AT&T still making excuses for FaceTime over Cellular

Jordan Golson for MacRumors:

AT&T announced today that it is planning to allow any customer “with an LTE device” on a “tiered data plan” to use iOS 6’s FaceTime over Cellular feature. Previously, only customers with a Mobile Share plan could use the feature.

parislemon:

Either you believe AT&T that the delay in rolling this out to more (but not all) customers was the result of engineering challenges — or — you look at the history of the company and realize they’re likely only doing this because the government immediately started looking it as a net neutrality violation.

Strange how Verizon was on board with FaceTime over cellular (and not just LTE either) from day one without these engineering challenges. Maybe AT&T would do better to just say that Verizon has the far superior network?

It amazes me that AT&T appears to be the only iPhone carrier on the planet that limits FaceTime over Cellular to only customers on specific data plans. Granted, not all carriers support FaceTime over Cellular at all — and of course there are places like Saudi Arabia where it isn’t even available over Wi-Fi — but generally if its available, it seems it’s available to all customers without prejudice.

iPhone Loyalty is Waning?

Parmy Olson, Forbes.com:

2012 is shap­ing up to be the year when the glow sur­round­ing Apple‘s mobile prod­ucts sud­den­ly got dim­mer – first from the tech­nol­o­gy press, now from a sur­vey. Accord­ing to recent research by Boston, Mass.-based Strat­e­gy Ana­lyt­ics fewer people who own iPhones are planning to replace them with newer models from Apple, marking the first decline since Apple released the iPhone in 2007.

This is a rather myopic viewpoint that assumes “loyalty” is measured solely by how many people are upgrading to every new iPhone and iPad product as it comes out.

By that standard, I guess almost every other electronics manufacturer must find “loyalty” slipping as well. I have a friend who hasn’t bought a new PS3 in five years — I guess his loyalty to the PS3 is slipping, even though he spends hours on it every day and buys new games every month.

I know a lot of people who are still perfectly happy with their iPhone 4 or iPad 2. It does what they need it to do and still runs the latest iOS version and the vast majority of the apps on the App Store.

To me, that demonstrates even more loyalty to a product — sticking with what works and makes you happy rather than always jumping on the shiny new thing, whether its a newer iPhone/iPad or a device from someone else.

Apple Maps on iOS 6

voreblog:

And this, more than anything else, outlines Apple’s biggest hurdle: people keep finding mistakes in Maps because looking for them has almost become a sport. When was the last time that you saw users analyzing Google Maps with this ridiculous level of detail? Had Apple set the public’s expectations better, we may be having a very different discussion at this point.

This pretty much mirrors my own experiences here in Toronto. Further, I haven’t been looking for mistakes, per se, but those few I’ve encountered have generally been about the same in both iOS 5 and iOS 6 — even to the point of some of the same wrong/closed locations showing up in local search results.

Rick's Rant - Polling

“Let’s face it, the only people talking to pollsters in 2012 are shut-ins, the demented, and people like me who think it’s funny to make up the wrong answers.”

Remember these?

I was showing one of these to a friend in her twenties a few days ago. She barely remembered 3.5” “floppy” disks — had no idea there was anything bigger than that (I didn’t have the heart to tell her that there was also an 8” version :) )