Spending a fair amount of time out and about lately. Which is to say that I haven’t been anywhere near my Mac or an Internet connection, short of email/Facebook access from the Blackberry. Boy would it be handy if I had Internet access while out in the field. So I’ve been checking prices and I’m not happy with what I have found.
My local Starbucks use AT&T for wifi internet connectivity. I can buy 2 hour blocks for $4 or sign up for an account, locked into a 1 year contract for $20 per month. I could also add tethering to the Blackberry. For the ability to do this, Verizon will gladly charge me an additional $30 per month, again on a 1 year contract. While I’m not terribly keen on either of these, AT&T is appealing because it’s $10 a month cheaper, but I would be stuck getting access at Starbucks. Verizon is as well because I know the service is good and I would have the flexibility to access anywhere as long as I have a USB cable.
There is a new option that I will be researching this weekend as well. As it turns out, since I am a Verizon FiOS customer, they are offering WiFi connectivity free at select locations. From what I understand, I only need install an app on my computer to use for connecting. I think this would be the way to go, mostly because I’m such a big fan of free.
I am curious as to how you connect when mobile via computer (not iPhone).
You might have seen this yesterday on the Twitter.
Yes, that is correct, I am now in the possession of my 4th Blackberry Storm. The last one had a wonky screen with bad corners and I was a little tired of it.
But that’s not why I’m writing you today.
I had to go to the Verizon Store because teh lad’s phone gave up the ghost. Phone ordered and papers signed, I mentioned mine and before I even finished the sentance, the girl was already reaching into a cabinet and pulling out a replacement. Without even looking at my phone first.
This tells me that Verizon knows this is a problematic phone. No questions asked on a phone swap? I didn’t have to call 611, didn’t have to wait for someone to look my phone over, wasn’t asked a series of questions, nothing. I said it was bad and it got replaced on the spot, no waiting.
Reason #1 I stick with Verizon by the way. There is no way AT&T or Sprint would provide this level of service. On that same note, it would also appear that AT&T and Sprint know better than to sell a pile-of-crap phone like the Blackberry Storm.
Here’s to hoping the Storm 2 or The Tour are better phones are get released soon. Very soon.
In case you missed it from Crunch Gear, make sure you don’t do any data roaming internationally on the ATP. Unless, of course, you are made of money.
I’m not a vindictive man. I believe in sweetness and light. But I would encourage anyone with a brain who travels, especially in these trying economic times, to buy an unlocked GSM phone and purchase pay as you go SIM cards or a MaxRoam SIM and a Rebel SIMCard for the iPhone 3G. I also encourage you to use Boingo for Wi-Fi roaming in airports and, increasingly, cities. Why? Because I just paid the equivalent to a flight to Paris and back just because I wanted to use Google Maps on the iPhone 3G to find my way around gay Paree.
Don’t let that happen to you if you travel outside the US.
Personally I can’t wait to find out how much Verizon Wireless will ream charge me for using a VZ sim outside the US. Scary stuff indeed.
Update If you go over to Maxroam.com and enter ‘donburnside’ in the discount code you will get 10% off!
The more I read/hear about the new 3G iPhone, the more I’m convinced that AT&T is not the wireless provider for me and feel bad for all of those suckers people that are about to get one because it’s cheaper than the original.
I was also looking at a coverage map for AT&T’s 3G coverage. It looks pretty sparse.
(blue is better)
Like I said, pretty sparse. In comparison, Verizon’s highspeed network coverage looks a little better, but not by much.
(again, blue is better)
So, with the not-that-great of coverage and the extra expense in getting the phone (1 iPhone account costs more than what I pay for 2 phones on Verizon without data), I wonder how many of these are going to sell.
For starters, in case you were wondering, I am, in fact, for hire. Not a craigslist fan? Check this out instead. Feel free to pass that along to anyone, anywhere, that you think could benefit from my services.
Next up, you probably noticed all of the sites I run were down today. The outage effected 14 sites. Middle of the night hard disk failure was the culprit, then it took all day to rebuild the RAID array. That it took that long to rebuild the array tells me it was something more than a hard drive failure. I would guess either it was a RAID controller failure or complete corruption of the OS on the server. Normal RAID hard drive failure doesn’t require a 12+ hour rebuild. That’s the benefit of RAID. Regardless, it’s fixed and that’s that.
MTTS starts Friday. My trip is planned, flights confirmed and I’m ready to go. My journey starts Thursday, and you know you’ll be hearing about it. To make things easier for the non-w(t)f readers that are going to want to track me, I’m going to be thinning out my friendfeed feed to include only twitter, WRR and WR.tv. For those of you that use that feed for everything else, all apologies. I will go back to normal when I get back.
I certainly wish I could get excited about the iPhone. I just can’t switch to AT&T. I can, however, give serious thought about the iPod touch now. For those of you pissed that you have to pay for the 2.0 update, feel free to share your feelings in the comments.
You can wish me a happy birthday too unless you did already otherwise. it’s totally allowed, esp. since today marks the 40th anniversary of my life on earth. Double ugh with a side of ack right there.
Only 4 to go before 1K. Think I can do it before I leave at 5:00AM Thursday?
