About three months ago, I decided that I was officially sick of AT&T. It wasn’t just their crappy cell-service, and it wasn’t just their extremely hit-or-miss customer service that really pushed me over the edge, either; it was the highway robbery they call a monthly bill. I was paying upwards of $100 a month simply for the privilege of using an iPhone, and that was with the most bare-bones service plan they had to offer. No matter how fantastic the phone is, if the network is garbage, there really isn’t much enjoyment to be had, now is there?

This post started out simple, but wound up turning into a bit of an epic saga. My apologies to those interested; I usually try to keep things short and sweet, but this has been brewing for quite a while now. Warning: Long post is LONG.

TIMELAPSE! The Beginnings:

Originally, I had an iPhone 3G — and it was great — but I was running it in an area of the country that was completely shunned by AT&T (Most of the South, anywhere but Atlanta). It was infuriating enough that the only usable data coverage was in the busy commercial areas, but I couldn’t even make or receive a phone call in just about any place that really mattered. There was absolutely no 3g coverage, despite the company’s assertions that large swaths of the South are covered.

Funny enough, I was living in Augusta, Georgia at the time, and AT&T made sure to have 3g vans stationed there every April for the Masters to give the countless golf-loving tourists the impression that the city of over 100,000 inhabitants wasn’t completely ignored. It’d just be a pity if Tiger didn’t have the fastest connection to check all his mistresses’ emails, wouldn’t it? Those portable towers disappeared as soon as the last rich guy packed his bags.

Afterwards, I moved home to California, to the San Francisco Bay Area of all places, and my cell-reception was equally shitty. That was almost too much to take, but as the iPhone 3GS was just coming out at the time, I stuck with the company for what I thought would be the long haul. Amazingly, the 3g coverage was so poor in the entire region that I found it was easier to simply turn it off, and run EDGE instead.

From iPhone 3G to iPhone 3GS

Then it came out that in order to acquire the 3GS, having not had the 3G model long enough for AT&T to allow me to upgrade, that I would have to open an entirely new line under my plan. The idea being that one line lay dormant, with a dead SIM card attached to the account, while I use my new 3GS on the other line of the new “family” plan all by its lonesome. The cost of that venture was an additional $15 or so a month, and about $200 for the phone at the local Apple store. It cost less to pull that swindle for a year than it would have cost to simply buy the phone outright and fork over the “early upgrade” penalty fees levied by AT&T — something which is beyond irksome since they don’t like people knowing the loophole even exists.

Note the five miraculous bars of reception; this photo was taken here in Seattle, NOT the SFBA.

So this was my phone, the iPhone 3GS, on AT&T’s hopelessly broken network, in one of the most tech-savvy areas in the world. I didn’t have one bar of reception standing outside, staring at the city of San Francisco laid out in front of me. The phone itself was fantastic. I won’t ever speak ill of the iPhone 3GS — it’s extremely fast, the camera works alarmingly well for such low technical specifications, and the iPod functions alone make it the best PMP I’ve ever had the privilege of owning.

Then It All Started Crumbling

Apple’s chokehold on the device, along with AT&T’s bottlenecking of its real-world capabilities, ate away at me as time wore on. Some months later, I moved again; this time to Seattle, another hotbed of technology and communications. Arriving here, I noted that my cell-reception was notably better than it was back in the Bay Area. While it wasn’t anything near stellar, I was seeing three bars steady, with bursts of five full bars from time to time — and I actually had functional 3g service most of the time. It was nice to finally experience something like the service that was promised to iPhone users across the country. Things were good, for a time.

I then realized just how unhappy I really was with that phone, on that network. In order to do some of the simplest things with my own iPhone, I was forced to jailbreak it, repeatedly, in a cat and mouse game that countless users continue to play to this day, in an uphill battle with Apple and its senselessly draconian firmware police. Why was I wasting so much time doing that? Was it worth it, just to have an easier time using things like Google Voice, or to have access to my own ringtones? I actually spent a great deal of time deciding whether or not it was, and it never added up.

The App Store: 10 Billion Facepalms Served

It’s no secret that the iPhone’s core strength is the App Store. The App Store has indeed become a massive institution; there really are apps for nearly everything. They don’t lie when they claim it, the problem is that most of those apps are trashy, buggy, and overpriced. As if that weren’t bad enough, these same sniveling app developers have the nerve to embed ads in paid apps. That’s fine though, I could live with that. What I couldn’t handle was the sheer amount of stupidity run rampant on the platform. There are roughly 154.2 billion apps in the App Store, and only six of them are worth downloading. Note: My numbers may be highly inflated, but that doesn’t make the point any less true.

Nearly every single app available for the iPhone makes me reel in terror, at the horror of humanity’s downward spiral into endless fart-noise generators and rip-off duplicates of already buggy apps that may possibly prove somewhat useful once every three months. It came to a point that there really wasn’t any reason to continue carrying around a glorified iPod that cost me over $120 every single month.

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I was tired of AT&T. I was tired of feeling limited by Apple, and unable to use my own phone the way I wanted to use it. I was tired of every braindead woo-girl on the street having the same phone as me, and acting like it suddenly made her not only “an Apple user” — but a “geek.” I grew to hate my iPhone. I hated what it stood for, I hated what it did to me, and I hated the way I felt every month when AT&T sent me a notice of assrape they politely call a bill, just so I could feel privileged enough to have an iPhone in my pocket. I had had enough.

iStopped Paying the Bill

After feeling dirtier and more taken advantage of with every passing month, I simply stopped paying AT&T. I didn’t call them to cancel my plan — not yet anyway. They’re in the middle of having their asses handed to them in court right now for their outlandish early-termination fees, so I figure I’ll let it sit a couple more weeks before officially notifying them of my departure from their network.

My iPhone had already updated itself to the newest firmware, which at the time of this post is 3.1.3, and in doing so had killed any chances of jailbreak for the foreseeable future. Apparently, the folks who usually crack the firmware so quickly after every update are holding back on this one, until Apple releases iPhone OS 4.0, meaning I had an iPod with worthless telephony hardware crammed inside its bulbous case. So I shelved it.

Then I went to T-Mobile and signed up for their cheapest Even More Plus plan, which at only $60/mo offers the very same thing that my $100/mo AT&T plan did, but doesn’t care what mobile device I’m using, and doesn’t require a contract. It took less than 15 minutes inside the local T-Mobile store to sign a piece of paper, pay the opening month’s fees, pick a phone number and walk out with a new SIM card. It felt amazing. I didn’t feel dirty anymore. I didn’t feel like I was being held at gunpoint just to have a cell phone. I was happy again.

Luckily, my girlfriend had a derelict BlackBerry Pearl 8100 buried in the closet. It took us about 15 minutes to get it unlocked, and the network picked it up almost instantly. We only had to let them know the device was a BlackBerry, and they set the data plan on the account to reflect it. The one and only drawback was that I could not have 3g access, since the phone wasn’t configured for T-Mobile’s 3g frequencies. Here’s the kicker: Despite recent reports, AT&T’s 3g network sucks. There’s just no other way to put it. Here in Seattle, on T-Mobile’s EDGE network, I experience speeds that feel exactly like those I had on the best of days using my iPhone 3GS on AT&T’s 3g network. That not only surprised me, but made me extremely happy with my decision.

Lost Technology of the Ancients

About the Pearl: I had previously used a friend’s BlackBerry about two years ago (I think it was a Curve), and that was my one and only experience with a RIM device. I admitted at the time that the phone was nice, it felt solid, it was quick, beautiful and overall a nice smartphone experience. I never gave the BlackBerry line a second thought. This ancient Pearl, beat up, used and forgotten, didn’t make the greatest first impression when we got it charged and operating. That would quickly change.

The phone was in desperate need of software/firmware updates that stretched back to the time when vikings were building swiftboats. I had originally planned to use the phone sparingly as I waited for my iPhone to again be jailbreak-capable, but after some hefty updating, the Pearl came alive and wowed me. I never expected to be swayed to the Crackberry side of the field by a humble, busted-down Pearl 8100 — but it happened. The little phone quickly became comfortable in my hands; it was a bit sluggish due to lack of processing power, but once it was up and running, it just worked. I had push notifications, I had mobile web-browsing, I had Gmail and Google Voice at my fingertips and I even still had Foursquare. It surprised the hell out of me, to say the least.

After a week’s worth of heavy use, I decided that I truly enjoyed using a BlackBerry. I still love the iPhone as a device, I just don’t want to use one myself; not anymore. After some research, I found that the BlackBerry I would really love to use is the Bold 9000, now succeeded by the 9700. The bold had everything I wanted, along with the tactile roller-ball (I’m not quite down with the new miniature touchpad in the 9700).

It didn’t take long to see that there was a huge market for people who felt the same way I did about the device. Not only that, but there was an even wider market for people looking to buy, sell, or trade an iPhone 3GS. Craigslist led me to one such trader in the area who was looking to trade his Bold 9000 for an iPhone matching my own, so I set up the trade.

To anyone interested: There are people looking to buy iPhone 3GS handsets for upwards of $500 — it could be worth it if you are prepared for the haggling, flaky Craigslist used cell-phone crowd.

That’s right, iPhone purists, you can hate me all you want; I traded my iPhone for a two year-old BlackBerry Bold.

This phone is the most enjoyable smartphone I’ve had yet. The physical keyboard and tactile mouse not only allow me to do things just as quickly as the iPhone’s touchscreen, but I can type much more quickly and more accurately. The phone has WiFi, and as I stated before, T-Mobile’s EDGE network is just as effective as AT&T’s 3g in real-world use. The phone is unlocked and nobody sets up arbitrary rules or barriers regarding how I can use it. I love it.

There aren’t even a fraction of the iPhone’s available apps for me to choose from now, but the very few that I needed or wanted to use all have BlackBerry equivalents. The Bold has a microSD slot capable of up to 8GB storage, and since the phone charges with a universal miniUSB connection, I can use the entire phone as an 8GB pocket drive if I want to. It’s camera isn’t the 3GS’s, but it has a flash, which tends to make all the difference in real-world situations. It’s worldphone capable, and has equivalent processing power to that of the 3GS. Overall, it’s a matter of touchscreen vs. keyboard and App Store vs The Internet.

Above All Else – The Simple Things

The BlackBerry has an LED. I know this sounds silly, even inane, but one of the things I always wished my iPhone had was a simple little indicator light; something to let me know there is a message waiting, as it sits on a desk and away from my pocket. Something that lets me miss the message tone and vibration, but not the message itself. It’s just one of those tiny things that makes all the difference to me. Is that ridiculous? I don’t think so.

There are untold numbers of simple tones floating around the Internet that I can grab and use for any number of different alerts my phone gives me. I’m not stuck with the choice of gaudy, tacky Cupertino Specials that came with the iPhone, or a 15 second burst of flat-sounding music from the iPhone’s terribad speaker. Seriously, have you ever tried using the iPhone’s speaker? It sounds like somebody strapped a rusty tin can to the PC speaker of a Packard Bell from 1993 and forced it to somehow play music. It’s terrifyingly bad.

Don’t Misunderstand Me

I love Apple. I love Apple hardware, whether it’s the iPod, MacBook, iMac, you name it. They’re fantastic machines, with beautiful, functional design backing solid engineering. I believe that OS X is hands down the best operating system in use today. I think that it gets a bad rap from clueless wannabe “geeks” that shop at Apple Stores and think that it’s a glossy, dumbed down version of Windows that only sorts and creates music and videos. I get angry when ignorant fools downtalk the cleanest UNIX OS I’ve ever seen.

I swear by my Mac, through and through. What I don’t stand behind is Apple’s behavior in the last two years. I don’t like the crowd the company is gathering. I don’t like the image it’s presenting (seriously, did you see the “Youth Programs” they’ve instituted?). I don’t like how it’s getting to the point that I will not, under any circumstances, state in a public venue that I am a Mac user, not because of the usual Microsoft fanboys that would hurl stones at me, but because I don’t want to be associated with the throngs of dimwits who would leap to their feet and declare that they, too, are “Macs” because they bought a MacBook Pro to show off at the local Starbucks and know how to open Safari.

So this is it, this is the first step. Hopefully it’s the last, because I don’t want to continue down the path of Apple Abandonment. There is a followup post coming soon about a recent experience with the Apple Store of Bellevue, Washington — an experience that really helped solidify my growing resentment of something I once held so dear. I’m trying not to hate Apple, I really am. I want to love Apple; I want it to be the way it used to be. Unfortunately, at this point in time it feels like Mister Jobs is deliberately shunning the most important piece of the puzzle — OS X — in his quest to take over the unconquerable mobile phone market. He’s alienating the people who believed in the company when iPods were still three pound white bricks with a tiny share of a huge PMP market.

I don’t like it, and I’m a Mac.

The Snow Leopard Login Screen

Apple is good at designing things simply and beautifully enough that users generally make little to no changes to their UI — but let’s face it, that space background gets pretty old after the first thousand logins, and they really should have included the login screen aesthetics in the system prefs.

You do not need any of the dozens of trashy apps floating around to tweak this. The methods for tweaking the login screen change with every major inception of OS X, as do the apps for changing hidden system prefs, but those apps all work by changing the system’s instructions themselves, rather than simply going to the source image and leaving the system alone. I’ve always preferred the safer, cleaner way of doing things, which is simply replacing the default images.

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Luckily, changing the login screen background is about as easy as opening the finder and swapping an image file. Just open the finder and hit shift+command+G, which brings up the Go To Folder dialogue, and enter this folder:

/System/Library/CoreServices

Once there, find the image file by the name of DefaultDesktop.jpg and make a copy of it somewhere safe. Now simply replace it with a .jpg of your choosing, so long as it’s 1920×1200 and renamed to DefaultDesktop.jpg — and don’t freak out when you’re asked to validate with an administrator password, since it’s a system folder.

The Apple Logo

As much as I appreciate how clean the OS X Apple logo is, I’ve always liked the vintage look. Just like the login screen’s background image, the Apple logo itself can be swapped out for an image of your choosing, so long as it matches the size and filetype of the original. You can also do the same with the “Mac OS X” underneath the logo.

The login window itself has a totally different folder full of goodies, here’s the path:

/System/Library/CoreServices/SecurityAgentPlugins/loginwindow.bundle/Contents/Resources/

You’ll notice the veritable plethora of image files in there, all named quite nicely so there’s no confusion. You can swap any image ever involved in the workings of the login window, easy as copypasta, just make sure the sizes are always the same, and that you are sure to name them the same filename as the files they’re replacing — including the filetype. If the image you’re replacing is a .tif instead of a .tiff, then name your TIFF image as a .tif like it wants.

Happy tweaking :)

Today, CNN’s new app hit the App Store, and the world rejoiced. Mashable reported on it, and told masses of impressionable readers that it was impressive. I’m not going to disagree with Ben on this, but I am going to chime in a bit where he left off.

What wasn’t talked about all that much in Mashable’s post was the fact that CNN is charging $1.99 per download for this app. First of all, why on earth would CNN be charging for this? They don’t charge for any of their other content, why start now? Secondly, the price is saying something; $0.99 is the normal price for an app, $2.99 is officially expensive. $1.99 is known as the pretentious price for an app. It’s the price a company charges for an app that should obviously be only $0.99, except they know they can get away with charging more.

The Real Issue

CNN suddenly becoming capitalistic isn’t what I take issue with. They can charge whatever they want, it doesn’t bother me, what does bother me is this: Note the inclusion of extensive iReport functionality. It all becomes extremely transparent once you realize what they’ve done here.

CNN wants to charge you $1.99 to work for them. It’s not crazy, it’s common sense. Nothing about this app is actually special, except for the streaming video addition, which can be had at their website free of charge. Those streaming videos are paid for by ads, and that same business model could have been applied just as easily on a mobile platform.

Most people don’t utilize CNN’s iReport simply because they have to go out of their way to do so, but if they’re already using a news app on their iPhone, a piece of equipment which probably spends more time in their hand than not, then it makes perfect sense to build streamlined iReport functionality directly into the extant application. The glossy video features will sell the app, but people will use iReport.

Download the App.

CNN met great success when they embraced Twitter in their daily reporting, and their iReport has been continuously lauded since its inception. Put simply, CNN has succeeded in passively crowdsourcing to bolster their real-time capabilities. Now they’re going to make money doing it.

First, Apple made the decision to dump anything Google Voice from its Appstore. Then, the entire world cried havoc and shenanigans on AT&T, clamoring for them to relinquish some phantom hold on Apple and allow the apps to release. The problem with that is that AT&T had absolutely no reason to intervene – or even care – about Google Voice.

Apple, on the other hand, did.

Here’s the Link-Tome of History:

1. Apple kiboshes Google Voice apps from the Appstore.
2. Mike Arrington “quits the iPhone.”
3. I call rubbish on Arrington’s temper-tantrum.
4. I got slammed for calling out Arrington.
5. The Wall Street Journal hops onboard the ignorance train.
6. I read above WSJ article and lose my temper on my uncensored blog.
7. Apple, AT&T and Google respond to the FCC query that resulted from the drama.

(In case you didn’t click the link above, basically they all affirmed I was right from the start)

8. TechCrunch dryly covers the revelations in those responses, and Arrington says nothing.

So, where does that leave me?

It leaves me in the “i’m so right it hurts” chair. Where does it leave you?

In a nutshell, I said that AT&T really had no reason to care about Google Voice or any app related to it that may grace the Appstore with its presence. I said that Apple had plenty of reason to care about these apps, especially Google’s proprietary app, because they replace functionality on the iPhone.

• The dialer, visual voicemail, the address book, the SMS message app, all would be functionally replaced with a sleek Google version that allowed linking to a nice free service that would tie in with other services and apps that are already taking the place of Apple’s offerings in other fields. Example: I’ve got half a screen full of web apps now on my iPhone’s home screen, all Google.
• Apple’s onboard email app, while nice, is rendered completely useless next to Google’s Gmail web app.
• The calendar application suffers a similar fate when stacked up against Google Calendar.
• Notepad, as simple as it is, is useless now that I have Google Tasks (assuming I’ve got data coverage at the moment).

MobileMe basically sucks is severely overpriced, considering most people just use it for sync. I’ve got all my calendar, tasking, email and contact lists syncing with Google servers, for free. Mate all that with phone functionality in the form of a fingertip app, and you’ve got a GooglePhone by Apple. Do you really think that Apple would like that? After all the work they’ve put into perfecting their iPhone OS, after all the marketing they’ve put out there, showing in great detail just how sleek their software is?

I was sure about this three weeks ago, and I’m sure about it today.

The writing isn’t only on the wall, it’s on the whitepapers that got sent to the FCC. People need to wake up and realize that as easy as it is to hate AT&T (believe me, it’s so, so easy), it doesn’t change the fact that they had no motive to take part in this nonsense. The blame needs to lay where it already lies, and people who screamed their heads off at the wrong party should man up and admit they were jumping the gun, and just flat out wrong.

Before I get the inevitable “why are you using Safari anyway? Why not use Firefox??” An explanation:

I’ve been using Safari for about two months now because I had an episode with Firefox 3.5 that left a bad taste in my mouth. Google, which I very transparently champion as the company that will shape the Internet as we know it, should be a safe bet when guaging a browser’s compatibility. Firefox failed to render a simple option-box; it completely ignored the existence of a drop-down menu in my Google Adsense settings. I was severely confused as to why I was unable to change the setting, until I loaded it in Safari and realized what was happening. At that moment I shelved my Firefox icon, and I haven’t opened the app since. Safari 4, on the other hand, renders every page beautifully and efficiently. I haven’t had cause to regret the decision save for the application’s absolutely mind-numbing tab behavior, which (I won’t lie) makes me something akin to suicidal. Holding down a key every time I want to click a link isn’t exactly going to kill me, but it’s damned annoying.

Enter Google Chrome. This browser is built by people who deal with the Internet, primarily. It’s fast, responsive, beautiful, smooth, and more importantly – it’s entire existence is contingent upon the use of the most cutting edge technologies, with as little frills or baggage as possible. That’s the way a browser ought to be, and that’s the way Chrome is.

Chrome for Mac: Get it here.

So aside from the slower rendering involved in resizing the window, or in scrolling a page, I’ve not come across any problems yet. I can tell you that I’ve severely overloaded it with tabs, and I’ve put the omnibar through its paces without giving it a chance to breathe. It handled everything in stride. As of today, Google Chrome for Mac is stable enough for me, give it a shot yourself and see what you think.

It’s interesting to note that most suicide notes are written in desperate attempts to get noticed.

This comes at a perfect time, since only a couple of days ago I posted about my thoughts on Apple, AT&T, Google and Voice. I postulated that AT&T may have actually had nothing to do with the blocking of the app, and that it was simply a row between Apple and Google. As updates became available I later added that not only is the FCC as interested in this as we are, but that AT&T has officially denied any role in the drama.

I also poked fun at the fact that many of the loudest to complain in this case are those who have never actually used Google Voice, and were simply regurgitating hearsay and often bad information when drawing their conclusions. Conclusions which seemed to unanimously point the finger of justice at AT&T.

Which brings me to the core issue: I didn’t expect to be forced to the conclusion that I was, that I would be made to believe that Mike Arrington has not actually used Google Voice on an iPhone, and possibly has not used it at all. Sure, he’s got knowledge of it, he cites his own blog’s posts about it several times, posts which are several months old. He nearly always refers to it as “formerly Grand Central.” That’s all well and good, but it’s not Grand Central anymore. It’s Voice, and the myriad of problems Arrington rails off through the article all seem to be from some alternate reality where I don’t have my iPhone in front of me, with Voice at the ready, proving him wrong at every turn.

I think the best way to handle this is to simply go paragraph by paragraph in excerpts from his post.

What finally put me over the edge? It wasn’t the routinely dropped calls, something you can only truly understand once you have owned an iPhone (and which drove my friend Om Malik to bail). I’ve lived with that for two years. It’s not the lack of AT&T coverage at home. I’ve lived with that for two years, too. It certainly isn’t the lack of a physical keyboard, that has never bothered me. No, what finally put me over the edge is the Google Voice debacle.

Most of you won’t know what I’m talking about, so I’ll explain.

Yes Mike, AT&T has spotty coverage at best, and we all hate dropped calls. The grass is always greener though, isn’t it? Because last time I checked, customers of other wireless service providers were complaining about the same thing. But that’s not what I want to point out in this excerpt, the last line is: “Most of you won’t know what I’m talking about, so I’ll explain.” Really? Well thanks Mike Arrington, because I was sitting here completely befuddled by the moonspeak you were spewing. Please, go on.

Google Voice is a call management service that lets you determine what calls get through to you based on who’s calling and what time of day it is, among other factors. It has amazing features, like automatically transcribing all your voicemails. And you can forward calls to any other phone easily and automatically. Here’s an overview of the service if you aren’t familiar with it.

What I want to note here is that the article he links to supposedly explaining to us simpletons what exactly Google Voice is, is in fact from back in March.

This is what we’ve really been waiting for:

I’ve always wanted to use Google Voice but there’s a big switching cost – changing your phone number. Too many people have that phone number and use it to call in great stories. There’s no way I’m giving that up. And there’s another problem with Google Voice. When you make outbound calls from a phone, it (obviously) doesn’t use your Google Voice phone number, so recipients don’t know it’s you calling. Those were two hurdles I wasn’t willing to jump over.

There it is. “I’ve always wanted to use Google Voice but… …hurdles I wasn’t willing to jump over.” Wow. He’s just basically admitted that he is speaking entirely out of his ass. And these unavoidable “hurdles” he names? Not so much. I think it’s nothing short of amazing that the great Mike Arrington is willing to bestow such “obvious” knowledge upon us. Especially since it’s completely wrong.

When you set up your Voice account, you choose a phone number. This will be your Google Voice number for as long as you choose to keep it. It does not replace the phone number attached to your iPhone, that’s AT&T. Your friends who have this number saved will still have the number saved, and will still see your face when they dial it. If you want them to start using your new Google Voice number, you simply give them the number and tell them so whenever they call you. What a hurdle!

As for the second revelation, that when making outgoing calls your phone “(obviously) doesn’t use your Google Voice phone number” (and that your friends will have no idea who is calling if you should try it): This is absolutely ridiculous. All I have to do in order to make an outgoing call is to hit a contact’s name or enter a number to dial in the web-app furnished by Google. I am called by my own Google Voice number, I answer, and the system connects me to the party I’ve dialed. They see my Google Voice number in their caller ID, just like normal. All the Google Voice features are enabled, they work by touchtone during the call, you still have a dialer and a finger. It’s really no different than any other call once you get past the act of not initiating it with the dialer.

He doesn’t stop there, he actually continues, striding boldly forward into oblivious serenity, laying down his sage learnings cooly and methodically:

But now Google is planning on rolling out number portability, so I can move my mobile phone number to Google. None of my friends, family or contacts have to store a new number.

That still leaves the problem of outbound calls, though. I can move my mobile number to Google and then get a new iPhone account, but outbound calls won’t be identified because they are on the new number. Google has a solution for that too, though. They are releasing apps for a variety of handsets that effectively take over the native dialer, address book and call log. Problem solved. I can use any phone I like, or a bunch of phones, and just choose the one that makes sense at any time. I never have to be tied to a carrier and their restrictive contracts again.

Or so I thought. Apple and AT&T are now blocking the iPhone version of the Google Voice app. Why? Because they absolutely don’t want people doing exactly what I’m doing – moving their phone number to Google and using the carrier as a dumb pipe.

So I have to choose between the iPhone and Google Voice. It’s not an easy decision. Except, it sort of is. Google isn’t forcing the decision on me, Apple and AT&T are. So I choose to work with the company that isn’t forcing me to do things their way. And in this case, that’s Google.

Where do I begin? I’ve already covered his being obsessively wrong about the outgoing calls business, so that’s done. In doing so I’ve now covered the use of the web-app, so that’s taken care of. Earlier in my last post I covered the issue of AT&T’s involvement (or lack thereof) in the blocking of the native Voice app, something which Arrington believes he can simply state as fact (as he does everything else). So all that’s left is his plaintive cry for help, because he’s been so unreasonably forced to choose between his iPhone and Google.

Don’t misunderstand me, if there were ever an actual moment that truly did force such a decision, I would choose Google over my iPhone. Mike Arrington has not been forced, in any way whatsoever to make this choice. Mike Arrington has shown that he has no idea what he’s talking about, and that he simply wants attention. In this case, he probably expects to get a free iPhone 3GS from Apple, because he probably believes he has that kind of clout. He very well may. Too many people have placed laurels on the head of this man, and the combined weight of all that crowning glory seems to have caused a severe over-inflation of his ego. My suggestion to Mr. Arrington is this: If setting up and using Google Voice is too much of a hassle for you, maybe you should indeed put down the iPhone. While you’re at it, give the people at JitterBug a try, they might be more your speed.

Addendum: The Wall Street Journal doesn’t seem to have a clue what Google Voice is, either.

I think people tend to forget that AT&T is not the only carrier that Apple deals with, and that the US isn’t the only country in which the iPhone is sold. AT&T has always played second chair to Apple in the deal, and Google Voice has absolutely zero significant threats to wireless carriers hidden within it. Many of the rants floating around are written by people who don’t even have a Google Voice account yet, and seem to be basing conjecture on more conjecture, while piling rumor on top of that. The fact is that there are no facts, because nobody ruffling feathers about this mess are the people who know what’s going on. That would be the execs at Apple.

[UPDATE]: The FCC is very interested in knowing, too.

[UPDATE]: AT&T has stated they were not involved in the decision.

You are still able to use Google Voice on your iPhone. I have it, and I use it, all with a web-app. It’s not that bad, really.

If there has been any truly informative insight into just what is going on between the three industry giants, it would be the deleted tweet that came from the hand of Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search at Google. In it, she linked to a satirical (and hilarious) news article posted at BBspot, which told a story of Google turning the tables on Apple and removing them from their search index. The reasons given were meant to mirror Apple’s statement on deciding to block Google Voice’s native iPhone app, as well as Latitude’s.

While the article is purely satire, there was one particular bit of truth buried within it that many people are overlooking: The Google Voice application is still available for Blackberry and Android phones. This fact alone, considering iPhones in no way make up the majority of AT&T’s phone market, goes to show how flawed the argument is that AT&T is responsible for the block.

Why Google Voice is not such a threat to AT&T:

I’m going to use my own experience as a guide here, I know that’s not usually preferable, but in this case I seem to be one of few who actually use the service I’m blogging about.

• Texting: When I receive a text, I still receive the text, otherwise, I’d never know anyone texted me. It still counts against me come billing time. There are no less than 41 billion SMS and MMS texting apps available on the Appstore at any given time. Many of them have the ability to send text messages as data, but just like with Google Voice, the phone gets alerted via text upon receipt. Nothing new here.
• Calls: The way phone calls work on Google Voice is that you are connected through your Voice number, which means you are still connecting via your wireless connection to an actual phone number. Google Voice is not a VOIP service, and doesn’t even have the option while on a computer. It’s a number mask, a relay, a switchboard, a log and a transcription service. It’s not Skype.
• Long Distance Calls: I don’t know about the rest of you, but my AT&T account comes with free long distance calling, and it’s the cheapest account available. International rates are cut-cost with Google Voice, but there are already countless services set up for relay-calling international numbers at low rates, so this is not new.

What is new here is the fact that if Voice were given its own native app on the iPhone, then the two components of the device that make it a phone would suddenly be replaced with Google software. This wouldn’t affect AT&T much, but it would certainly upset Apple, whose software is being replaced. Right now, in order to use Voice, I basically have Safari open all the time, which isn’t a hassle since it already is anyway, due to GMail’s web-app being nicer than my phone’s onboard mail handler. That alone is a big hint. If a Google user like myself finds a simple web-app more useful than Apple’s software, then just how hard would it be for me to replace the Phone and Text buttons with a single GVoice icon should there be an actual app available?

The answer to that is that it’d be very easy, since that functionality is built into the phone. In fact, I’ve gone ahead and replaced the icons anyway, with home-screen Safari bookmarks for Google Voice and GMail. I don’t make any outgoing calls using the phone’s dialer, I simply dial out from the contact lists in my Voice web-app. Those contact lists are constantly sync’d with my GMail contact lists, which in turn are sync’d to my phone’s address book which in turn sync’s my Mac’s address book every time I plug my phone in. The system is pretty streamlined, and it’s nearly completely Google-driven except for, believe or not, a Microsoft Exchange service going on in there, but that shows how Google remains non-biased in their workarounds to get a product to the user. Since “the user” happens to be “Me” that makes me happy.

I strongly suggest that you actually try Google Voice before you believe anything someone else has written about it, including myself. As with any other service, it’s going to come down to personal preference in the end. I love it. I think it’s worth the slightly extra bit of work I go through to make phone calls or send text messages. But that’s me, I also like my freedom to use it, and admire Google for planning ahead and supplying me with a web-app the way they have. This stuff is free and they’re going great lengths to make sure it’s available. And after everything is laid out on the table, with Latitude’s absolutely senseless app-murder, it just doesn’t make sense to place the blame on AT&T anymore.

This looks like a simple case of lovers’ quarrel.

A few days ago, Google quietly released their newest web app for the iPhone, Latitude. We’d been waiting for what seemed like forever, and in fact many had lost hope that it would ever get ported over to iPhone at all. With Google’s new round of upgrades to their mobile sites (and the iPhone being heavily considered in all of them) it’s no surprise that this is when Latitude finally makes its Apple debut.

Google’s first announcement came on their main blog, which gave a brief summary of the release and linked to their mobile blog for more details.

On your iPhone, goto: google.com/latitude

In those details is this disclaimer regarding the ever-present issue of running apps in the background:

Unfortunately, since there is no mechanism for applications to run in the background on iPhone (which applies to browser-based web apps as well), we’re not able to provide continuous background location updates in the same way that we can for Latitude users on Android, Blackberry, Symbian and Windows Mobile. Nevertheless, your location is updated every time you fire up the app and then continuously updated while the app is running in the foreground. And, of course, you can check in on where your friends are, so we think there’s plenty of fun to be had with Latitude.

OK, granted, it would be really nice to have this running as a full-fledged background app, mated with our already present Google Maps app. While that’s not the case, what they’ve given us is still seriously nice webware. It’s extremely fast, it’s got all the same smooth functionality of Maps, and it’s tied into your other Google contact lists. Overall, it’s worth the wait, and it would be silly to think they’re finished tweaking it already. I’m very curious to see how Latitude evolves over the course of the next year, as webapps become more prevalent in Google’s push for mobile-web advancement.

Google Voice’s App Got the Kibosh?

Also worth noting is that this trend of Google’s to bring interesting features to the iPhone in the form of a web app isn’t localized to just Latitude and revamps to old Google apps. Users who have been scratching their heads in wonder as to why they have no app available to fully utilize Google Voice have now learned the reason why:

(From Google) We work hard to bring Google applications to a number of mobile platforms, including the iPhone. Apple did not approve the Google Voice application we submitted six weeks ago to the Apple App Store. We will continue to work to bring our services to iPhone users – for example, by taking advantage of advances in mobile browsers.

While I’m getting by just fine using Voice as a web app, it’s a pain. I’ll continue to hold my breath in hopes that Google gets green-lighted for an official app, and soon, because Voice is one hell of a service.

[Added]: A Hilariously Well-Put Point by TUAW:

One more thing: who else thinks it’s ironic that a company started by a couple of guys who spent lots of time phone phreaking in a garage in the 1970s now kowtows to AT&T and kills apps that help people make cheaper calls?

I couldn’t have said it better myself, but I don’t think it’s a case of active bullying on AT&T’s part. Since when has AT&T ever told Apple what to do in this relationship? I’m betting there are contract clauses buried somewhere that provide for this sort of thing, and no workaround could be found on Apple’s part that would allow it to accommodate Google. But I don’t work for either of them, so I wouldn’t know. Neither do the rest of the people screaming conspiracy.