Please make it easy for me to buy your products... Is anyone listening?
Many years ago, back in the golden age of boxy cars guaranteed to fall apart shortly after purchase, I worked as an engineer at GM. (Another story for another blog.) One of the reasons Detroit cars sucked was that all of the executives at GM had access to free cars that were serviced on a daily basis. Failures were examined from an accounting point-of-view -- how much did it cost GM to fix the part compared to how much it would have cost to use a better part to start with? Failure was built-in so long as it wasn't expensive for them. The executives completely failed to understand that a breakdown, stranded at the side of the road, was traumatic for their customers, and at a minimum, when the car didn't start, someone had to rearrange their schedule to deal with getting the car fixed.
Similarly, everyone throughout the company had access to cars at a fixed, subsidized price. It was one of the perks of the jobs. But it meant that nobody working at the company ever had to negotiate with a dealer, and had no idea how unpleasant the experience could be.
It feels like the cell phone industry has some of the same problems. Has an executive at AT&T ever called for help ordering their product? Have they ever tried to buy something from their store? When they make me president of AT&T, the first thing I'm going to do is say, no free phones for you and your family. You go to the store today and buy one yourself, then you make sure your customers have a better experience than you just did.
Okay, enough negativity. It actually wasn't quite that bad, though when we get to the activation it gets worse, at least for AT&T.
First, the iPhone. They didn't have an iPhone at the AT&T store, nor anyone who seemed to know much, so I went online. When I completed the ordering, it said the phone would ship in 10-14 days. So I tried the Apple store. They said 3 weeks. Hmmm. I assumed 10-14 days was calendar days, but maybe that was a sneaky way of saying 3 weeks. In any case, my wife needed the phone for a trip we were leaving on in a week or so, and I didn't want the phone sitting out on the sidewalk in front of our home for a week while we were gone. I also wanted to know why I was being charged $60 in sales tax on a $200 phone purchase. So I decided to call. It went something like this...
me: "Why does the form show $60 in sales tax?"
at&T: "California tax rate is high."
me: "Yup. Sure is. 9.75% in LA. But that's more like $20, not $60."
at&t: "We charge sales tax on the retail price."
me: "Yes, the listed retail price shown is $199."
at&T: "We charge the correct sales tax in each state."
me: "Is this something special in California in how sales tax is calculated?"
at&t: "We charge the correct sales tax in each state."
me: "Okay. How do you calculate the correct sales tax on a $199 purchase?"
at&t: "We charge the correct sales tax in each state."
Okay, I get the idea. Subsequently, a web search showed that California charges sales tax based on the supposed unsubsidized price rather than the sale price. Not AT&T's fault, but they really should be able to explain to customers why we're getting charged this crazy sales tax amount.
The shipping question ran about the same:
me: "If I complete the order now, when will I get the phone."
at&t: "7-10 days."
me: "Is that business days or calendar days?"
at&t: "It's 7-10 days."
me: "The Apple store says 3 weeks. Are you under-reporting, are they sandbagging, or do you get the phones before Apple?"
at&t: (Yeah, I had no hope of a real answer on this one.) "7 to 10 days."
Since that would be just about smack in the middle of the time when we'd be out of town, I held off for a week before ordering. And of course, the phone arrived in a week, the day after we left town, and sat outside on the walkway next to the sprinkler.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Monday, September 13, 2010
The Conclusion - Executive Summary
For those of you viewing now who don't want to wait around for the whole story, here's the executive summary.
The iPhone 4 is brilliant. My wife and I both love it. The Nobel committee should establish a new prize for ingenuity and award it in perpetuity to Steve Jobs.
But unfortunately, the phone has a fatal flaw. Both at home and at work, the iPhone 4 has trouble staying connected to the network. If I can get a call through, it usually dies within 30 seconds. At first, I thought the problem was just AT&T's service, but a colleague with an iPhone 3 was able to come into my office where I was unable to send or receive a call, and happily do both. I thought maybe this was the antenna problem, but even sitting on the table without touching it wasn't noticeably better. Which makes it useless as a phone, and useless for everything else when I don't have WiFi access. Perhaps the promised free cover might help, but it seems unlikely, and the cover won't arrive until weeks after the end of the 30 day return policy.
We agonized long and hard, but then my wife tried to reach me for something urgent and couldn't complete the call, and our decision was made. We sent it back and got her a Fascinate.
The Fascinate is far from perfect. It's not nearly as smooth to use as the iPhone, mostly because Verizon has cluttered up the interface with junk. By junk, I mean applications that Verizon charges for that I have little interest in. As a good example, right on the home page is a "Voicemail" button. If you click that button, you've signed up for Verizon's extended voicemail for which they charge an extra monthly fee. You have to read the manual to figure out how to access the free voice mail. You can't get rid of the prominent voicemail button, though with some work and lots of reading of the user's guide, it is possible to move it off the home page. The interface is full of such clutter that can't be removed. Very annoying.
Combine that with far fewer apps than the iPhone (Netflix was a real treat on the iphone), and the Fascinate is far less of a device than it could be. But at least it works well as a phone, email, texting, and browser.
The iPhone 4 is brilliant. My wife and I both love it. The Nobel committee should establish a new prize for ingenuity and award it in perpetuity to Steve Jobs.
But unfortunately, the phone has a fatal flaw. Both at home and at work, the iPhone 4 has trouble staying connected to the network. If I can get a call through, it usually dies within 30 seconds. At first, I thought the problem was just AT&T's service, but a colleague with an iPhone 3 was able to come into my office where I was unable to send or receive a call, and happily do both. I thought maybe this was the antenna problem, but even sitting on the table without touching it wasn't noticeably better. Which makes it useless as a phone, and useless for everything else when I don't have WiFi access. Perhaps the promised free cover might help, but it seems unlikely, and the cover won't arrive until weeks after the end of the 30 day return policy.
We agonized long and hard, but then my wife tried to reach me for something urgent and couldn't complete the call, and our decision was made. We sent it back and got her a Fascinate.
The Fascinate is far from perfect. It's not nearly as smooth to use as the iPhone, mostly because Verizon has cluttered up the interface with junk. By junk, I mean applications that Verizon charges for that I have little interest in. As a good example, right on the home page is a "Voicemail" button. If you click that button, you've signed up for Verizon's extended voicemail for which they charge an extra monthly fee. You have to read the manual to figure out how to access the free voice mail. You can't get rid of the prominent voicemail button, though with some work and lots of reading of the user's guide, it is possible to move it off the home page. The interface is full of such clutter that can't be removed. Very annoying.
Combine that with far fewer apps than the iPhone (Netflix was a real treat on the iphone), and the Fascinate is far less of a device than it could be. But at least it works well as a phone, email, texting, and browser.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Background
It was time for new phones, and a new kind of phone. My wife and I had been using a couple of old flip phones that were at least three years old, and were of the free variety even then. They had served admirably, but it was time to enter the 21st century.
Despite working at a technology company that makes computer network test equipment, we're not very adventurous when it comes to new technology. We don't need the latest and greatest, we need something that works well and helps us get our jobs done quickly with a minimal amount of effort. Neither of us talk on the cell phone much, but spend much of our waking hours doing email.
My minimum requirements were for a phone that would be good for web browsing and reading/writing email to be able to stay in touch with the office and customers without having to lug around the PC. And tethering for the times when I do need to write quotes, review sales reports, or do more than simple email from the road. And it needs to be able to handle Japanese text. Which brings me to my wife's requirements.
She's originally from Japan. Reading menus and instructions that are often cryptic enough in your own language are close to impossible in a second language ("error 57: too many arguments to function call in line 786" had my wife asking who was arguing, why that wouldn't allow the phone to function, and she never called line 786 anyway. Did the phone have a sensor to prevent arguments on calls to area code 786?) So she wanted a Japanese phone. More importantly, I wanted her to have a Japanese phone so she wouldn't call me every ten minutes in the middle of customer meetings asking me how to use the phone. (Of course, the downside is that she'll call me and say, "The phone says 'genzai network ni tsunagaranai kara shibaraku matte kudasai.' What should I do?" And all I'll be able to answer is, "Huh? I don't know, do what the phone tells you do do.") But we're getting ahead of ourselves...
At a minimum, she needed a phone that could read and write Japanese email and web. After weeks of researching phones online, the only conclusion I could come to was that it was impossible to tell what language features were supported by which phones, other than the iPhone. Apparently, with the release of the iPhone in Japan, the phone is multi-lingual and can change from being an English language smart phone to a Japanese smart phone with the touch of a button. (Including things like putting contacts in Japanese language order instead of ABC order.) And there are plenty of resources online in Japanese, not to mention whole how-to books there on using the iPhone. (Japanese love how-to books, complete with manga illustrations, but that's a story of another blog.)
With all the bad publicity around AT&T coverage, I was sceptical, but she asked three different friends using iPhones, and they all loved their iPhones and said that coverage was good enough. (We live and work in West LA, the area between Santa Monica and Beverly Hills near UCLA, so there's a good chance that coverage is better here than elsewhere.) Her decision was made. She wanted the iPhone 4 with the better screen quality, and so it was decided. I know better than to argue with her.
I thought about getting an iPhone for myself, but I travel frequently and was still sceptical enough about AT&T that I wanted to hedge my bets. I kept looking and decided on Verizon's Samsung Fascinate (Galaxy Z) an Android phone, which seemed to be the only phone comparable to the iPhone in features and screen quality. Despite my lack of adventurousness and the added hassle of having to set up and learn how to use two different phones, it seemed like an interesting experiment to compare the two, and as soon as I got the Android phone, everyone kept asking me how I like ti and how it compared to the iPhone. So I thought a blog might be useful to everyone else out there considering their phone options. Certainly, my own online resource had found only "experts" bantering about terms like amoled and retina technology screens, and other things that meant nothing to me.
We'd been using Sprint for something like ten years, and despite their reputation for so-so overage, I've had no major complaints, so that would have been the easiest choice. Unfortunately, they didn't have any phones that appealed to me. In particular, I was still hoping for a way to read and write emails in Japanese, and that meant a virtual keyboard instead of a physical one, ruling out most of their phones. the 4G coverage that they spend millions advertising, within California is only available in Fresno. And there is a general impression, fairly or not, that Spring might not survive the two years of the phone contract. (Note to Sprint - think about getting away from 2 year contracts if you want to keep customers and sign up new ones. It's time to get creative.)
Having ruled out Sprint and AT&T, that left Verizon as the obvious choice, and their reputation as having the best network was promising. Still, my past experience with Verizon's wired service was not encouraging. We moved a few months back, with both the old home and new home inside Verizon territory and just wanted to move the phone service and set up FIOS. I won't go into detail here, but their incompetence left us without Internet access for more than two weeks, then took another two weeks, countless hours on the phone, and three technician visits (which means my wife has to take half a day off work each time) to get FIOS TV service turned on, all of which turned out to be caused by a typo in my name on the billing address that caused their system to fail a credit check on me, and my account to be silently cancelled time after time. For weeks. Still... we hope of the best and prepare for the worst.
A few final notes - the impression and recommendations are based on our particular needs, locations, and situation. Our phone usage is probably typical of a middle-aged (???) couple with busy work lives, but very different from the younger generation. In other words, your mileage may vary. Second, I am receiving nothing from any of the players - Apple, AT&T, Verizon, Samsung, Sprint, etc. for this. They don't know I exist. I'm just a regular consumer. And though I may be something of an expert in computer networking, I'm a complete amateur in cell phones and a newbie to smart phones.
I hope this turns out to be useful to other people out there...
 |
| The starting point... |
My minimum requirements were for a phone that would be good for web browsing and reading/writing email to be able to stay in touch with the office and customers without having to lug around the PC. And tethering for the times when I do need to write quotes, review sales reports, or do more than simple email from the road. And it needs to be able to handle Japanese text. Which brings me to my wife's requirements.
She's originally from Japan. Reading menus and instructions that are often cryptic enough in your own language are close to impossible in a second language ("error 57: too many arguments to function call in line 786" had my wife asking who was arguing, why that wouldn't allow the phone to function, and she never called line 786 anyway. Did the phone have a sensor to prevent arguments on calls to area code 786?) So she wanted a Japanese phone. More importantly, I wanted her to have a Japanese phone so she wouldn't call me every ten minutes in the middle of customer meetings asking me how to use the phone. (Of course, the downside is that she'll call me and say, "The phone says 'genzai network ni tsunagaranai kara shibaraku matte kudasai.' What should I do?" And all I'll be able to answer is, "Huh? I don't know, do what the phone tells you do do.") But we're getting ahead of ourselves...
At a minimum, she needed a phone that could read and write Japanese email and web. After weeks of researching phones online, the only conclusion I could come to was that it was impossible to tell what language features were supported by which phones, other than the iPhone. Apparently, with the release of the iPhone in Japan, the phone is multi-lingual and can change from being an English language smart phone to a Japanese smart phone with the touch of a button. (Including things like putting contacts in Japanese language order instead of ABC order.) And there are plenty of resources online in Japanese, not to mention whole how-to books there on using the iPhone. (Japanese love how-to books, complete with manga illustrations, but that's a story of another blog.)
With all the bad publicity around AT&T coverage, I was sceptical, but she asked three different friends using iPhones, and they all loved their iPhones and said that coverage was good enough. (We live and work in West LA, the area between Santa Monica and Beverly Hills near UCLA, so there's a good chance that coverage is better here than elsewhere.) Her decision was made. She wanted the iPhone 4 with the better screen quality, and so it was decided. I know better than to argue with her.
I thought about getting an iPhone for myself, but I travel frequently and was still sceptical enough about AT&T that I wanted to hedge my bets. I kept looking and decided on Verizon's Samsung Fascinate (Galaxy Z) an Android phone, which seemed to be the only phone comparable to the iPhone in features and screen quality. Despite my lack of adventurousness and the added hassle of having to set up and learn how to use two different phones, it seemed like an interesting experiment to compare the two, and as soon as I got the Android phone, everyone kept asking me how I like ti and how it compared to the iPhone. So I thought a blog might be useful to everyone else out there considering their phone options. Certainly, my own online resource had found only "experts" bantering about terms like amoled and retina technology screens, and other things that meant nothing to me.
We'd been using Sprint for something like ten years, and despite their reputation for so-so overage, I've had no major complaints, so that would have been the easiest choice. Unfortunately, they didn't have any phones that appealed to me. In particular, I was still hoping for a way to read and write emails in Japanese, and that meant a virtual keyboard instead of a physical one, ruling out most of their phones. the 4G coverage that they spend millions advertising, within California is only available in Fresno. And there is a general impression, fairly or not, that Spring might not survive the two years of the phone contract. (Note to Sprint - think about getting away from 2 year contracts if you want to keep customers and sign up new ones. It's time to get creative.)
Having ruled out Sprint and AT&T, that left Verizon as the obvious choice, and their reputation as having the best network was promising. Still, my past experience with Verizon's wired service was not encouraging. We moved a few months back, with both the old home and new home inside Verizon territory and just wanted to move the phone service and set up FIOS. I won't go into detail here, but their incompetence left us without Internet access for more than two weeks, then took another two weeks, countless hours on the phone, and three technician visits (which means my wife has to take half a day off work each time) to get FIOS TV service turned on, all of which turned out to be caused by a typo in my name on the billing address that caused their system to fail a credit check on me, and my account to be silently cancelled time after time. For weeks. Still... we hope of the best and prepare for the worst.
A few final notes - the impression and recommendations are based on our particular needs, locations, and situation. Our phone usage is probably typical of a middle-aged (???) couple with busy work lives, but very different from the younger generation. In other words, your mileage may vary. Second, I am receiving nothing from any of the players - Apple, AT&T, Verizon, Samsung, Sprint, etc. for this. They don't know I exist. I'm just a regular consumer. And though I may be something of an expert in computer networking, I'm a complete amateur in cell phones and a newbie to smart phones.
I hope this turns out to be useful to other people out there...
Friday, September 10, 2010
New phone arrived
The new Verizon Fascinate (Samsung Galaxy S) arrived yesterday and I'm beginning to set it up for use. I'll record my impressions here for how it compares to the Apple iPhone.
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