New Apple Lust Objects for 2010 and onward

I'd go to whichever network has more of your friends/family on it

^^Good call on that. My whole family is on Verizon which is definitely a plus.

My whole family is on Verizon, so that's crucial, and I'm in NY and Verizon reception is totally fine.

yeah but it costs $1m a month

i think i might just move to vermont and go off the grid instead of making a decision

A couple bucks more and I've never had a dropped call.

$480 bucks more

I've been on AT&T since the first gen iPhone, and I have almost never had the dropped call problem that others seem to have. By "almost never," let's call it once every . . . 25 calls, maybe?

max don't go off the grid, move to europe. phones work here!

I wouldn't call "1 in 25" "almost never!"

I'm really bad with money, Max, so I hardly noticed. I spent that much on 7" singles last month. It's a problem.

Yeah but I don't actually talk on the phone that much, so the frequency feels even lower.

max move to africa they generally have p good reception there

no joke, it's p astounding

just take a quick walk to a spot higher up w/better reception, no biggie

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/wp-content/uploads/images/06/38/wind_will_carry_us.jpg

AT&T sucks so much in Manhattan. I've been trying to work out Sprint v. Verizon for my gf. Seems like Sprint is worse than Verizon for reception, don't know by how much.

Check yr with employer, your bank/credit union, the school you went to, your grand mason, etc. if you dig a bit, you're probably in some organization that'll get you ~15% off your cell phone bill.

brian lam has convinced me to hold off till the end of the month and see how sprint's network deals with the iphone traffic

http://thewirecutter.com/2011/10/a-guide-should-you-get-an-iphone-4s/

Here is how it will work: really awesome for a few days, then incredibly overburdened until they pool enough cash from selling iPhones to expand

I think I'm moving over to verizon; on AT&T in the bay area and there are too many places where there is just no data reception, never mind the terrible phone reception. Verizon might be a little bit cheaper but at least I still get a corporate discount.

or rather, verizon might be a little bit more expensive

Guys quick important questions: is it smarter to buy 4S in 16gb instead of 32gb since you can store stuff via le cloud? Does cloud work only with wifi or with 3G too?

works with 3g. if you won't need all your stuff offline and you get good reception ...

Sweet thanks!

I bought the max size iphone 3gs but I don't think I've ever used more than half of the storage

yeah i dont really know what youd need more than 16GB for, especially if you can sync your phone every night

I listen to podcasts and iTunes U 6-8 hours a day at work so my 32gb 3GS is always full. I guess I could manage them better

Max, Verizon is a horrible company. Sprint said they had 4g before it was even available to carriers so that's a little suspicious but I bet they would have the best deal but maybe worst coverage. AT&T depends where you are.

if you stream audio 8 hours a day you might use a fair bit of data. think about yr data plan when considering 16 vs 32.

yeah im kind of operating under the assumption that theyre all horrible. my research indicates that sprint has better cov'g than AT&T in NYC. theoretically at&t has the fastest top speeds but... you need a signal.

i feel better deciding to wait and see what the reviews are like. its horrible, the way cell phones work in this country, i cant believe i have to sign a two-year, $2000 contract for this shit

and ya you could totally manage your podcasts better, an hour-long podcast should be what like 75mb? at most?

it's america's fault for being so big

well also for not regulating/investing in infrastructure

yeah - I hate my cell phone bill as much as everyone else, but logistically, america is a huge country and the population density is just not very high for like 90% of the country. even in places where it is high, I think city zoning laws prevent cell phone companies from erecting as many towers as they would like to. it's been what, 4-5 years now and SF and manhattan still have shitty 3G. I'm sure that AT&T is aware that if they'd deliver good coverage to these two places 95% of whinging about AT&T would go away online, but they haven't. so why?

unless there are planning issues with masts, there is no technical reason why sf or manhattan couldn't have a working GSM network.

my guess:

1) iphone monopoly for longer than any other country (presumably because there's only one gsm carrier in the US and iphone was gsm only for the first 4? years, but also because the US was the first country they launched in, and apple didn't realise how much influence they could exert over carriers to stop them pulling their usual shit, which is not a mistake they made elsewhere in the world)

2) and fewer networks than most places now the monopoly has been broken

= no competition for most of the time the only mass market smartphone has been around, and even now unusually dysfunctional competition by international standards

= why would at&t bother improving infrastructure? 1/25 calls dropped is good enough to make billions of $.

A friend was explaining about a nice trendy community where they had a covenant to not allow cell towers, and everyone who lives there complains of horrible reception. Yeeeeah.

yeah caek in my time in HK I had excellent 3G service, despite a population density 10x anywhere in the US and everyone around me having 3G data plans...

I honestly do think that there are probably planning/permit issues - getting SF or Manhattan up to speed would likely not even exceed their ad budget, and would be far more effective at squashing word-of-mouth complaining than just sitting on their monopoly. I mean, AT&T had to know since day 1 that their exclusivity wasn't going to last.

San Francisco Neighborhood Antenna-Free Union (SNAFU)

die

ew

Don't get why people care about talking and surfing at the same time. What situation demands it? How are you even doing it, speakerphone?! I assume I have this, but I don't know for sure because in the three years I've had an iphone I've never needed to try. (NB yes ok tethering I guess)

To me visual voicemail would be a bigger differentiator (over here o2 have it, but I don't think orange/tmob/voda do) - maybe sprint and verizon have infrastructure in place for this tho?

Without talk and surf your phone won't ring if you get a call when using data, which is the worst one for me.

Also how can you look up a great calamari place while chatting about where to go for dinner as the ad instructed me to?

haha! Oh but I was being thick and hadn't thought about surfing meaning you couldn't receive calls - I can see why that'd be a problem.

You can receive calls when you surf - it pops up and you answer it. You just can't look up directions or something while you are talking, which can be frustrating.

chart for UKers to compare deals on the 4S:

http://regmedia.co.uk/2011/10/10/iphone_1.png

By using my phone number as the reference number, I just figured out my tracking number on the UPS site. It's left Hong Kong!

gonna have to soldier on with the old 3g, not that i'm particularly upset

was thinking about getting an iPhone finally but good grief are those monthly plans in the USA expensive, with two-year contracts to boot; just hard for me to accepting spending like $1000 a year to have a phone + like 250 megs of data a month. Mostly I'm a cheapskate when it comes to monthly / recurring costs; with an upfront bill I can budget better, but monthly fees are deceptive to me. Plus two year contracts are horrible: how am I supposed to know now whether I'll still want the same plan in 2 years? I don't know where I'll be living in 2 years, or what my financial situation will be like.

pretty stoked though about the cheapass walmart/t-mobile plans pre-announced last week, though: 100 minutes of talk a month & unlimited data & texting for $30 a month, without contract. yeah I'll be stuck with some android phone but I don't really care I think: iPhone is gorgeous but until we get European-like plan prices here, they're off the table for me.

I have a 3g iPad 2 & was playing around with the idea of getting a SkypeIn # to take occasional calls on the iPad but since it doesn't fit in my pocket it's not as good as what I'd like.

I just chunk it into my "reoccurring costs" budgeting with my water/electric/cable bills.

just found this out about Mail in Lion:

The favorites bar in Mail is keyboard-accessible (just like Safari). Press command 1 to go to the first favorite, command 2 for the second, etc.

HALLELEJUAH

or however you spell "FUCK YES"

my contract is €10/month for 500GB + 9c/texts + 9c/min for calls to germany, europe and the usa /braggin

500gb?! on a phone?

Paying 10 quid/month here for 250 mins, unlimited text, unlimited data. Seems OK to me.