When we pre-ordered the new iPad last week, we opted to stick with AT&T for data coverage, despite our recent complaint about AT&T’s misguided crack-down on unlimited data plan subscribers. Several other people we follow on the internets have switched preorders from the AT&T offering to Verizon, but there are several reasons we decided to stick with our initial decision.

Ease of transfer.

When we moved from the original iPad to the iPad 2, keeping our data service was a simple matter of swapping out SIM cards. It may not be a big deal to ensure our existing iPad data plan is canceled, and a new one activated on Verizon in its place, but why bother with this if it’s not necessary? Verizon’s data plans aren’t any cheaper than AT&T’s are, unless you opt for the 10GB/month option,¹ leaving LTE availability as the only compelling reason to move to Verizon.

Unlimited data.

Granted, it apparently means nothing anymore, but we’re still grandfathered in to AT&T’s unlimited data plan. AT&T should take note that this was a factor, albeit an incredibly minor one, in keeping a subscriber on their network. A tiny part of us hopes that AT&T won’t throttle speeds at the full 95% bandwidth that some have reported in the event we ever do exceed 3GB/month, and if they don’t, perhaps this is a small reason to stick with AT&T.

Poor LTE availability.

For people living in certain cities, the Verizon option may be a no-brainer, because Verizon currently has better LTE coverage overall. However, both providers have pretty poor LTE coverage outside of major cities, so most people don’t really have the option to get LTE in the first place. If you live in a city where only one provider has an offering, that’s obviously the provider you want, but for everyone else, it’s a toss-up as far as coverage goes.

Personally, we don’t live in an LTE-available area, so there’s no compelling reason to switch to Verizon. Of the cities we’ll likely visit more than once this year, there’s LTE available from both carriers, so again, no reason to switch to Verizon.

AT&T’s 3G+ speeds.

Many people are annoyed over the fact that Apple caved and gives a “4G” moniker to 3G data speeds on AT&T’s network, for those who have a newer iPhone. Technically speaking, the 4G label here isn’t indicating that the iPhone is running on a 4G data network (as that’s what the “LTE” label would indicate), so why did AT&T push for this?

Yes, it’s a marketing gimmick, though AT&T’s 3G offering is faster than Verizon’s in certain areas, and that’s what the “4G” label indicates. So while it’s nowhere near as fast as LTE is, in areas where LTE isn’t available, you’ll default to the 3G offering, which in AT&T’s case, is faster than Verizon’s offering.

Since we don’t live in an area where LTE is available, we’ll be doing all our non-wifi surfing over 3G, or in this case, the faster “4G” that AT&T offers. If you’re in a similar case, there’s no reason to choose Verizon unless you simply don’t get AT&T service in your area.²

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When the original iPad was released, the 3G version was exclusive to AT&T. Among the data plans offered was an “unlimited” plan that ran for $29.99/month. This plan has since been deprecated; if you bought an iPad after the plan was discontinued, you have to opt for a limited bandwidth tier, while those who had the option for the unlimited plan before are grandfathered in. Today, the largest data plan available through AT&T is 3GB/month, with additional bandwidth costing extra.¹ Conveniently, the 3GB plan also costs $29.99/month.

The controversy with the unlimited plan is that AT&T has threatened to throttle bandwidth for unlimited plan subscribers for quite some time. Reports have been varied, and customers wanted a clarification of the rule. Recently, AT&T provided this clarification, stating they would throttle bandwidth for all unlimited plan subscribers after 3GB of bandwidth is consumed in a given month. Once the next billing cycle begins anew, the throttle would be removed, and customers would be back to full-speed data transfers. AT&T’s argument is that they want to ensure that a minority of users are not placing undue burden on the network for the majority, but as Hot Hardware points out, that’s not really the case:

First, AT&T’s bandwidth throttle is based solely on a person’s usage, not their location or the overall demand for bandwidth at any given time. In reality, this is never the case. At 5PM in a downtown metropolitan area, cellular bandwidth will be at an absolute premium — a graveyard shift worker in one of the office buildings at 3 AM has no way to saturate the available spectrum, even if they had a dozen phones.

In other words, AT&T is finding a convenient excuse (that doesn’t hold much water) to charge their early iPad-adopting customers more money than they were initially led to believe. If these customers choose not to switch plans and pony up for more bandwidth in the event they exceed 3GB/month, AT&T throttles the customer’s networks speed by as much as 95%, effectively making the data connection useless.² AT&T is still technically providing unlimited bandwidth to the customer, only it’s at incredibly low speeds.

An iPhone user in California recently won a small claims court judgement for $850 over this throttling fiasco³, and I would be surprised if others don’t take similar legal actions. Not everyone sees the small claims court victory just, however, like Dan Frommer:

Please get over your emotional battle — and extinguish any legal threats, that’s silly — and join us in reality. If you use a lot of mobile data, be happy about it, and be happy paying for it.

Dan’s argument is just as emotional as the argument of those asking that “unlimited” mean “unlimited bandwidth at maximum speed”; Dan accuses unlimited subscribers of whining, but then whines about how we’re all hurting his precious network. But as Hot Hardware points out, high-bandwidth users aren’t necessarily adversely affecting the network; for AT&T to justly throttle a user’s speeds, the burden of proof needs to be on them to show that a user’s network use was affecting the network in a negative way, but they’re not doing that. The reality is AT&T trying to underhandedly change the terms of its original $29.99/month plan by convincing the majority of its customers that they would be negatively impacted otherwise.

The assumption Dan makes (and those who back him in this) is not just that unlimited-plan subscribers are hammering network speeds for everyone else, but that they’re consistently using more than 3GB of data each month. To our knowledge, AT&T hasn’t provided any evidence of this either, and from an anecdotal perspective, we don’t believe this to be the case; we’ve been on the unlimited plan since pretty much day one, and most months, don’t come close to reaching 3GB.⁴ We may never exceed the 3GB cap each month, and if we have, it’s incredibly rare. This means that most months, we pay more than what we use, and would be surprised to hear it’s much different for many other unlimited plan subscribers. In effect, we’re putting more into the network than the average consumer, and so if we happen to exceed the 3GB cap one month, shouldn’t we morally be allowed to get away with it? Maybe Dan should be thanking us instead of calling us whiners.

AT&T has a rollover minutes plan for their cell phones, which seems reasonably fair: if you don’t use all your minutes in a given month, the surplus will be added to your next month’s minutes (to a limit) for you to use later. Maybe AT&T should do something like this for data. But that would be fair.

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On Friday, we drove by two Targets, a Best Buy, and an AT&T store to see if anyone was selling the Jawbone UP early. None were. The reports we heard about UPs selling early must have been very isolated experiences, though it seems people had more success at Apple stores, who apparently are more likely to not play by the rules.¹ Both Target stores we visited had places set aside, complete with labels, for the three sizes of the UP initially available, yet employees at neither store could tell me whether they already sold out of their UP stock, or if they hadn’t received any yet. We decided to return to the AT&T store on Sunday morning.

We had sized our wrist using the printable template available at the UP site. This proved to be a waste of time, because not only did the AT&T store have demo units out to try on, but the packaging on each UP box has a plastic template included, so buyers can check for their size when in the store. It’s a nice touch, and shows Jawbone’s attention to detail. So we bought our UP, and set it up in the car on the way home.² We won’t bother to give a full review here, because we found Shawn Wall’s review to be plenty thorough for a product that’s only officially been on shelves for less than two days, but we will respond to some points he made for the sake of completeness.

The rubberized bracelet is bendable to a degree. It’s not the simplest task in the world getting it on or off your wrist, but thankfully you don’t really need to take it off given its waterproof nature.

Jawbone actually calls the bracelet water resistant, and only to a fairly shallow depth. The idea is that you can wash your hands, and even take it into the shower, without worrying about it getting damaged. We even saw a picture of someone wearing it in a shallow pool, so the idea that you can wear it most places is obviously something Jawbone wants customers to understand. But don’t think about taking the UP diving. In fact, the notion of taking this thing in the ocean makes us a bit uncomfortable, and we’d rather someone else tried it first.

When we took a shower this morning, our hesitation for getting the UP wet made us take it off. It’s not like you’ll be missing out on too much activity tracking in those few minutes of the morning anyway. Though, we did notice that the black rubberized band³ attracts dirt pretty quickly, so wearing it into the shower may not be a bad idea after all.

As far as bendability goes, the UP has to be somewhat bendable to get it on and off. But that’s only for the “ends” of the band, and the bendability is temporary. In other words, you can’t bend the UP into a different shape, or make it larger or smaller.

There’s really not much in the way of moving parts here; there is a button at one end that is used for switching modes (more on that later), and the opposite end has a cap that is pulled off to reveal the 3.5mm male jack that is used to sync the device with your mobile phone (currently iPhone-only, but Android “coming soon”).

The one thing we don’t like about the UP is that the button on one end, as well as the cap, is painted silver. We’d much rather have these match the main band colour, as we don’t expecially like the accent color. The cap is only silver on one side though, so if you put it on backwards, it appears black to all but the closest observer. A backwards cap also means you’re not proudly displaying “Jawbone” written on your jewelry; we don’t need to advertise for the company we already supported by buying their product. Depending on how much we dislike the button on the other end being an “off” colour, we may end up painting it black down the road.

One really great feature in regards to sleep is that the bracelet can be used as an alarm clock using vibration. Even better, it supposedly will wake you up out of a light sleep instead of a deep sleep by getting you up a little earlier if it can (by looking at your deep vs. light sleep somehow).

This feature worked well for us this morning, though to be fair, we didn’t sleep all that great last night anyway, and noticeably tumbled around a bunch. In this case, we were quick to feel the pulsing vibration of the alarm, but we wonder if it will wake us on days that we have a deeper sleep. Today, it woke us up 15 minutes early. We’re considering doing a side-by-side test of the UP and Sleep Cycle iPhone app to see how consistent the two are, or if one tends to go off before the other. For now, though, we expect the UP to handle our alarms equally well, if not better, with the only concern being whether the vibration is strong enough to rouse us from a deep sleep.

One of my favorite feature of the device is found in this area. You can set your bracelet to remind you to be active if you are sedentary for too long. The time range is user defined. This is great as it can remind us programmers to get out of our chairs once an hour

We’re rather fond of this feature also. We have it enabled during business hours, and its a great reminder to get up and do something, even if it’s just to pee or get some fresh water.

I do not own another pedometor, Fitbit or anything else along those lines so I cannot speak for the accuracy of the UP. It feels like the numbers are too high though.

Whether they’re too high or not, all we can say is that the “lightly active” category is cake during an average weekend, and that’s not even with workout scheduled. From noon until night yesterday, we scored over 8k steps taken, which means we can easily up our steps goal to the next level. We’ll have to see how our weekend activity compares to the average workday to see whether it’s worth adjusting our goals at this time, though.

The food diary portion of the application is well… a little underwhelming in my opinion.

We haven’t played with this feature too much yet, and honestly, we’re not too tempted considering there’s no way to count calories. We’ve used other apps to compare our caloric intake to our ideal goal (at least 3k calories a day), and the fact that such a simple feature is missing makes us feel like we’d gain little from the UP app’s inclusion of a food log. Maybe once this feature becomes more robust, we’ll be more likely to keep up with it.

Game mechanics are a huge portion to an offering such as the UP, and I feel they currently fall a little short.

We agree with Shawn here, and don’t like how simply accepting a challenge means others who accepted the challenge can suddenly see your progress. We’d prefer “private” challenges that don’t involved any reporting, or at the very least, allow users to select a username instead of their registered (true) name. Sure, the public feed only uses first names, but we’d still prefer a nickname.

The problem of the food log and the game mechanics points at the one flaw the UP currently has, and that’s a very simplistic piece of software. If Jawbone maintains a regular release schedule of updates and bug fixes, however, we can truly see the pair being a useful lifestyle assistant for some time to come.

More thoughts to follow as we spend more time with our new bracelet.

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Our 2G iPhone, operating exclusively on T-Mobile, once started having issues making/receiving phone calls, and when a call was able to connect, it was quickly dropped. To determine whether the problem was with our iPhone or T-Mobile, we put our SIM back into our aging Sony Ericcson T610 backup phone, and verified that it, too, had issues. So, we took the Sony into a local T-Mobile store, explained the problem, and had our SIM card replaced. Everything worked again.

Fast forward a few years and we’re on an AT&T family plan with two lines. One phone is an iPhone 3GS, and the other an iPhone 4. Despite the fact that both phones have been working fine in our house for the last year, suddenly neither phone can reliably make or receive a call at home, and calls that do connect drop after about a minute or two. The problem showed up one weekend, seemed to have gone away, and suddenly came back later in the week. We’ve had dropped calls with AT&T before, but nothing like this.

AT&T customer support said they could “send a reset signal” to both phones in an attempt to reset the SIM cards, but that the phones would have to be off in order to do this, else the SIM cards could be damaged. This sounded ridiculous, and we ultimately passed to see if the problem went away on its own, which it did for a day or so. When it returned, we took our phones into the local AT&T store, and asked them if they could reset our SIM cards, or outright replace them. The fact that this was happening to both our phones convinced us this wasn’t an issue with Apple hardware, and just to cover all our bases, we made sure that both phones were running the latest iOS version.

So AT&T agreed to replace our SIM cards, but the customer representative wasn’t too sure this would fix our problem. So, he gave us a free AT&T microcell, which normally retails for $200. We didn’t need to sign a contract extension or anything, as apparently other people were having signal problems in our town. Mind you, our phones don’t have signal issues most of the time; we’re routinely at four bars in our home, and even when we experienced the dropped calls, the signal strength wasn’t dropping (based on the iPhone display). Still, the AT&T representative suggested we try the microcell out and see if it fixed our problems.

When we got home, it appeared that the SIM card replacement did the trick. The 3GS held a call for some time, but then the call abruptly dropped, and from then on, wouldn’t maintain a connection. We tried the iPhone 4, and it seemed to work, but then after a short while, it too started failing. This was all while we waited for our microcell to register with AT&T, a process that the instruction manual says can take around 90 minutes.

When the microcell went live, we noticed two things:

1. We were at five bars.
2. Call problems seemed to be gone.

Strangely, we also noticed that sometimes, a phone would drop the microcell signal and jump back onto the cell tower signal. We speculate that this is because our microcell is located in our basement, at a window (albeit with a view of the sky). Placing the microcell in the basement was necessary because that’s where our FIOS box is, along with our Apple TimeCapsule. We don’t have a problem with a wireless signal in our house (though it’s admittedly boosted on the first floor thanks to an Apple Airport Express), and usually, the microcell signal is still giving us five bars on the second floor of our house.

So the microcell appears to have fixed our problem, but it’s still too early to tell, as the issues we were having came and went before, too. What we can say is that the microcell appears to be a nice option if AT&T signal strength is normally poor, but it’s at the expense of bandwidth¹. We’re concerned with the phones switching between the microcell and nearby cell tower (which is about a mile away), and why sometimes, the complete signal is dropped.

Has anyone had similar issues with AT&T connectivity? It’s strange that this problem appeared spontaneously, and that it hasn’t been consistent. No outages were reported by AT&T customer service, either.

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Catching up on weekend news reveals quite a number of blog posts concerning the proposed AT&T/T-Mobile merger, with arguments being made both for and against. But why does anyone care if the merger happens? We’re not saying that the merger would necessarily be good for the industry, but we’re far from saying it’d be bad, either.

We love T-Mobile. We were loyal customers for years, and when T-Mobile didn’t offer the iPhone in 2007, we stayed with them anyway. When jailbreak/unlocking tools were available, we picked up an iPhone and ran it on T-Mobile with much satisfaction. We held out this way playing the jailbreak cat-and-mouse game up until the iPhone 3GS was released, when we finally decided that EDGE was too slow for us and that a better camera and GPS were enough to sway the boat in AT&T’s favor. In all respects though, other than the speed improvements, our switch to AT&T meant more dropped calls and a slightly larger service area (noticeable to us on a practical level), but by far the greatest effect on us was that T-Mobile effectively became a non-factor in the wireless game.

They’re still a non-factor; they don’t offer the iPhone. Without going into a pro or anti bend regarding Android, let’s just come to terms with the fact that the iPhone is the pre-emptive mobile device and has been for almost four years; for those of you who love your Android devices, more power to you, but you have a second-fiddle device (and that’s not a bad thing: it’s just a fact that the iPhone offers more apps and is at least perceived as a friendlier device for mass-consumption).

Right now, Verizon is the bigger wireless beast between it and AT&T. With a T-Mobile merger behind it, AT&T swaps places with Verizon. Big deal. At the end of the day, it doesn’t change the fact that AT&T and Verizon are still the largest wireless monsters in the country, with lowly Sprint still sitting at the number three table wishing they could eat with the big boys. T-Mobile subscribers, meanwhile, get the iPhone. They get access to a larger network and the shining star of mobile devices. Let them have their cake without pissing about whether AT&T grabs another 10% market share or not.

Those of you crying that this is bad for innovation: T-Mobile lost that game when it had to rely on Windows Mobile and Android devices. These wireless providers aren’t creating devices themselves, anyway. They just make deals with manufacturers and occasionally throw their own branding on new gadgets. The innovation in this space is handled by Apple, Google, Microsoft, RIM, et al. All these telecoms are doing is providing a network for devices to run on. The innovation the telecoms control is in speed, availability, and pricing, and T-Mobile’s already fallen behind on the first two. If they can gain those and somehow influence AT&T in the third, it’s a win for everyone involved.

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A number of people have reported losing data over AT&T when upgrading older iPhones to iOS 4. The culprit isn’t clear, though many owners reported jailbreaking their iPhones in the past, though this doesn’t appear to be a universal factor. Regardless, the common solution for getting data back is to restore the iPhone from a previous state, sometimes using a different admin account on an OS X system in order to force iTunes into re-downloading the iOS 4 update.

We underwent the same loss of data after upgrading our 3GS, and though a restore worked after setting the iPhone up as a new phone, we weren’t happy with losing all our data. (Restoring from a previous backup didn’t work, even after restoring the firmware and setting the iPhone up as a new device.) Fortunately, we found a solution that worked, which doesn’t require one to restore the iPhone at all.

It seems that the loss of data may be tied to AT&T’s carrier file, which may have ben corrupted/changed on older iPhones (possibly after jailbreaking or installing jailbreak apps). To fix this, get on a wifi network, and from the iPhone, head over to HELP.BENM.AT and follow the links to obtain the carrier file for your respective service provider. Once the file has been installed, you’ll be back up and running with cellular data, without having spent the time to set up your iPhone as a brand new device.

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It’s upsetting that AT&T wasn’t clearer on this before we decided to rant, especially since their own employees didn’t know that one could replace a non-discount-eligible iPhone with a 4G iPhone purchased using the eligibility from a discount-eligible iPhone on the same family plan. At least, so says AT&T now, well after pre-orders for the 4G iPhone stopped, and units are already shipping. In fact, getting a 4G iPhone at this point will likely take several weeks before stocks are refilled.

Still, this information is useful, since it means we don’t have to wait until next year to upgrade at discount. If we did have to wait that long, we’d probably just wait another four months to see what next year’s iPhone will bring. Now, however, we need to rethink whether we can make good use of that 5MP camera, HD video-recording, and FaceTime.

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