Crave

AT&T charges an iPhone user with a service that's not available on the iPhone.

(Credit: Screenshot by Dong Ngo/CNET)

I've been a customer of AT&T ever since 2003, when I got myself my first cell phone ever, and I've been a very good one. The proof: I set my bill to autopay from day one and even convinced a few friends to move to AT&T (mostly so that we don't have to use the minutes to talk to each other.)

I found out Thursday that AT&T hasn't been very nice to me.

The iPhone 3G S launch is well under way, and AT&T made a big deal this week with a capitulation to iPhone customers under contract (click the link for the CNET story). It promised that some 3G customers who would normally be upgrade-eligible later this summer (June, July, August) will finally be able to get their 3G S now for the new-contract prices of $99, $199, and $299.

It was a nice promise, but were you able to take advantage of it? I ask because I bought my 3G last August 31, and I pay more than $99 a month on my bill--a prerequisite according to AT&T's news update. However, after half an hour spent on the phone with customer service managers, I discovered that what I had been told on AT&T's Web site and via text message was still true: I don't qualify until 1/31/10, which is more than halfway toward the release of the next iPhone after this one.

Moreover, AT&T wouldn't specify what, exactly, determines whether a customer gets a 12-month or 18-month upgrade window. Even their official message remains gray on the matter. To make matters even more inexplicable, the manager said it was "Apple's decision," and that I needed to spend more than $99 a month just on my voice plan, not including data (required with every iPhone contract) and texting. On the other hand, our editor in chief, Scott Ard, told me he was successful, and that he was a 3G owner who had been eligible late July. What was the magic powder that sealed the deal? He's been with AT&T longer than I have, which may have helped.

Sound off: did you get an upgrade? Were you denied? Was it a pain to do, or remarkably easy? Let us know. At the least, I can feel sympathy in numbers (and wonder why I'm so excited about spending so much for a faster chip, a video camera, and a compass). For more on my AT&T rant, check out this week's Digital City podcast when it goes live.

Your vacuum cleaner sucked out a woofer? Who to call?

(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)

I get this one a lot, what should I do about my--fill-in-the-blank--broken headphones, buzzing speakers, static noises, intermittent sound, or when my subwoofer stops subbing?

Only rarely can I solve the problem with a quick fix; I always first advise contacting the dealer or Web site that sold you the product. Service is their responsibility and if they don't provide it, you shouldn't buy from them.

Of course, the best time to ask about service is before you buy any product. Will they replace a product if it fails within 90 days of purchase? Do they pay for return shipping? I'm talking about audio products here, but that advice works for any tech purchase.

Every so often (we can't discern a regular pattern), J.D. Power and Associates hands out awards to wireless carriers. Though we don't doubt that J.D. Power's methodology is thorough and careful, we do have a hard time keeping track of them all. There are awards for customer care, call quality, retail sales satisfaction, and overall customer satisfaction. And within each award, there can be multiple categories and individual winners in each region of the country.

This time around, T-Mobile has taken the customer care prize with an index score of 755 points on a 1,000-point scale. Verizon Wireless trailed just behind with 749 points and Alltel, which is merging with Verizon, garnered 744 points. AT&T came in fourth place with poor Sprint Nextel bringing up the rear.

T-Mobile has had a good record in the customer care category with several wins over the past few years. Last August, Verizon Wireless edged out T-Mobile for the first time, which perhaps gave T-Mobile the motivation it needed to try just a little harder. In any case, its efforts paid off.

What do you think? Does T-Mobile deserve its award?

BlackBerry squished by a car

(Credit: Adam Richardson)

Sorry for the lack of posts recently, I've been very busy with a lot of traveling that hasn't left many brain cells free to do blogging. Thanks to Tim for holding down the fort in my absence. Now, on to business...

Recently my BlackBerry got run over by a car. You can see the results here, it's not pretty. Actually, I think it held up pretty well considering it got hit on a busy street. It's rather a mystery how it got there, as I hadn't been anywhere near where it was found.

A kindly woman named Shawna saw it, stopped to pick it up, and had the savvy to take out the SIM card, put the card in her own phone, and see if any text messages had been left indicating the owner. "It's what I'd hope somebody would do for me," she explained, thus boosting my faith in humanity. As luck would have it, I'd sent a text to it in just such an eventuality. My hat is off to Shawna for her effort and for thinking of that solution. Only in Silicon Valley!

Work was able to get me a new one within a couple of days so my withdrawal symptoms were minimized. But here's what I found interesting about this process: Once I got the new one and activated it, everything came back -- and I mean just about everything. Of course the email, texts, call logs, calendar and so on, those are to be expected. But what surprised me was that it also restored my theme, the location of icons on the main screen, ringtones and profile settings. In other words, it restored all the things that you painstakingly customize over time and which take almost equally long to get back how you liked them. It instantly created a doppelganger of my old phone as though nothing had ever happened. The only item that didn't get restored for some reason was my text shortcuts, which is a bit of a pain.

The iPhone may be sexier, but to my knowledge it couldn't pull of a trick like this. Kudo's to RIM's system, this turned a potentially painful event into one that was pleasantly surprising. Not that I will be trying to repeat it again any time soon.

Sometimes, you can just be too direct.

VentureWire announced today that a company called Get Satisfaction Unlimited, which provides a forum for consumers to discuss customer service issues, has secured $1.3 million in funding from First Round Capital, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and a group of individual investors.

(Credit: Satisfaction Unlimited)

It's a great idea. But there are probably a lot of names that wouldn't make a 13-year old laugh. Kvetch.com, Alwaysright.com, Whining Old Ladies. If I were a naming consultant, popping off those three would probably net me $50,000. Not bad for 45 seconds of labor.

Get Satisfaction Unlimited sounds like a 1) the album Barry White never finished or 2) the name of a Jean Claude Van Damme movie in which someone gets their head lopped off by a helicopter blade. At a minimum, they should have included a few exclamation points (Unlimited!!!) on the end.

"It's a new take on customer service," company Chief Executive Thor Muller told VentureWire. "Customers are at the center and can help each other. It's a community sourcing platform where questions can be asked, problems can be solved and ideas can be shared."

The publication does not report whether Thor (if that is his real name) was wearing a shirt or not.

The name seems to change quite a bit too. Although VentureWire has it down as Get Satisfaction Unlimited, the site lists the company as Satisfaction, Satisfaction Unlimited, and Satisfaction! (Finally, they wise up and go for exclamations.) BusinessWeek described it as Get Satisfaction.

Get Satisfaction now joins my hall of crazy company names. Some are good (Hyperactive Technologies, Dress Barn) and some are a bit crazy (Internet Gold Golden Lines, Central European Media Enterprises, Hurray Holding and Wackenhut Security). And let's not forget the game controller, the TrustMaster!

The squeaky wheel doesn't always get the grease.

At least not if the squeaky wheel is a Sprint Nextel customer. On June 29, 2007, Sprint sent letters notifying some customers that their service would be canceled by the end of July due to excessive calls to customer service.

"Our records indicate that over the past year, we have received frequent calls from you regarding your billing or other general account information," the letter reads. "While we have worked to resolve your issues and questions to the best of our ability, the number of inquiries you have made to us during this time has led us to determine that we are unable to meet your current wireless needs."

"Therefore after careful consideration, the decision has been made to terminate your wireless service agreement effective July 30, 2007."

Subscribers who have gotten letters from Sprint terminating their service won't have to pay the early termination fee. Their account balances will also be set to zero. But subscribers will have to sign up with a new wireless provider by July 30 if they want to keep their phone numbers. Otherwise, the numbers won't be available after the Sprint service ends, the letter states.

(You can take a look at one of these letters posted within this discussion stream on a Sprint users' forum.) And click here to see an image of one of the letters.

The company's new tagline: 'Sprint Ahead.'

(Credit: Sprint Nextel)

A Sprint spokeswoman acknowledged that a group of letters had been sent out on June 29. She said that only a "small minority" of customers were impacted.

"We have to be able to quickly and efficiently serve customers," said Roni Singleton, a Sprint spokeswoman. "And when we are unable to consistently solve our customers' problems it results in a lot of frustration and longer waits for other customers. So after looking through our records, we were able to determine that there were customers who we could couldn't meet their current needs."

Singleton said it was normal business practice for Sprint to audit customer service interactions. She also said the company has always reserved the right in its terms of use to terminate the contract for whatever reason.

Posting on the Sprint users' message board, one customer who received one of these letters said the calls she made to Sprint were for errors in the company's billing. She also questioned how the company counted the number of calls.

"I absolutely didn't call as much as they say I did, but I did always have the hang up/transfer scenario--even today calling in I was hung up on twice and transferred at least five times," she said in one of her posts. "I mean I DREAD calling in and sitting on hold, why on earth would I do it unless I had to!"

Clearly, Sprint is trying to shed customers who seem to eat up too many resources. But it seems crazy that a company that's already having a hard time keeping subscribers would be willing terminate contracts.

For years, Sprint has had a reputation for poor customer service and poor network coverage, and as a result, the company is suffering. For the first quarter of 2007, it reported a loss of 220,000 post-paid monthly subscribers--customers who pay monthly. This was the third quarter in a row the company had a substantial loss of these types of customers. The company has consistently had one of the worst churn rates in the wireless industry. At the end of the first quarter of 2007, Sprint reported a churn rate of 2.7 percent.

This issue has gotten me wondering about wireless contracts in general. If you are a Sprint customer who recently received one of these letters, or you've received a similar letter from another carrier, please write me at maggie.reardon@cnet.com.

(Credit: Apple Computer)

The Apple iPod is, far and away, the most popular MP3 player on the market--less a product and more a way of life for many people. But just how reliable a product is it? That's the question posed by Nick Wingfield's article in today's Wall Street Journal. "When iPods Die" (which, like most WSJ content, is locked behind the paper's subscriber firewall) compiles some compelling iPod war stories. Among the frustrated 'Pod users chronicled is Tom Westrup of Austin, Texas, who--after suffering from repeated freeze-ups during playback--is currently awaiting his fifth replacement iPod. There's also New York software developer Bill Torpey, who shocked his daughter's malfunctioning iPod back to life--albeit temporarily--by slamming it down on his desk.

Those stories jibe with issues we've seen as well. Along with freeze-ups (requiring the need to constantly reset the device) and ever-shrinking battery life, hard drive failures are a frequent culprit. CNET Senior Editor Dan Ackerman was able to revitalize an old (out-of-warranty) iPod with a DIY hard drive replacement--though it lasted only six months before the dreaded "click of death" returned. Another editor was able to persuade the local Apple Store to give him a replacement iPod at a reduced cost--a kindly Genius Bar denizen took pity on the fact that his warranty had expired only a few days earlier.

Of course, we're not counting the incident where yet another colleague destroyed his iPod in a freak drinking-game accident (don't ask). And that raises a good point: These are portable devices, after all, and they take a lot more abuse than most stationary stay-at-home products. It goes without saying that the flash-based Nano and Shuffle models are certainly a better choice for active travelers. For instance, the aluminum skin found on the second-generation Nano has gone a long way to toughening up those models while eliminating the scratching problems found on the earlier plastic-faced versions. On the other hand, like any hard drive, the ones found in the full-size iPods can take only so much jostling, dropping, and hitting before they give up the ghost.

For its part, Apple claims the iPod failure rate is "less than 5 percent," a figure that a company spokesman calls "extremely low" compared to industry averages. And, indeed, the players' continued mega-success--70 million sold since 2001, according to the Journal article--would seem to indicate that the allure of an iPod still far outweighs its drawbacks. But in an age where a single YouTube video can rocket a consumer complaint from anecdotal obscurity to viral ubiquity, such complaints represent a possible crack in the iPod's armor. Whether that will translate into success for the army of competitors trying to assail Apple's massive 75 percent market share remains an open question.