Thanks for the reply. This is disheartening to say the least.
If there are any Cingular Treo users out there, I hope they'll respond in this thread with their comments on data service.
It would be a great pity if Danger did badly, not because of their device, but because their service didn't work right thanks to cheap cellular providers and their historically bad service.
About 1/3 of those items are to the direct benefit of the artists. The guitars, the sound equipment, the blow-out party, the catering, the tour bus and the limos are all effectively income for the artists.
This trickery generally benefits the artists because they're not taxed on the benefits it provides them with, unlike the 7/11 clerk, who has to pay income and Social InSecurity taxes on every dime of his income.
I'll bet the 7/11 clerk would change places with them in a heartbeat.
I read a very interesting biography of Richard Branson, who founded the Virgin record label among other enterprises. He was taught a hard lesson in economics from the other side of the fence. He signed some number of bands. One was a huge hit, the rest did poorly. Overall, he made very little even though his business was glamourous and he had a lot of fun with it.
In other words, just because the gross is pretty doesn't mean the net isn't ugly.
In this case, consider that the semi-hit analyzed here has to support a number of flops, that don't come even close to recouping their costs. Overall, then, the label probably does a lot worse than you think, precisely because this guy selected a middle of the road example.
Anyone know what the actual profits of the record labels look like?
I don't think there's any significant doubt that the Danger Sidekick is the superior product, as a product, but when I bought mine it had horrible coverage problems, and they just kept getting worse.
When I first bought it, I could have lunch at California Pizza Kitchen and check the Internet while eating. When I last tried it, before giving up in frustration, I could not; there was no data service at all.
Now it has a problem with its card, so I have no recent data. I'm going to take it to a T-Mobile station pretty soon and see what's up with that, but until then I can only recommend the unit if you get decent coverage in your area.
In the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles, coverage is lousy and - as I said - has gotten worse over the last few months.
I met a Sidekick user, and he said that the external antenna really helped. This is a piece of copper that mounts directly under the SideKick, leaving the form factor unchanged.
The bottom line is that the design of this device was superb, but ask other people who live in your area, and the other areas you plan to use the device, about coverage before you plunk down your $250-odd.
Sorry to be so discouraging, because based on the other comments here I'd rate it significantly superior to the Treo. The keyboard works great, and although it's a bit small and the type is a bit tiny, it's clear, crisp and readable.
The owner of my company read the book 'The Six Sigma Way' and got very excited about it. He asked me to read it, and he asked the manufacturing guy to read it. Whenever we would have a problem, he would say stuff like "That's not Six Sigma" in email.
I read about half of the book. It seemed to be a bunch of billions of generalities, complete with meaningless charts and graphs, and I am not actually sure what implementing it would do in a concrete sense.
The basic idea of doing a ground-up analysis of your business to determine what needs to be done to make things more reliable is, in my opinion, something every business should do periodically. However, I don't think giving it a trendy name and insisting on hiring expensive consultants is going to help quality as much as just, well, periodically scrutinizing your own processes and looking for ways to improve quality.
One of the key things the book said is that if you don't have buy-in from management and employees, Six Sigma is useless. So if nobody in your company wants to drink the Kool-Aid, it's pretty wortheless. But if people are enthusiastic about improving the way their company works, I'm not sure if the Six Sigma framework says that much that common sense doesn't.
Hope this helps; I welcome dissent from the better informed.
I have to say that sounds a bit high. I'd be delighted to pay $10, willing to pay $20, but $30 seems like it's overreaching just a tad - especially if I don't have a direct flight and would have to pay $30/leg! Yikes!
When I bought my S900 photo printer, I was quite impressed to note that it came with all six (!) full ink cartridges. No cheesy half-full cartridges for Canon.
Of course mainstream printers are now so cheap that they really have to rely on the cartridges for most of their revenue. This is probably why this issue is rearing its ugly head now.
If my memory serves, Chimera's rendering deficiencies are very similar in appearance to Safari's.
Only OmniWeb does a perfect job at it, so I will be very sorry to see the original OW codebase go. On the other hand, they seem to have hit some kind of brick wall with the project - there haven't been improvements in some time. Hopefully this will help kickstart their efforts.
Thanks for reproducing the error message for me. It reminds me of why I really love Apple. Steve Jobs may be a jerk sometimes (as is Bill Gates), but he sure does deliver the goods (unlike Bill).
While it's true that they have a remote, I'm not sure how useful it would be with the typical monitor I see attached to a PC.
And the trend is undeniably towards more immersive viewing experiences (i.e. 60 inch plasma screens, etc).
I didn't notice anything about the monitor in the Media Center PC spec, but I'll bet most of these systems have standard 15 or 17" monitors, and most people using them are watching TV from an office chair.
There's nothing wrong with that per se, but I would think a remote control would be next to useless -- and the first thing a buyer would lose.
What you really need to make this concept work is a true HDTV monitor. Unfortunately, at about $5,000-odd, that's not cheap, even compared to the price of this system.
mainly because I like the way its rendering engine looks. Seems to me Omni is throwing away their main competitive advantage by using Safari's.
I'm using Safari right now, and the only thing I don't love about it is that the text doesn't look quite as perfectly polished as Omni's.
I'll miss OmniWeb's nicer looking text if that's really the direction they'll take.
Safari is my favourite user interface right away. Even though I understand the old-style ones, I particularly like their slick error messages. They're written in high-quality, clear language that even a novice is going to have no trouble understanding. For a choice example, try refreshing a page with a submitted form on Safari, and then try doing it with any other browser.
The $1,199 base iMac is far from $1,600. I think that amount buys the 15" iMac with SuperDrive. If you don't need the SuperDrive, $1,199 will do you fine.
And if that's too much, there's always the eMac or iBook for $999.
Fairly reliable rumour has it that these prices will go down shortly, so be a little patient and you might get a deal.
The $1,600 dual processor PowerMac G4 is a pretty sweet deal, but you really don't need all that power to check out the Mac platform, especially with the sweet display of the iMac.
I have to agree that it's tough to defend dotmac. I'm not a subscriber, but I've heard enough bad things about it to be glad I'm not.
At the same time, it seems to me that the iApps are still superior to comparable competitive products. And if that's true, charging a reasonable upgrade fee doesn't seem so bad.
They have done this before, with a $50 charge to go from iMovie 1 to iMovie 2. Now it's $50 to go from iMovie 1 and iPhoto 1 to iMovie and iPhoto 2. I don't see that as such a bad deal.
If the iApps stink, then it's a bad deal no matter what. But if you like them better than their competition, I see no reason for this massive anger and pain.
The economics of the computer industry are changing. In the good old days, profits were so thick you could give away a lot of stuff without much sacrifice. Now, margins are narrowing and costs are climbing.
I just bought a PowerBook G4/1ghz with SuperDrive, and you'd have to pry it out of my cold dead fingers to make me convert to Wintel. It's so much better an experience than Wintel (which I have to use at my work) that it's not even funny.
As it happens, Irix 6.5 is the current version of Irix. There's not much you can do on a new Irix system that you can't do on an Indigo2, although of course the Indigo2 will be significantly slower.
And I did say "But that's just me", an indication that this was not a precise fit for his problem, but something worth considering. And I stand by my answer.
The fact that the license doesn't let you use it for commercial software.
That seemed clear enough to me.
I'd probably just tell him to buy the novel hardware. I bought a very nice Indigo2 for $400-odd a few months back, and it's a cooler experience to have the real equipment someplace.
Marklin happens to be the ideal company to make something like this because they have a digital train control system where the track voltage is fixed and train throttles are controlled through command signals coming from the digital controller. So you can simply run the power off the track.
They have a beautifully made version of this that I believe costs a mere $1,400-odd. Unfortunately, I don't think it's available in the US; I think the technology is PAL, not NTSC.
I have a Marklin Digital HO setup, and it's both very cool and back-breakingly expensive.
Alexander is a great writer. There is no question about this in my mind, and in fact I am looking forward to his new book which should be out in a few months.
His general idea is that the house should have some of YOU in it, it should reflect the personality of its owner. Not its designer, but the poor sap who has to live in the thing.
He has a lot of ideas that don't seem practical today. For instance, he says that we should have small, independent businesses instead of huge, big-box style stores. There's no question that he has a point; you'll have a much warmer and more personal world that way. At the same time, you won't be able to choose between 12 different brands of PCMCIA Ethernet cards; you might even have to order one instead of grabbing it off the shelf at Fry's. It seems to me that the US has unquestionably gone down on the side of the Fry's and the Wal-Mart, because people may protest them, but they'll wind up being customers anyway.
There's no question in my mind that the world has turned colder and more sterile than it used to be, and yet the warmer world of yesteryear had its own problems. I think his books are valuable as ideas for shaping a different type of future. The main problem is that they imply a confusing mix of freedom to design as you wish, and centralized control to make sure you don't design something that's out of scale, such as a business with more than 10 employees. Since large enterprises seem to be essential for our society, it seems that his views are backward-looking wistful thinking.
But they have inspired some other interesting books, such as 'The Not So Big House' series. I think Alexander has been very influential in the micro way (individual houses), but certainly he has not had the opportunity to reshape society in his image.
Whether that's a relief or a real shame I will leave as an exercise for the reader.
USA Today was never bought out. It was a crusade by the then-head of Gannett, and has always been owned by them. Not that this is frightfully relevent for what you're saying, but I don't like to see incorrect information spread.
The other responder to your message is correct - people like living in San Francisco, despite the costs. More to the point, the VCs who financed them were in San Francisco, and they no doubt wanted to keep tabs on their investment.
Finally, the rich liberals who were willing to bail them out all came from San Fransicso.
I don't think they could have raised nearly as much money anywhere else.
it is news, and I wouldn't want to censor the news, either.
A better idea would be to mirror the site whenever a non-commercial page came up. Perhaps permission could be asked for this (which in this case I'm sure would have been quickly granted).
Internet accounts 12,500 (0.052% of the population)
If you consider that Internet access is obviously determined by political reliability, not technical prowness, how many Iraqi geeks with Internet access do you think exist?
I know Iraq could have a special elite Geek Squad or something, but normally you need a pretty good pool of applicants to recruit from. In the case of Iraq, I don't see it as fertile ground for geeks to get needed experience, however motivated they may be to help Saddam.
Also, we know cracking is all about trial and error, and Iraqi geeks are bound to be intimidated by Saddam's "succeed or we kill you" policy. That doesn't exactly encourage the hacker ethic, does it?
So no, I'm afraid Iraqi mastery of this subject is a pipe dream. I could believe Al Queda operatives could conduct cyberwar, because most of them are in fairly free countries and could take advantage of people's grievances and resentments to learn.
This is odd, since they only seem to have gotten to the US West Coast a few months ago. I don't remember seeing VoiceStream; T-Mobile booths started popping up in the malls and that was the first I'd heard of the company. I think they replaced some multi-carrier companies in the mall, so I assumed they were a fairly new company going through a huge expansion.
I bought the T-Mobile SideKick about a month ago. Kudos to Danger; they really did get it right. I would like a colour screen, of course, and I'd like the option to use a larger font, but other than that, the device is darn near perfect for its intended use.
No, the problem is T-Mobile.
Voice service here in LA seems very similar to other cellular providers - not very good, but it works most of the time. I can't say I think it's good, but I don't think it's any worse than the bad cellular service provided by other companies.
My real problem is with availability of the data service. When it works, it's really cool to have lunch while exploring the Internet using the cellphone. When I first got the device, it was a real gas surfing the web in California Pizza Kitchen, the only restaurant in which it would reliably work. So I wound up spending $21 for my lunches instead of $8-11. Oops. But then my illusions were shattered when it stopped working even there!
So now I'm not sure what to do. I sold the service to myself by saying "Well, I won't have to buy books to read during lunch, so I will actually save money with the wireless Internet!" Now, I'm not so sure about that.
The problem is that I really like the device - a lot - especially when it works. So I'll keep it, and hope things get better over the next few months.
At present, though, the data service is so spotty that I'd claim T-Mobile is in breach of contract because I can't get the service I've been promised. Perhaps someone should start a class-action suit to get people out of unfair cellphone contracts when they are unable to get the service to work consistently. That might be the one time I'd be on the side of the lawyers; they would earn their (huge) fees fair and square by getting the little guy out of these contracts with the unfair termination clauses.
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Thanks for the reply. This is disheartening to say the least.
If there are any Cingular Treo users out there, I hope they'll respond in this thread with their comments on data service.
It would be a great pity if Danger did badly, not because of their device, but because their service didn't work right thanks to cheap cellular providers and their historically bad service.
D
About 1/3 of those items are to the direct benefit of the artists. The guitars, the sound equipment, the blow-out party, the catering, the tour bus and the limos are all effectively income for the artists.
This trickery generally benefits the artists because they're not taxed on the benefits it provides them with, unlike the 7/11 clerk, who has to pay income and Social InSecurity taxes on every dime of his income.
I'll bet the 7/11 clerk would change places with them in a heartbeat.
I read a very interesting biography of Richard Branson, who founded the Virgin record label among other enterprises. He was taught a hard lesson in economics from the other side of the fence. He signed some number of bands. One was a huge hit, the rest did poorly. Overall, he made very little even though his business was glamourous and he had a lot of fun with it.
In other words, just because the gross is pretty doesn't mean the net isn't ugly.
In this case, consider that the semi-hit analyzed here has to support a number of flops, that don't come even close to recouping their costs. Overall, then, the label probably does a lot worse than you think, precisely because this guy selected a middle of the road example.
Anyone know what the actual profits of the record labels look like?
D
I don't think there's any significant doubt that the Danger Sidekick is the superior product, as a product, but when I bought mine it had horrible coverage problems, and they just kept getting worse.
When I first bought it, I could have lunch at California Pizza Kitchen and check the Internet while eating. When I last tried it, before giving up in frustration, I could not; there was no data service at all.
Now it has a problem with its card, so I have no recent data. I'm going to take it to a T-Mobile station pretty soon and see what's up with that, but until then I can only recommend the unit if you get decent coverage in your area.
In the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles, coverage is lousy and - as I said - has gotten worse over the last few months.
I met a Sidekick user, and he said that the external antenna really helped. This is a piece of copper that mounts directly under the SideKick, leaving the form factor unchanged.
The bottom line is that the design of this device was superb, but ask other people who live in your area, and the other areas you plan to use the device, about coverage before you plunk down your $250-odd.
Sorry to be so discouraging, because based on the other comments here I'd rate it significantly superior to the Treo. The keyboard works great, and although it's a bit small and the type is a bit tiny, it's clear, crisp and readable.
D
The owner of my company read the book 'The Six Sigma Way' and got very excited about it. He asked me to read it, and he asked the manufacturing guy to read it. Whenever we would have a problem, he would say stuff like "That's not Six Sigma" in email.
I read about half of the book. It seemed to be a bunch of billions of generalities, complete with meaningless charts and graphs, and I am not actually sure what implementing it would do in a concrete sense.
The basic idea of doing a ground-up analysis of your business to determine what needs to be done to make things more reliable is, in my opinion, something every business should do periodically. However, I don't think giving it a trendy name and insisting on hiring expensive consultants is going to help quality as much as just, well, periodically scrutinizing your own processes and looking for ways to improve quality.
One of the key things the book said is that if you don't have buy-in from management and employees, Six Sigma is useless. So if nobody in your company wants to drink the Kool-Aid, it's pretty wortheless. But if people are enthusiastic about improving the way their company works, I'm not sure if the Six Sigma framework says that much that common sense doesn't.
Hope this helps; I welcome dissent from the better informed.
D
But who's Luca Scheuring? (See "Luca scheuring airlines" on the window shade).
D
I have to say that sounds a bit high. I'd be delighted to pay $10, willing to pay $20, but $30 seems like it's overreaching just a tad - especially if I don't have a direct flight and would have to pay $30/leg! Yikes!
D
When I bought my S900 photo printer, I was quite impressed to note that it came with all six (!) full ink cartridges. No cheesy half-full cartridges for Canon.
Of course mainstream printers are now so cheap that they really have to rely on the cartridges for most of their revenue. This is probably why this issue is rearing its ugly head now.
D
If my memory serves, Chimera's rendering deficiencies are very similar in appearance to Safari's.
Only OmniWeb does a perfect job at it, so I will be very sorry to see the original OW codebase go. On the other hand, they seem to have hit some kind of brick wall with the project - there haven't been improvements in some time. Hopefully this will help kickstart their efforts.
Thanks for reproducing the error message for me. It reminds me of why I really love Apple. Steve Jobs may be a jerk sometimes (as is Bill Gates), but he sure does deliver the goods (unlike Bill).
D
While it's true that they have a remote, I'm not sure how useful it would be with the typical monitor I see attached to a PC.
And the trend is undeniably towards more immersive viewing experiences (i.e. 60 inch plasma screens, etc).
I didn't notice anything about the monitor in the Media Center PC spec, but I'll bet most of these systems have standard 15 or 17" monitors, and most people using them are watching TV from an office chair.
There's nothing wrong with that per se, but I would think a remote control would be next to useless -- and the first thing a buyer would lose.
What you really need to make this concept work is a true HDTV monitor. Unfortunately, at about $5,000-odd, that's not cheap, even compared to the price of this system.
D
mainly because I like the way its rendering engine looks. Seems to me Omni is throwing away their main competitive advantage by using Safari's.
I'm using Safari right now, and the only thing I don't love about it is that the text doesn't look quite as perfectly polished as Omni's.
I'll miss OmniWeb's nicer looking text if that's really the direction they'll take.
Safari is my favourite user interface right away. Even though I understand the old-style ones, I particularly like their slick error messages. They're written in high-quality, clear language that even a novice is going to have no trouble understanding. For a choice example, try refreshing a page with a submitted form on Safari, and then try doing it with any other browser.
D
The $1,199 base iMac is far from $1,600. I think that amount buys the 15" iMac with SuperDrive. If you don't need the SuperDrive, $1,199 will do you fine.
And if that's too much, there's always the eMac or iBook for $999.
Fairly reliable rumour has it that these prices will go down shortly, so be a little patient and you might get a deal.
The $1,600 dual processor PowerMac G4 is a pretty sweet deal, but you really don't need all that power to check out the Mac platform, especially with the sweet display of the iMac.
D
I have to agree that it's tough to defend dotmac. I'm not a subscriber, but I've heard enough bad things about it to be glad I'm not.
At the same time, it seems to me that the iApps are still superior to comparable competitive products. And if that's true, charging a reasonable upgrade fee doesn't seem so bad.
They have done this before, with a $50 charge to go from iMovie 1 to iMovie 2. Now it's $50 to go from iMovie 1 and iPhoto 1 to iMovie and iPhoto 2. I don't see that as such a bad deal.
If the iApps stink, then it's a bad deal no matter what. But if you like them better than their competition, I see no reason for this massive anger and pain.
The economics of the computer industry are changing. In the good old days, profits were so thick you could give away a lot of stuff without much sacrifice. Now, margins are narrowing and costs are climbing.
I just bought a PowerBook G4/1ghz with SuperDrive, and you'd have to pry it out of my cold dead fingers to make me convert to Wintel. It's so much better an experience than Wintel (which I have to use at my work) that it's not even funny.
D
As it happens, Irix 6.5 is the current version of Irix. There's not much you can do on a new Irix system that you can't do on an Indigo2, although of course the Indigo2 will be significantly slower.
And I did say "But that's just me", an indication that this was not a precise fit for his problem, but something worth considering. And I stand by my answer.
D
The fact that the license doesn't let you use it for commercial software.
That seemed clear enough to me.
I'd probably just tell him to buy the novel hardware. I bought a very nice Indigo2 for $400-odd a few months back, and it's a cooler experience to have the real equipment someplace.
But that's only me.
D
Marklin happens to be the ideal company to make something like this because they have a digital train control system where the track voltage is fixed and train throttles are controlled through command signals coming from the digital controller. So you can simply run the power off the track.
They have a beautifully made version of this that I believe costs a mere $1,400-odd. Unfortunately, I don't think it's available in the US; I think the technology is PAL, not NTSC.
I have a Marklin Digital HO setup, and it's both very cool and back-breakingly expensive.
D
Alexander is a great writer. There is no question about this in my mind, and in fact I am looking forward to his new book which should be out in a few months.
His general idea is that the house should have some of YOU in it, it should reflect the personality of its owner. Not its designer, but the poor sap who has to live in the thing.
He has a lot of ideas that don't seem practical today. For instance, he says that we should have small, independent businesses instead of huge, big-box style stores. There's no question that he has a point; you'll have a much warmer and more personal world that way. At the same time, you won't be able to choose between 12 different brands of PCMCIA Ethernet cards; you might even have to order one instead of grabbing it off the shelf at Fry's. It seems to me that the US has unquestionably gone down on the side of the Fry's and the Wal-Mart, because people may protest them, but they'll wind up being customers anyway.
There's no question in my mind that the world has turned colder and more sterile than it used to be, and yet the warmer world of yesteryear had its own problems. I think his books are valuable as ideas for shaping a different type of future. The main problem is that they imply a confusing mix of freedom to design as you wish, and centralized control to make sure you don't design something that's out of scale, such as a business with more than 10 employees. Since large enterprises seem to be essential for our society, it seems that his views are backward-looking wistful thinking.
But they have inspired some other interesting books, such as 'The Not So Big House' series. I think Alexander has been very influential in the micro way (individual houses), but certainly he has not had the opportunity to reshape society in his image.
Whether that's a relief or a real shame I will leave as an exercise for the reader.
D
I'm not planning to play the game because any violent games, whether anonymous or not, are simply not my cup of tea.
However, there are enough people who hate Bill's products that I think he's wound up damaging more people's lives than he's uplifted.
D
USA Today was never bought out. It was a crusade by the then-head of Gannett, and has always been owned by them. Not that this is frightfully relevent for what you're saying, but I don't like to see incorrect information spread.
The other responder to your message is correct - people like living in San Francisco, despite the costs. More to the point, the VCs who financed them were in San Francisco, and they no doubt wanted to keep tabs on their investment.
Finally, the rich liberals who were willing to bail them out all came from San Fransicso.
I don't think they could have raised nearly as much money anywhere else.
D
it is news, and I wouldn't want to censor the news, either.
A better idea would be to mirror the site whenever a non-commercial page came up. Perhaps permission could be asked for this (which in this case I'm sure would have been quickly granted).
D
According to The CIA's World Factbook:
- Population 24 million
- Phone lines 675,000 (2.8% of the population)
- Internet accounts 12,500 (0.052% of the population)
If you consider that Internet access is obviously determined by political reliability, not technical prowness, how many Iraqi geeks with Internet access do you think exist?I know Iraq could have a special elite Geek Squad or something, but normally you need a pretty good pool of applicants to recruit from. In the case of Iraq, I don't see it as fertile ground for geeks to get needed experience, however motivated they may be to help Saddam.
Also, we know cracking is all about trial and error, and Iraqi geeks are bound to be intimidated by Saddam's "succeed or we kill you" policy. That doesn't exactly encourage the hacker ethic, does it?
So no, I'm afraid Iraqi mastery of this subject is a pipe dream. I could believe Al Queda operatives could conduct cyberwar, because most of them are in fairly free countries and could take advantage of people's grievances and resentments to learn.
But not Iraq. Forget Iraq.
D
The fee is generally paid by the number of times the ad is aired. It's very rarely a flat fee.
So it's likely that she didn't know what the total would be. The iPod was probably a signing bonus.
D
Note the maximum 5 gallon fuel capacity, which severely limits its range, whether you're fat or not.
...
Seems to me that the hour maximum flight time (even with a 190lb person) really limits its usefulness.
Although I suppose it would be nice motivation to lose weight
D
I think that for a long time he flew coach.
It's only in the last few years that he finally bit the bullet and got a private jet.
So my guess is that he didn't think much of some of the changes, and was probably forced into them strictly for reasons of privacy.
D
This is odd, since they only seem to have gotten to the US West Coast a few months ago. I don't remember seeing VoiceStream; T-Mobile booths started popping up in the malls and that was the first I'd heard of the company. I think they replaced some multi-carrier companies in the mall, so I assumed they were a fairly new company going through a huge expansion.
I bought the T-Mobile SideKick about a month ago. Kudos to Danger; they really did get it right. I would like a colour screen, of course, and I'd like the option to use a larger font, but other than that, the device is darn near perfect for its intended use.
No, the problem is T-Mobile.
Voice service here in LA seems very similar to other cellular providers - not very good, but it works most of the time. I can't say I think it's good, but I don't think it's any worse than the bad cellular service provided by other companies.
My real problem is with availability of the data service. When it works, it's really cool to have lunch while exploring the Internet using the cellphone. When I first got the device, it was a real gas surfing the web in California Pizza Kitchen, the only restaurant in which it would reliably work. So I wound up spending $21 for my lunches instead of $8-11. Oops. But then my illusions were shattered when it stopped working even there!
So now I'm not sure what to do. I sold the service to myself by saying "Well, I won't have to buy books to read during lunch, so I will actually save money with the wireless Internet!" Now, I'm not so sure about that.
The problem is that I really like the device - a lot - especially when it works. So I'll keep it, and hope things get better over the next few months.
At present, though, the data service is so spotty that I'd claim T-Mobile is in breach of contract because I can't get the service I've been promised. Perhaps someone should start a class-action suit to get people out of unfair cellphone contracts when they are unable to get the service to work consistently. That might be the one time I'd be on the side of the lawyers; they would earn their (huge) fees fair and square by getting the little guy out of these contracts with the unfair termination clauses.
D
Their advertising is pretty good.
I often think they should have their ad agency manage their network instead of whoever's actually doing it.
Sprint PCS was my first cellphone, and gave me absolutely abysmal service. No question.
D