AT&T Wireless Store Recon
On June 28, 2008, pingdave posted the following report of his trip to the local AT&T Wireless Store:
I talked to my buddy Zeke, the former Windows mobile enthusiast AT&T store sales person. He said he gets asked about it a lot, and when I walked up he said “Hey, it’s Mr. iPhone. 8 AM, July 11th. I am guessing that is what you want to know.” and laughed before I said anything to him.(That is CST). He also laughed and said, “no we don’t have one to show you or have any in the back right now” when I asked him. He said it will be $199, and it will just be a $10 additional data charge on our family plan if I get one. Now I’ll be losing the SMS text messaging also. Something I never used anyway. I think it would be an additional charge for that. No biggie. I won’t pay for something I don’t use. He said they got a couple of iPhones in about 5 weeks ago, but sold them immediately and have basically been out for over a month.
He said his best guess for 3G here is 1 year at the soonest, 2 years at the latest. He said AT&T is really going all out on expanding and upgrading their network, but all the areas with heavier population density are naturally getting 3G before our area.
He was shocked when I told him what current used iPhones were selling for on Ebay. . he agreed he’d do the same thing I am doing, sell it and get the new one. He said he will likely try out the new iPhone and may get one himself. He has some kind blackberry I think now. He was told that the new iPhone gets better reception, both voice and data over the current one, even when only on the Edge data network. He was told this by someone up the ladder in management who knew something about the testing that had been done. They said it was because of the plastic back vs the metal one on the current iPhone, and he thought they had made some other improvements on the Antenna and maybe the software. His opinion is that I’ll see better data speeds even without 3g network here yet. He also said GPS location mapping should work fine on either 3G or Edge.
Said they had added a tower in this area, and are working on another one.
All sounded really good, and he was really stoked about having it as far as driving store sales. Remember, this is the guy who tried to talk kylobbyist into not waiting for the iPhone and told her windows mobile was better a little over a year ago. Big change for him.
techstock2000 @ June 28, 2008