ATT doesn't believe their own hype. ATT has been bragging that it has had 1 million signups for information about the new Apple iPhone, as if that can be translated into a given number of potential sales. That must have been put out there for Wall Street, cause now they're cooking up plans to sell this Consumer item to businesses. Story here. Too bad the experts say thats a nonstarter.

Another ATT/Cingular screwup I signup in a Cingular store on April 13 for an upgrade from dsl pro to dsl elite, which would put me at a possible 6 mbps download speed, and it was scheduled for April 16. April 16 came and went, and no upgrade, and ATT has no record of a service order for such upgrade.

Swiss Cheese: Cingular's published maps of 3G (equivalent to cheapest dsl speeds if you're lucky), are to say the least overly optimistic, showing 100% coverage in areas with very discontinuous non contiguous coverage, for which the fine print has enough weasel words to cover them. See the Houston Map here, Fine print follows:

Map may include areas served by unaffiliated carriers, and may depict their licensed area rather than an approximation of their coverage. Actual coverage area may differ substantially from map graphics, and coverage may be affected by such things as terrain, weather, foliage, buildings and other construction, signal strength, customer equipment and other factors. Cingular does not guarantee coverage.

As I predicted: The price cutting on Vista has begun. Office Depot is offering a $40 rebate.
By fall you'll get a free Microsoft Money with your Vista, or better.

Followup: April 22 - The Office Depot rebate sale is over. But then Microsoft has its own sales now. See here.

AT&T problem with their Unity Plan sales on the Web reported here 3 weeks ago, continues.

The iPhone will appear on time ! - Apple has pushed back the scheduled debut of OS X 10.5 so it can bring the iPhone out on time. Story here.
Too bad Cingular's internal marketing folks will likely repeat the effort they made for the Motorola iTunes phone, which sold 1% of the volume of the Motorola's V3 phone. Old story here. It's worse than that now. Cingular gives away those iTunes phones for free now with new 2 year contract, as opposed to the $599.99 they want to get for the 8 Gig iPhone.
My prediction: Big initial sales spike, which will fall off VERY QUICKLY due to poor Cingular support of the phone.
For $399.99 (after rebate) one can now get a Cingular 8525 Windows Mobile phone, with slide out keyboard. Too bad it has the non-intuitive Windows Mobile 5.0 Operating System, which acts like it was designed by committee, having menus pop from different places for each different function.
Cingular is having a hard time enforcing its desire to charge $39.99/month for a data plan for that phone when its' web site only wants to sell a $19.99 plan. This phone however does have 3G capability, lacking in the iPhone and for $9.99 a month one can add a GPS program.

Just (hopefully) resolved more grief with Cingular. I think they've
merged too many companies too fast and don't have knowledgable folks in the right places in their Systems Department.

In January 2005 they were confident of merging the then Cingular Network with the ATT Wireless network by Dec 2006, but 4 months later, still a long way to go.

I also remember their outage last August which convinces me they route all their long distance calls through Bothell Washington for monitoring by the N.S.A.

A $300 Apple Computer ! - Just as TiVo units have been "hacked" (it's just a Linux box after all), the new Apple iTV has also now been hacked (It's just an Intel Mac after all).