iPhone 4 is on Verizon!!!

[jeffsw6]

Re: iPhone 4 is on Verizon!!!

That said: Phone numbers and email addresses are pretty readily available from the Telcos and ISPs, so I don't generally feel that my cloud-synced contact list is much of a privacy threat.

In our industry, that may be a somewhat inaccurate assumption. For example, let's say Evan Kirkendall loses his cell phone. Some teenager picks it up, and inside it are the cell phone numbers of all the ATL guys. Teen shares their phone numbers on Facebook, and tomorrow, those guys all have to get new numbers because they are inundated with calls from teenage girls.



Was it Paris Hilton whose contact list was stolen, not from her phone, but by someone who hacked her cell phone carrier's backup service? I bet some of her close friends felt it necessary to change their phone numbers.



So contacts like these can be sensitive information that you want to keep private, if for no other reason than to prevent artists who we may work with from being hassled by well-meaning fans.

 

[Steve Milner]

Re: iPhone 4 is on Verizon!!!

That said: Phone numbers and email addresses are pretty readily available from the Telcos and ISPs, so I don't generally feel that my cloud-synced contact list is much of a privacy threat.

In our industry, that may be a somewhat inaccurate assumption. For example, let's say Evan Kirkendall loses his cell phone. Some teenager picks it up, and inside it are the cell phone numbers of all the ATL guys. Teen shares their phone numbers on Facebook, and tomorrow, those guys all have to get new numbers because they are inundated with calls from teenage girls.



Was it Paris Hilton whose contact list was stolen, not from her phone, but by someone who hacked her cell phone carrier's backup service? I bet some of her close friends felt it necessary to change their phone numbers.



So contacts like these can be sensitive information that you want to keep private, if for no other reason than to prevent artists who we may work with from being hassled by well-meaning fans.

If Evan is stupid enough to walk around with a cellphone with their numbers in it labeled, ATL GUYS .... or anything even remotely obvious... then he deserves whatever happens. On the other hand, if Evan lost his iPhone and had the mobile me package, all he needs to do is go to any device that can connect to the internet (another iPhone, a computer) and log into his account, there he can choose to lock the phone, locate the phone, display a message on the phone, or worst case scenario... WIPE THE PHONE CLEAN.



I consider cloud computing to be working in his favor in the scenario that you described.... but to each his own. I have personally used these features in situations where it matters... and I have yet to not have my phone back in my possession within the hour! To me...that's security.



Edit..missed a word...DOH!

 

[Rob Spence]

Re: iPhone 4 is on Verizon!!!

That said: Phone numbers and email addresses are pretty readily available from the Telcos and ISPs, so I don't generally feel that my cloud-synced contact list is much of a privacy threat.

In our industry, that may be a somewhat inaccurate assumption. For example, let's say Evan Kirkendall loses his cell phone. Some teenager picks it up, and inside it are the cell phone numbers of all the ATL guys. Teen shares their phone numbers on Facebook, and tomorrow, those guys all have to get new numbers because they are inundated with calls from teenage girls.



Was it Paris Hilton whose contact list was stolen, not from her phone, but by someone who hacked her cell phone carrier's backup service? I bet some of her close friends felt it necessary to change their phone numbers.



So contacts like these can be sensitive information that you want to keep private, if for no other reason than to prevent artists who we may work with from being hassled by well-meaning fans.

Ok, so this old guy's paranoid point of view is from being in the Internet Security business from the late 1970s through 2005 when I retired for health issues (stress... hauling heavy audio stuff is my physical fitness program keeping me alive).



I agree that the actual phone numbers and perhaps addresses are available from other means.



My concern is really about relationships. That is, the fact that I might have Evan and Bennett in my contacts could be correlated with other folk's contact lists to draw perhaps false conclusions to my detriment.



Who I have in my contacts is private even if their information is not.

 

[Steve Milner]

Re: iPhone 4 is on Verizon!!!

My concern is really about relationships. That is, the fact that I might have Evan and Bennett in my contacts could be correlated with other folk's contact lists to draw perhaps false conclusions to my detriment.



Who I have in my contacts is private even if their information is not.

So anytime you call Bennett, you walk down to the pay-phone on the corner, so that the phone records won't tie you two together?

Sounds suspect to me right off the bat!!

Seriously though, I do appreciate the desire for privacy and the reluctancy to offer any more info to anyone then is necessary... I just don't think that cloud computing is any different then all of the other productivity tools we use currently... if it is used in a smart and sensible way by YOU, then you control your exposure, by limiting what you place on the cloud.

Everyone's level of sensitivity will likely be different, but that is no reason for sweeping statements about Cloud providers just giving your data away carte-blanche.

 

[jeffsw6]

Re: iPhone 4 is on Verizon!!!

If Evan is stupid enough to walk around with a cellphone with their numbers in it labeled, ATL GUYS ....

I used to keep contacts in my phone using initials, not full names. Only problem was, I dealt with hundreds of people regularly enough to need their phone numbers in my cell phone. So I gave up on initials or nicknames. It was not working for me.



The feature you point out of Mobile Me, on the other hand, is something I was not aware of. It seems there are advantages to both ways of doing things. Maybe I will get that feature if I trade my BlackBerry in for an iPhone.

 

[Ned Ward]

Re: iPhone 4 is on Verizon!!!

Mobile me is also great way to share stuff with friends and family that's too big to email. We have public photo galleries, and password protected ones with our kids in them.



DropBox is another godsend when working across home Mac, Work mac, and iPhone, especially on the road.



FYI - if you have a mac, download Printopia to be able to print to pretty much any printer your mac sees from an iPhone. Worth the price!

 

[Steve Milner]

Re: iPhone 4 is on Verizon!!!

+1 Drop-box is a totally kick ass tool.... I had a band in from Ireland the other day that saw the LS9... asked if I could record the show to a usb stick and stick it in Drop-box for them.... flawless.



I could have done the same with mobile me... but all of the guys in the band had drop-box... so it was a great opportunity to try it out.

 

[Adam Whetham]

Re: iPhone 4 is on Verizon!!!

+1 Drop-box is a totally kick ass tool.... I had a band in from Ireland the other day that saw the LS9... asked if I could record the show to a usb stick and stick it in Drop-box for them.... flawless.



I could have done the same with mobile me... but all of the guys in the band had drop-box... so it was a great opportunity to try it out.

+1 Dropbox is amazing. I set up my mothers computer with it. shared a folder with myself. so if my mom ever can't figure out how to download something. I download it myself. put it in our shared folder and BAM right to her desktop also.

 

[Stuart Høgg]

Re: iPhone 4 is on Verizon!!!

Another vote for DropBox. We use it to store quotes we write for customers and this lets all of our staff view and edit them. It's been flawless so far.



A side note about contacts: I help organise a band, and at one time it was my landline number on the fliers that were handed our fairly liberally at gigs. It soon became clear that this wasn't a good idea. My wife was getting woken up by drunks calling the house and trying to request songs or date the better looking band members.

 

[Ned Ward]

Re: iPhone 4 is on Verizon!!!

not having voice and data multitasking (CDMA drawback)

=FAIL (certainly for me and others)



Why someone would buy a locked Verizon iPad (upcoming) is baffling as well, since with the current 3G iPad, you can use it with any service, even internationally. If you buy a Verizon iPad, you can use it anywhere they have Verizon.

 

[Mike Babcock]

Re: iPhone 4 is on Verizon!!!

If they offer better overseas plans than AT&T, you can count me in.

<snipped>



For now, if you want a ''global iPhone,'' stick to AT&T. In the future, I believe Verizon's network will become compatible with global phones.

I fail to recognize the ATT iPhone as a global phone. You can't claim something as a viable global option when everyone who has an iPhone puts it in airplane mode the second they get on a plane going out of country and off airplane mode the second they get back to the US. While it might work overseas, the overcharges one pays for using it is way over the top. I haven't seen the pricing plans for Verizon, but if they have something similar to the Blackberry global plans, it will be thousands of dollars cheaper per tour than using an ATT iPhone for business. I saw a phone bill for a singer's iPhone usage on a 2 week Euro tour where he called his GF every night for a little while...over $5000...no thanks. My Verizon BB phone bill which included a couple very short calls, a few hundred text messages to my GF back home, tons of BBMs, and emails advancing the next leg of the tour...$300 (normal is about $150 and the only roaming charges were for the phone calls and texts, everything else was on the global data plan). That is the difference between a global phone (Verizon BB) and a phone that works everywhere if you want to pay out of the nose (ATT iPhone).



On another note, does anyone else find it extremely rude to have someone tell you to hold on while they look something up when you're on the phone with them listening to a bunch of loud pops and bangs as the first person types crap on their phone? While the surf while you talk feature seems nice for the one who has it, I'd be happy if it went away, never to be heard of again!!!

 

[Ned Ward]

Re: iPhone 4 is on Verizon!!!

Mike - I do know that ATT has an international plan that can be activated for month to month or pro-rated for a part of a month. same issue when I went to London/Cannes for a week last year for business; called ahead and got the service and it was reasonable - under $60 for a week's worth of talking and data. The year previous, people came back with those similar thousand-dollar bills.



Touring undoubtably raises the data usage, but checking on international plans on whatever carrier you're on is always a good idea.

 

[jeffsw6]

Re: iPhone 4 is on Verizon!!!

I fail to recognize the ATT iPhone as a global phone. You can't claim something as a viable global option when everyone who has an iPhone puts it in airplane mode the second they get on a plane going out of country and off airplane mode the second they get back to the US. While it might work overseas, the overcharges one pays for using it is way over the top.

I bought an iPhone, and subscribed to AT&T, specifically because I was traveling to non-CDMA countries. The supposedly ''global'' Verizon phone I had at that time worked in some places, but not others. The iPhone did work everywhere, although I operated it in the ''international'' mode so it would not use up data.



I ended up hating the call quality. CDMA really sounds better than GSM, and IMO CDMA flat out sucks compared to legacy AMPS, which I used right up until the day they shut the towers off.



I also had the ''original'' iPhone, with the craptastic ring volume. The admittedly awesome web browser was not enough of a novelty for me to sacrifice the primary function of the phone. I hated the SMS messaging interface, too.



The combination of disappointing phone features (compared to the Treo 650 I had at the time) and GSM/AT&T suck led me to cancel my AT&T/iPhone. I had kept my Verizon phone and account active just in case, and I was glad I did.



In any case, there are no CDMA networks in most of the world, and a CDMA iPhone is not going to travel well. If the requirement is global iPhone, AT&T still has a lock on that market, at least as far as I am aware.

 

[Bennett Prescott]

Re: iPhone 4 is on Verizon!!!

Mike,



You've just got to be careful, I find a certain utility in having the same number reach me no matter where I am on the planet. If I need to have a long conversation I can tell them to use Skype once they've reached me. I'm not overseas for more than a week at a time, but I don't think I've ever added more than $100 to my bill.

 

[Adam Whetham]

Re: iPhone 4 is on Verizon!!!

Why someone would buy a locked Verizon iPad (upcoming) is baffling as well, since with the current 3G iPad, you can use it with any service, even internationally. If you buy a Verizon iPad, you can use it anywhere they have Verizon.

I made some Sweet MSPAINT pictures to prove you are WRONG

 

[Ryan Lantzy]

Re: iPhone 4 is on Verizon!!!

+1 Adam... I laughed out loud... Seriously.

 

[David Sturzenbecher]

Re: iPhone 4 is on Verizon!!!

My Touchpro 2 is awful. It is slow.





These days only Windows Mobile and Blackberry meet those needs.

I feel your pain of all problem issues that accompany the touchpro 2. I however I am stuck with it do to belonging to a Windows Mobile company. I supposed I can't complain as I don't pay the bill every month. Hopefully WinPhone7 will save me.

 

[Ned Ward]

Re: iPhone 4 is on Verizon!!!

ATT has focused their service where the population is in the US so that over 75% of the US population has 3G access and 96% are covered by the slower EDGE. In markets like where you pointed out, there ain't a lot of people, so looks like Verizon is the choice if you're in that neck of the woods that often.



On the current iPad, the only service you can't use is verizon (without their MiFi); anything else you can get your sim card in it (easy instructions online on how to cut it) so that it doesn't have to be ATT; there are other options. If you buy the Verizon iPad, you won't have options as there won't be a SIM slot since it will be CDMA. To me it seems limiting; to you it's a reason to finally get an iPhone/iPad.





network reach:

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/11/in-escalating-war-against-verizon-att-is-getting-tone-deaf/



speed comparison of networks (since neither iPhones or iPads are 4G-enabled (obviously to your point, if you don't get ATT service in your area, this isn't as relevant)

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/01/verizon-or-att-iphone/



[Edited for spelling, grammar and adding some relevant links]

 

[jeffsw6]

Re: iPhone 4 is on Verizon!!!

ATT has focused their service where the population is in the US so that over 75% of the US population has 3G access and 96% are covered by the slower EDGE. In markets like where you pointed out, there ain't a lot of people, so looks like Verizon is the choice if you're in that neck of the woods that often.

It may interest folks to learn that much of the reason for this has to do with technology choice.



CDMA cells can be arbitrarily large, so deploying that technology on towers built for existing AMPS infrastructure, in low-density areas, did not require building new towers or buying more back-haul. RF SNR obviously still limit the range from phones to tower, but it is possible to have huge cells.



GSM cells, on the other hand, have a fixed size limit which is much smaller than what is really cost-effective for very rural areas. The limiting factor is not RF SNR but RF travel time from the mobile phone to the tower. To upgrade from AMPS in these areas, more towers had to be built, even though only a small fraction of the available capacity would be used within each very-low-density cell.



My understanding is that this problem is solved by somewhat-recent GSM equipment, which can allow a cell to operate in a lower density mode for phones that are too far away.



Eventually, AT&T may find it cost-effective to build into very rural areas. Even if they don't, it will become cheaper for rural wireless carriers to provide GSM service in those areas, increasing the likelihood that you will be able to roam onto another GSM network. Whether or not you want to pay the roaming fees, that's another question entirely!

 

[Ned Ward]

Re: iPhone 4 is on Verizon!!!

Jeff - thanks for that information - interesting stuff.



I've also read that in high congestion city areas where ATT's 3G isn't optimum, they're experimenting with supplementing it with WiFi, which would have a much bigger pipe; Times Square is one of the areas they're looking at. Again, this doesn't help in lower density rural areas, but I like the fact that they're looking at it from different ways to solve.



I'm still also interested to see how well someone else's network ''works'' when it gets an influx that big of data-hungry users. Hopefully Verizon users will fare better than ATT, but when you may get 15 million iphones activated per year (last year's ATT activation count) it does throw calculations out the window.