Sipping the AT&T Haterade: Why the iPhone 3G May Not Win Fans

Yesterday, I tuned in to no fewer than three liveblogs for the announcement of the phone I've been waiting for: the 3G iPhone. Last year I even replaced my Motorola RAZR at the unsubsidized price just so I could get the iPhone 3G when they finally came out with one, so yesterday's announcement had me darn near hysteria.

Today, however, the dust has settled. And Apple and AT&T may just have conspired to lose themselves a customer who was willing to buy a $400 phone with a silly business model and a little too much greed. How does a company like Apple, with some of the most loyal users, manage to alienate so many of those users?

For starters, Apple is so beyond paranoid about their big announcements that they have failed to educate most of the customer service reps on activation policies and rate plans. Depending on which customer rep or spokesperson you get information from, the information changes, leaving users wondering what is going on. To prevent the number of phones being unlocked and used on other carriers, iPhone 3G buyers are required to go into a store to buy the phone so that the mandatory two-year contract with AT&T is activated at time of purchase. That demonstrates no trust. I'm already an AT&T customer. I already have a data plan. It's not like I'm suddenly going to jump ship to one of the other useless carriers in my area. Yet Apple and AT&T don't trust me enough to let me buy the phone and activate it from home, meaning I'm going to be dragging four children into a store to get the phone and activate it. And I'm warning you; I'll be sure they are hungry to make the experience as painful as possible. Customer loyalty is already waning.

Next up? A rate plan change. I use my cell a lot, but not nearly as much as I use the data plan. As someone noted, I appear to be online most of the time, but a lot of that is reading news and IMing and using Twitter from my cell phone. I rely on my phone to keep me connected when I can't use my laptop, which is why I was so intent on waiting for 3G. My husband rarely uses his as a phone. The result is that we don't use an awful lot of minutes, and have been able to exist on the Nation 550 Plan, with Rollover Minutes to spare. According to yet another nameless spokesperson, I'm going to have to upgrade to a minimum of the Nation 700 plan, which is also going up $10 a month. Say what? Add in the fact that I lose my Rollover Minutes when I change rate plans and AT&T wants me to pay them a LOT of money. If those 2800 Rollover Minutes I've accumulated (and which do get used some months) are worth the same $0.10 a minute that the new plan rate assumes, AT&T is charging me $280.00 for allowing me to get the Jesus Phone.

And that's not all, folks. The data plan is going up as well. I'm currently paying $19.99 a month for my unlimited data plan, which includes 200 SMS in that amount. The new data plan? $29.99, which is another $10 a month more. Is this how they are making up the subsidy? Because I'd MUCH rather pay the extra $200 on the front end, thank you very much.

All this for a phone that still doesn't have full Bluetooth capabilities. Or video. Or a better camera. And then Apple is going to want me to pay for some of those nifty new apps they'll be helping developers to sell, pocketing a neat 30%. I'm not feeling like much of a loyal customer right now, and I'm hoping that most of this is just a slew of miscommuncations due to under-educated "spokespeople." Because a Nokia N95 on T-Mobile is looking a little better. Especially since it comes in purple.