My company’s iPhone app, Circa was just featured by Apple in the App Store as “Editors’ Choice.” This is such a very proud moment for our company considering we only launched one week ago! Huge thanks to Apple for featuring us!
You can download it for free on the iPhone and iPod Touch in the App Store!
Here’s a comparison chart I made to compare the different reasons to choose AT&T, Sprint, or Verizon as your carrier for the iPhone 5.
Source for dropped call data: http://cwres.451research.com/articles/2011/att-verizon-iphone4-20110405
I’d like to give an update to yesterday’s post on which network to choose when buying an iPhone 5. One of the things that I mentioned was how Verizon’s network will now support simultaneous voice & data. Turns out that’s not 100% true.
An Apple spokeswoman named Natalie Kerris said the following according to the New York Times:
“iPhone 5 supports simultaneous voice and data on GSM-based 3G and LTE networks. It is not yet possible to do simultaneous voice and data on networks that use CDMA for voice and LTE for data in a single radio design.”
Other Verizon 4G LTE devices are able to deal with this by adding a second antenna – one to handle the voice, and one to handle the data. Except it’s a bit more complicated with the iPhone 5 in that they too use two antennas, but they do so to simply improve the signal quality. Those two antennas use the same technology at the same time meaning it can’t split between LTE and CDMA bands.
The Verge was a quick to report that the iPhone 5 won’t support simultaneous voice and data on Verizon or Sprint based on the following quote from a Verizon spokesperson:
“The iPhone 5 was designed to allow customers to place a voice call on the Verizon Wireless network, while letting customers access the Internet over the WiFi.”
But it’s still not clear whether or not the iPhone 5 is compatible with a possible future implementation of voice calls.
One possibility is that the iPhone 5 will support Voice Over LTE in the future. Right now it doesn’t seem to be a capability but considering that the radio is the same, it’s possible that it could be implemented via a software update (this statement is based on my current knowledge of cellular radios). Verizon began testing VoLTE capabilities late last year and are reported to be pushing the technology in 2013.
When VoLTE becomes a capability of the Verizon network, theoretically the iPhone 5 will have the ability to support simultaneous voice & data while connected to an LTE network. However, Apple hasn’t made any statement about the above yet.
I, for one, am hopeful. I have a strong hatred for all that AT&T has done lately and am very keen on going to a different network. However, it appears that the decision may be a bit tougher, at least in the short-term.
UPDATE: I’ve put together a comparison chart highlighting the differences between carriers
I’ve been anxiously awaiting the launch of the next iPhone for some time now, but mostly so that I can leave my least favorite part of the iPhone 4S behind – AT&T.
Today’s announcement of the iPhone 5 was much anticipated and the design is exactly what the many rumors foretold. The device is longer – 4” vs. 3.5” – which gives it an aspect ratio of 16:9 and has a resolution of 1136x640. It’s got an integrated touch screen and display that allows it to be thinner and a higher quality display. It’s faster in a bunch of ways. No question it’s the best iPhone yet.
But how do you choose which carrier to go with? In the US we have three options – AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon. And whereas I don’t have a definite opinion on why you should choose any one of them I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that you shouldn’t go AT&T.
Let’s address the hardware first. While Apple didn’t expressly say it in their keynote, there will be three different iPhone 5’s – the devices will be compatible with US GSM, Europe GSM, or US CDMA. Translating very loosely that means AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, and other European carriers.
Digging in a little bit, I noticed that the cellular radios that each used were very different. Apple has these details on their iPhone 5 Tech Specs page but here’s the breakdown:
Notice that the LTE bands that the CDMA model and European GSM model support, specifically bands 1, 3, and 5. The CDMA model adds bands 13 and 25 to the mix – these are Verizon’s 700MHz band and Sprint’s 1900MHz bands. The AT&T GSM model uses bands 4 and 17 which are AT&T’s proprietary LTE bands, but the clear omission is the bands 1, 3, and 5.
Bands 4 and 17 which the AT&T version of the phone support gets you theoretical compatibility in the US, Canada, and Latin America. A significant difference.
Off the bat the AT&T iPhone has significantly less world support for being a “world phone.”
Apple points out on their own site what the specific carrier compatibility here which makes it seem like the European version of the iPhone 5 clearly outpaces the US counterparts. But the one thing to note about this is that the hardware itself supports the bands, so the reduction in compatibility has more to do with software than anything else at that point.
With iOS 6, Apple has added the capability for iPhones to do FaceTime over cellular connections. This is huge – especially for the hearing impaired population. As reported earlier AT&T is outright blocking FaceTime over cellular connections unless you pay them an arm and a leg for their newfangled “Shared Data” plans. First off this is ridiculous because there’s nothing technically different about the shared data plans that add compatibility. This is about AT&T being greedy and trying to take more money for the same functionality.
Verizon hasn’t provided an explicit answer to if they’re going to be supporting FaceTime over cellular but I’ll put my bet on the fact that they’ll allow it because they’ve historically been less stingy about what goes over their data pipes.
My biggest reason for never going to Verizon prior to the iPhone 5 is because the CDMA band that Verizon uses doesn’t support simultaneous voice & data. Essentially this means that I wouldn’t be able to surf the web, look at maps, etc. while I happen to be on a call. It’s also a big deal for people that work remotely sometimes and use data tethering. Because I use these features a lot it was always a deal-breaker.
Now with LTE, Verizon’s networks are able to support simultaneous voice & data – removing the previous restriction.
UPDATE: We’ve now got confirmation from Verizon that simultaneous voice & data is supported by Verizon on their LTE network.
@shellen I’m not a journalist, but I love awards! You can run voice/data at the same time on 4G devices, while in a 4G area! ^KAH
— VZW Support (@VZWSupport) September 12, 2012
UPDATE 2: Looks like this may not exactly be cut and dried. Here’s another blog post detailing why.
Verizon was much quicker to the LTE game than AT&T and it seems like AT&T has been struggling to keep up with Verizon’s breadth of coverage. Even some speed tests prove that Verizon’s network is quite a bit faster than AT&T’s.
While I can’t seem to find the original report that I’d seen on the additional amount of dollars going into the infrastructure – Verizon is outspending AT&T in this area as well which bodes well for customers that will be using their LTE network.
Beyond all of that I just have a personal hatred for AT&T. I’ve been a customer of theirs for 12 years now and in recent years I’ve been extremely disappointed in many things – price gouging, charging for features that shouldn’t be charged for (see FaceTime and tethering), and many more. Frankly I’m very excited to longer be a customer of theirs – no matter the price I’ll have to pay to terminate contract.
I’ll also start this as part of a discussion at Branch too. It’s embedded below as well.
I’ve written previously about some of Apple’s problems with iMessage, and thankfully those problems will be fixed in iOS 6. But there’s one glaring problem that I haven’t seen Apple address with iMessage: spam.
With many messaging mediums, there is always a high likelihood that spammers will figure out some way to get access and exploit it for nefarious purposes. Telephone, Email, Facebook, Twitter: they’ve all suffered from spammers. iMessage is already no stranger to spam, except this time it’s worse. With iMessage, there is currently no way to block people, or report them as spammers.
Leave it to Apple to make the most delightful holiday-themed ad this decade.
When iMessage was announced, I immediately thought it was brilliant. Not only for getting away from the ancient SMS protocol, but as a method of delivery of messages across multiple devices. Now that plenty of people had both an iPhone and an iPad, how great would it be if I could message friends, and receive messages on all of my devices? The intention of the feature was to be very fluid, and it does perform nicely whenever a message is sent from a phone to phone through phone numbers and gracefully degrades to SMS when no data is available.
Now that iMessage is finally in the wild and thanks to iOS 5 upgrades, available to most everyone with an iPhone I was able to test its functionality.
Man, was I disappointed in the user experience nightmare that followed.
First off, let’s cover how iMessages are sent and received. On the iPhone, you have the option of using your phone number (of course), but also the Apple ID (or iCloud ID) to which your device is registered. We’ll call that an iMessage address for simplicity’s sake. This allows iMessages to be received at either the phone number or iMessage address. When you send a message however, one of those two has to be the sender. This is known simply as the “Caller ID”.
The gist is that if I send a message from my phone (using my number as caller ID) to another iMessage device using a phone number as the recipient it starts to send as an iMessage over data. This is represented by the “send” button being blue, and the subsequent message background as blue too. However, if for some reason the message can’t be sent via data, a phone number-to-phone number message will fall back on SMS.
However, if I set my “caller ID” to my iMessage address and send a message to another phone number things start to get hairy. Let’s say I send a message as I just described - iMessage addy to phone number. The recipient now wants to send a reply to that message - it will be replying to the iMessage address, not the phone number. Now, in the event that my phone drops out of data coverage (which can be quite often while traveling), I won’t receive that message. Nor will it fall back on SMS.
The promise of iMessage - receiving messages across devices - doesn’t quite work as smoothly as one might think.
In the event that someone sends me an iMessage to my iPhone’s phone number it will not show up on my iPad. Furthermore, if I’m identifying my iPhone’s caller ID as my phone number, it will never get to my iPad. However, if I change that to the iMessage address, I can begin to receive messages across both devices. Though as I described above, if I use an iMessage address as my caller ID, in the event that data is not available, it won’t fall back to SMS.
I’ve made a chart to help explain this insanity:
Some might think these are edge cases to which I would answer “absolutely not”. Sending messages to phone numbers is what people are used to. Changing that behavior will probably prove quite difficult. Knowing that a message won’t arrive to me if I’m not on data and using my iMessage address as Caller ID disturbs me a bit.
I recently sent some iMessages back and forth with a friend of mine who was traveling. He happened to be on a plane with WiFi and was sending messages with his iPad. Robert was excited that he was able to send these messages but I was getting confused when my messages to him weren’t arriving. Later when I looked back, I realized I had four separate message groups from him: an iMessage address, second iMessage address, Google Voice SMS and iMessage (but sent from a phone number Caller ID).
To illustrate the confusion when he wasn’t receiving certain messages here’s our correspondence:
Clearly this makes for some incredibly confusing and disjointed conversations - not to mention the potential of not seeing messages at all.
Apple could have easily avoided these problems with a few very simple processes:
When authenticating an iMessage address (or multiple), the phone number from one (or more) iPhones get added into that account. This way, regardless of what device someone is using one could receive a message to a phone number via an iPad since it’s working through the iMessage protocol first, then SMS.
Allow me to send messages from the iPad using the Caller ID of my iPhone. This way, whenever someone receives the message, even from my iPad, it identifies as my phone number, not an iMessage address.
Fall back to SMS any time a message is not confirmed as received including when a message is sent to an iMessage address. Considering my first point, when confirming iMessage addresses and phone numbers together, this shouldn’t be hard.
Apple has a really interesting product with iMessage. The problems described above make for a very poor user experience currently, but the solutions are primarily technical and definitely not insurmountable.
There has been some rumor that Apple will begin to include iMessage in iChat or another messaging app on Mac OS X. It’s imperative that they clear up some of these issues before that happens or there will be a lot of confusion around where messages are delivered and why they’re not received when data’s not available.
I can only hope that Apple has already figured this much out and is working on a solution. But until that solution is shown, I’ll continue to be harping on why iMessage has such an incredibly poor user experience. Come on, Apple. You’re better than this!
Confession: I’m a horrible procrastinator.
In high school, I’d wait until literally the last 24-48 hours to write my papers, sometimes not even getting them done. I hated busy work. That trend continued through college, only that time the impact was far worse. Through my working career, I’ve noticed similar trends. I tended to wait until the last minute to get stuff done…and that’s IF I remembered when the last minute actually was.
I’ve tried for years to get this under control, but had never found the right solution. I’ve tried so many software tools (read: every one of them) that helped with organization and task completion. But the thing that I noticed was that most of these tools are horribly overcomplicated for most people and tend to make the problems even worse.
Let’s look at a couple of examples:
Here’s OmniFocus. It’s insanely complicated, does everything under the kitchen sink and has the looks of an overflowing desk. Though to be fair, I’m sure that it absolutely works for some people.
Here’s Things, the “easy” one of the bunch. Forget that they haven’t had over-the-air device syncing and still don’t, the “ease” still isn’t quite there to me. Here’s an example of them outlining simple “explanations” of the many features in a few marketing graphics.
After many years of trying to over optimize and conform to the software to get my shit done, I finally gave up and went for paper. Here was the result:
What did I find out? I actually got shit done. I didn’t need over the air syncing because, well, I just carried my notebook around and wrote it all done. I didn’t need tagging, or all the other stuff. It also felt incredibly satisfying to just cross stuff off when it was accomplished. This method has really worked for me for the last few months, up until my iPhone 4S.
Enter the iOS 5 Reminders App. It didn’t have tags. It didn’t have milestones, no concept of “areas of responsibility”, no starring, not much more than tasks and due dates. At first, I cringed, thinking “wow, how could they release software that had 10% the features of Things and OmniFocus and Wunderlist and blah blah. Then I realized what Apple did: they re-created my paper notebook in an app. No bullshit, just tasks.
But then they went a step further and added the next killer feature:
Siri
Now, no matter what I was doing - whether with my phone in and hand or over bluetooth while out and about, I could log the tasks that I needed to accomplish. Siri can set my reminder, as well as when I should be notified about it.
Then, while still adhering to simplicity, they made it more useful with the location-enabled reminders. I could say things like “Siri, remind me to take out the trash when I get home” and then, as soon as I drove up to my house, I would get notified to take the trash out. Seems simple, and maybe superfluous, but it’s powerful. Trust me.
It underscored to me what Apple’s motto has been for a long time and why I love them so much - get rid of the bullshit, simplify. I realized I didn’t need tags, or a lot of the other crap that the various To Do apps out there provided. I just needed something to get my work done and then get out of my way, not create more work for myself.
After a few months with the paper, and now the Reminders app, I can safely say that my life is far more organized and I’m feeling GREAT just checking stuff off the list. Removing features made the software far more usable. This is certainly the mantra of Apple, but also lots of other companies, like 37 Signals. I just wish more people adhered to that philosophy.
Hi, I'm Matt Galligan and I'm an entrepreneur living in San Francisco, CA. I'm currently the CEO & Co-founder of a company called Circa and have previously founded SimpleGeo and Socialthing. From time to time I'll blog about entrepreneurship, design, beer, photography, or just about anything else that amuses me.
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