iPhone Upgrade Saga With AT&T

My iPhone 4S arrived today and I knew I had my work cut out to swap it with my iPhone 4, add a line for my wife and port her number from Sprint. The process was supposed to be:

1. Activate iPhone 4S and make sure it can make a call.
2. Swap SIMs and restore my iPhone 4 onto the iPhone 4S.
3. Restore my wife's iPod onto the iPhone 4.
4. Call AT&T and combine the lines onto a FamilyTalk plan.
5. Call AT&T and have them port my wife's number onto the new line.

The first 3 steps were tedious, but I didn't run into any problems. Step 4 is where the problems arose. I called AT&T and told the rep what I wanted to do; the rep was thoroughly confused about what I wanted to do. Once she understood it, she didn't think it could be done and I finally offered to goto an AT&T store to get it done. The rep said that might be the best idea; of course, I wasn't about to leave the house because I got a rep that was clueless. Finally she got a supervisor to help her do what I wanted.

So after almost an hour, the rep managed to get most of it worked out, but had to pull my A-List feature off the account. The in-store rep who sold me the phone said that it is likely that I'd be able to keep the feature (no longer offered) if I was on a qualifying rate plan. It was good enough for now, so I asked the rep to transfer me to number porting and she almost couldn't figure out how to do that.

The last step I got a very knowledgable rep on the phone who was able to take care of the port without fumbling. I then asked her if there was a difference between the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S data plans; they were the same price and same amount of data. She didn't know, but understood that I swapped the phones and offered to transfer the IMEIs in the system so that the iPhone 4S was associated with my number. As she did this, the system rejected it, so she swapped the data plans. I'm not sure it made a difference, but if there is a different plan to get the top data speed the 4S can achieve, I wanted it. This call lasted a bit, but it took time to wait for the port to complete.

After something like 1.5 hours, I had a working iPhone 4S and my wife had an iPhone 4.

It is amazing how poorly trained some of the customer service reps are in the wireless industry. While it sounds simple to do customer care for a carrier, the number of combinations of plans, features, etc. make it very hard for a poorly trained rep to get anything done. Combine that with old features that the current system won't accept. Just about any time I've had to talk to customer care rep from Sprint or AT&T (the only 2 carriers I've had service with), it was a nightmare. My issues with Sprint were so bad that the only way I could get them resolved was to go through back channels and get a higher level service rep. Hopefully I won't have to call AT&T back any time soon.

To top this off, I spoke with an enterprise customer care representative since I have a corporate discount on my account. I can't imagine what the non-enterprise reps would have done.

(I did send email to the sales rep who sold me the phone to see if she could help me get the A-List feature back; she seemed far more knowledgable than the rep on the phone. For those that don't know, A-List lets you call certain numbers without racking up minutes; I use this for conference calls all the time.)

Ford Sync - Interesting Concept

I listen to the MacBreak Weekly podcast and they keep mentioning Ford Sync. As I'm not a fan of American cars (old biases die hard), I never thought I'd get a chance to try out Ford Sync. On our recent vacation, we rented a car which happened to be a brand new Ford Focus (it had 8 miles on it when we got it). Since I've never had good luck getting radio stations when renting cars, I made sure I brought cables to plug in my phone. I had a USB cable as well as a 3.5 mm patch cord. I was about to plug in the patch cord when I realized there was a USB plug in the center console. I plugged in my iPhone and the system immediately recognized it.

Pretty cool, I thought. My wife started playing with it and was able to browse all the music on my iPhone and we enjoyed music throughout the trip. In addition, all of the prompts for Navigon were played through the car stereo. I tried to use the voice recognition, but didn't spend much time with it. It seemed to work OK, but without knowing the vocabulary, navigating it was difficult.

I didn't try out making a phone call through it, nor did I try the navigation as I already had Navigon on my iPhone. I was pretty impressed with the technology and would love to see something like it in my next car; however, the chances of me buying a Ford are pretty slim. I do like a larger screen for navigating audio, like my wife has in her Honda CR-V and the navigation on the LCD is easy to use.

Review: Audio-Technica ANC23 Noise Canceling ear buds

For my birthday, my wife bought me a very nice pair of Senneiser noise canceling earbuds. They actually were the top of the line. A few months later, Newegg sent my wife email and left a message saying that the earbuds were recalled. They sent a postage paid return label, apologized, and gave us a $20 credit. I sent them back and started searching for a replacement. Looking for any active noise canceling earbuds was quite hard as there are very few; the price range was pretty huge, so I could get basically whatever I wanted. I searched and searched and ended up settling on the Audio-Technica ANC23. When I bought them, they were $75 and while that seems a bit steep, they were far less expensive than the Senneiser ones.

Normally when I work, I forget to turn on music and only sometimes wear headphones (it depends on if my son is running around making a lot of noise). So, I use the earbuds when I travel. I don't travel all that often, but this year, I've traveled 7 times (most of them after I bought the ear buds). Once I put the earbuds in my ears during a flight and turn them on, the airplane noise immediately is drowned out and the flight becomes a lot more comfortable. I've found that with the Comply tips that come with it, the earbuds are quite comfortable.

I always keep the earbuds in my bag and am not sure I would want to fly without them.

Pros

• Comfortable.
• Inexpensive (they're now down to less than $40.
• Good noise cancellation.
• Good pasive noise isolation.
• Compact.

Cons

• No microphone or volume buttons like the iPhone (it has a manual volume control).

Summary

My only real complaint for these earbuds is that I bought them for $75 less than 6 months ago and they're now down to $39 on Amazon. I found that these were almost as good as the $250 Senneiser earbuds my wife gave me. If you can wear earbuds (earbuds don't fit in some people's ears), these are a no brainer for anyone that occasionally travels or wants some quiet when working.

Review: APC Power Saving SurgeArrest

A few months ago when the local utility guilted me into conserving more energy, I bought an APC 4 Outlet Power-Saving Timer SurgeArrest and a APC 6 Outlet Power-Saving Timer SurgeArrest to shut off components of my media center at night. The surge protectors are your basic surge protectors, but have a built in timer that allows me to set times for the strip to turn on and turn off. I set up one timer to basically turn off from 11:30 pm to 5:30 am and the other to turn off from 10:30 pm to 6:30 am. Setup is extremely simple and I have already seen a reduction on my electricity bill. Some of the media center components sucked a bunch of juice and by turning things off for 1/3 of the day, it's no wonder I've already seen a slight reduction in my electricity!

There isn't a whole lot to say about the power strips. If you can arrange your components to turn off for long periods, they can pay for themselves pretty quickly and then some.

Pros

• Easy to setup.
• Pays for itself quickly.

Cons

• More expensive than regular surge protectors.
• Battery life for timer is unknown.
• Timer LCD is not easy to read.

Summary

If you're looking for a way to save some money and reduce electricity, the APC SurgeArrest devices are a great addition to any media center or computer workstation. Once you setup the timers, you can forget about them and start saving money. There is no downside to getting this surge protectors.