Three days into my trip, I called the international customer service number to check on how much of my data plan I had used. Not surprisingly, I was over the 20MB plan at 27MB in just a few days, so I asked to upgrade to the 50MB Data Global Plan for iPhone for $59.99 to avoid massive overage fees for the trip. Before I was off the call, the agent told me that they had ‘prorated’ my service based on the billing cycle and that I was only allocated 7MB for the billing cycle instead of the full 20MB I purchased. What?! I was on the hook for hundreds of dollars in data fees and the best option was to wait until I returned to the United States with the bill for that billing cycle in-hand. Total phone time: two hours.

I received the bill today – $837.20. The vast majority of that cost was for international data usage – surprise, surprise. I called AT&T and walked through the story again – I called the day before my trip, explained I would be traveling for seven days to the UK, and would cancel service upon my return. I have no idea why AT&T would prorate a service when I made it clear what the intended service period would be. In the end, AT&T waived all of my international data fees, but it was clear that this was one of those rare exceptions. Total phone time: one hour.

Four hours total on the phone with AT&T – setting up the service, checking, investigating, and finally arguing my case with AT&T ended up saving me hundreds of dollars.

So, here is my advice to you, international iPhone traveler:

* Disable international data roaming altogether (it’s a preference in the iPhone, Settings > General > Network > Data Roaming). It should be disabled, by default. Avoid the temptation. As a point of reference, a 20MB email attachment over EDGE or GPRS internationally costs $100 once you go past your 20MB or 50MB allotment. I am told that cost is substantially higher over 3G.

* Rely upon Wifi, instead of EDGE or 3G service. You’re going to save money even if you have to buy Wifi access on occasion to download your email. It’s a convenience to get email continuously, sure, but as I said already, avoid the temptation.

* If you absolutely must get the Data Global Plan for iPhone, make sure to get clarity from the sales rep about how proration is going to impact you. I was only given 7MB for my billing cycle even though I purchased 20MB! Call the free international AT&T customer service number (916.843.4685) regularly to get an international data usage amount and prepare to upgrade from 20MB to 50MB if needed. Understand that email attachments, which are out of your control, could easily eat up your allotment.

* AT&T does publish a useful iPhone Travel Tips guide, which I highly recommend before you proceed.

Good luck!

iPhoneDevCamp 2 is an upcoming not-for-profit gathering to develop applications for iPhone and iPod touch using both the native SDK and web standards. This is a follow-on event to the first iPhoneDevCamp, held in early July 2007. We are pleased that Adobe Systems has agreed to provide the venue again this year.

Attendees will include Cocoa Touch developers, web developers, UI designers, and testers, all working together over the weekend. Development projects will include both solo and team efforts. While some attendees will wish to work solo during the event, we encourage attendees to team up, based on expertise, to work in ad-hoc project development teams. All attendees should be prepared to work on a development project during the event.

Attendees will be able to:

* Create new applications for iPhone and iPod touch.
* Migrate Mac OS X applications to iPhone and iPod touch.
* Test and optimize applications for iPhone and iPod touch.

We have some exciting things in store this year – a few things we’re not quite ready to announce, but check back reguarly for updates on the event.

We are sensitive to the NDA that Apple has in place on the iPhone SDK. It is our hope that Apple will lift this NDA shortly after the public launch of the App Store. iPhoneDevCamp 2 will be held one month after the launch of the App Store. We have no intention of violating the terms that individual developers have in place with Apple on the iPhone SDK.

Confirmed sponsors so far include Adobe Systems, gogo apps, RadTech, Belkin, iLounge, Core Cases, Viewzi, ANSCA Mobile, The Apple Phone Show, and iWipes. We’re actively looking for additional sponsors to help make iPhoneDevCamp 2 a success. This is a not-for-profit event and 100% of sponsor dollars are used to pay for event costs.

The organizers of iPhone Dev Camp 2 include Raven Zachary, Dominic Sagolla, Christopher Allen, Chris Messina, Bart Decrem, whurley (William Hurley), and Blake Burris.

iPhoneDevCamp is not affiliated with Apple, Inc.

Los Angeles Times, “Apple to give outsiders access to its iPhone“

San Francisco Chronicle, “iPhone announcement Thursday“

Technology Review, “What to Expect from the Open iPhone“

PC World, “Apple’s iPhone SDK Strategy Both Promotes and Stifles Innovation“

ZDNet, “iPhone DevCamp’s Raven on iPhone SDK and what it means“

Telecoms.com, “Apple opens iPhone but keeps keys to kingdom“

Mac OS Ken Podcast, “Day 6 Interview” (Day 6 subscribers only)

Apple iPhone Developer Program

My colleague at The 451 Group, Tony Rizzo, covers mobile technology. With all due respect to Tony, I have to disagree with his comment to Red Herring on the lack of power management in the Apple iPhone.

From the Red Herring Article:

While many pundits give the iPhone design kudos, some believe the thing is a dog with fleas,” said analyst Tony Rizzo of The 451 Group. “It’s too big, has no power management, battery life will be terrible, the screen format is actually rather clumsy, and it is possible that Apple will find itself with a whole lot of iPhones it will need to discount to get rid of.”

No power management? Where did Tony get this idea?! Here are some data points from Apple regarding power management…

The proximity sensor detects when you lift iPhone to your ear and immediately turns off the display to save power and prevent inadvertent touches until iPhone is moved away.

and…

An ambient light sensor automatically adjusts the display’s brightness to the appropriate level for the current ambient light, thereby enhancing the user experience and saving power at the same time.

and two quotes directly from Steve Jobs during the iPhone introduction at MacWorld Expo in January…

“Five hours of battery life, 16 hours of audio playback.”

“Tremendous power management”

In late November 2006, I posted a blog entry entitled “The curse of the early adopter.” Unfortunately, this story did not end in November, as I had hoped. Since my posting, I’ve had two additional complete hard drive failures – one in my cursed MacBook Pro and a follow-up one in my replacement MacBook Pro that Apple Customer Relations was kind enough to send along. My latest hard drive failure over the weekend did not result in the pain of previous failures, as I became wise on backups. I lost perhaps two days of work, as I had not finished the transition to daily backups. But, this is nothing compared to the early January loss of 45+ days of work, during my grandmother’s funeral! I think losing data this many times has scared me into daily backups. I am impatiently waiting for Mozy to release the Mac client, which should be ‘any day now.’ Until then, it’s a script to a FireWire drive.

So, what is going on?! How does anyone have four complete hard drive failures on two separate computers in less than four months? Good question. I spent some time discussing this with an Apple Genius at the Portland Apple Store who knows of my plight. We have three theories…

1) Environmental: Some magnetic or other environmental exposure that is hazardous to hard drives. Unlikely, as my wife’s MacBook is just fine, and my co-worker has no problems at the office with his laptop or desktop. Those two locations account for the vast majority of my computer usage. This theory is the least likely of the three.

2) Heat Generation: A hard drive exposed to excessive, ongoing heat may fail. Two applications always generate excessive heat for me, causing the fan to turn on – Newsfire and World of Warcraft. To eliminate the heat issue, I have deleted both applications from my MacBook Pro. Newsfire is an RSS reader, and I migrated to Google Reader tonight for my daily RSS crawl. I don’t play World of Warcraft much at all anymore, so I can just use my iMac at the house when I have a scheduled game night.

3) Sleep Failures: When a computer is shutdown or in sleep mode, the hard drive heads should park to avoid damage during transport, and the computer should turn off to avoid generating heat. I carry my MacBook Pro around with me in a padded backpack. To avoid potential sleep problems, I will start powering off my computer during transport instead of relying on sleep mode to protect the drive.

Hopefully, the fourth failure will be the final one for many years to come. I am exhausted by this process, and the amount of time lost for both professional and personal pursuits is akin to having a major illness during the past few months. The number of hours lost on troubleshooting, backing up, reinstalling, configuring, mailing packages, visiting the Apple Store, making tech support phone calls, and everything else is in the hundreds of hours at this point.

I look forward to the day when these little mechanical spinning disks are replaced by flash memory and backups are as simple as browsing the Internet.

UPDATE 1 – 02/22/07: Have I found my explanation for burning through four drives in less than four months?! Take a look at the Mac Book Pro Hard Disk Failure post by Thingy-Ma-Jig and How to save your MacBook Pro hard drive post by Silver Mac. There are some times when I close my lid and then seconds later place it right into my backpack. Could this be killing my hard drives?

If you’re thinking about switching to Cingular before the iPhone is released in June – think again. What I discovered is that Cingular isn’t interested in your business…just yet. Read on (the short answer – wait until June).

I’m a long-time Apple user, since the Apple ][ in 1981, and I have tried a number of smartphones over the years from the Palm to the BlackBerry to Windows Mobile to the Sidekick. Nothing has really clicked with me, and I’ve always hoped that Apple would release its own smartphone. Many years of hope coupled with many years of frustration with existing phones meant that I was elated last week with the announcement of the Apple iPhone. I was down in San Francisco for business meetings, and made arrangements to be at the keynote this year. This was a great year to be at MacWorld (at least for the keynote).

After returning home from MacWorld a few days ago, I started planning a switch to Cingular. My rationale on moving to Cingular sooner than later was that the process of getting out of my T-Mobile contract might be more difficult in June when the majority of people were making the switch. By switching to Cingular now, I would be ready to go with the iPhone in advance of the public release, and possibly avoid any changes to my existing contract terms by T-Mobile, dealing with the loss of a large number of iPhone converts down the road.

The first step in switching was to call T-Mobile customer service. I explained that I intended to cancel my contract sometime before June and wanted to understand the various options to avoid paying an early termination free. With a family plan and three phone numbers with T-Mobile (self, spouse, and child), I was informed that I would need to pay $600 to terminate the three phone numbers ($200 per number), and pay the full balance of the two-year contract for each. If I were to walk away from T-Mobile right now, the amount due would be $2,800. Heh. Not an option. The T-Mobile customer service agent asked why I was interesting in canceling my account. I told her about my interest in the iPhone and she tried to convince me that the iPhone would work on the T-Mobile network. Nice try, but Apple intends to lock the iPhone using software to limit access to Cingular only. It’s not clear to me whether the agent was simply misinformed or if there was an internal stance from T-Mobile on customers calling about the iPhone.

I called back again and spoke to another T-Mobile agent, this time asking about how to transfer my contract. The second T-Mobile agent explained that I had three separate phone numbers, and even though all the phone numbers were part of a single family plan with one payment, I had to transfer all three phone numbers to get out of my contract. Not only that, contract transfers were not eligible for number portability, so I’d have to get new phone numbers with Cingular. What a pain.

I had my answer, even if I didn’t like it – it was time to promote my contracts on the Internet. I posted entries on the three main mobile phone switcher sites – Resellular, Cellswapper, and CelltradeUSA. I offered a $100 cash incentive for anyone taking over my three-number contract, and also posted to Craiglist, offering a T-Mobile BlackBerry Pearl as part of the deal. In less than a day, I had a good response from my Craigslist posting. I thought I might as well just switch to Cingular now, to free up the BlackBerry Pearl right away for a potential buyer. I’d buy my wife a replacement phone and move the unlocked phones for my son and myself to Cingular. In June, my wife and I would both purchase iPhones from the Apple Store. This sounded like the best plan under the circumstances.

This afternoon, I visited the Cingular retail store, but failed to notice the “authorized retailer” tag underneath the logo. A few minutes into an description of my switching plan, I could tell I had made a mistake. This wasn’t Cingular Corp I was speaking to, but a local merchant who had licensed the Cingular brand. Working through an authorized retailer on this switching plan might be a problem, and I left the store after thanking the employees for their time.

I then drove over to a Cingular corporate retail store. I explained the situation to an employee – I was a T-Mobile customer with a family plan and three phone numbers. I wanted to get a comparable plan, two SIM chips for my two existing, unlocked phones, and a new phone – totaling three phone numbers under one family plan bill. I wanted to do this in a way that would not limit my ability to purchase two iPhones in June under the two-year contract requirement. The employee explained to me that any plan I chose would require a one-year contract minimum, and that I might not be eligible for the iPhone at the $499/$599 price points in June due to the fact that I would only be under the first contract for five months. Providing me with the ‘discounted’ iPhone price in June would be at the discretion of the store manager, and the store was currently without a manager. She couldn’t help me. I was out of luck. I left the store frustrated with Cingular – I wanted to become a paying customer and the company was erecting barriers in front of me. I had no choice, though. The iPhone required service with Cingular.

I called the main Cingular phone number from the retail store’s parking lot. I explained the situation again to the sales agent on the phone. She suggested that I take this issue up with customer service instead. I was transferred, and after waiting on hold for a few minutes, the call was disconnected. I called back and explained the situation again to the customer service agent. She told me that I needed to speak with the ‘Review Team’ and supplied me a different 800 number. *sigh* I called the Review Team and explained my situation, yet again, to another employee of Cingular. The agent explained to me that yes, this way an issue that was at the discretion of the store manager. I explained to her that I did not plan to buy my iPhones directly form Cingular, but the online Apple Store. The Cingular store manager was unlikely to assist me if I wasn’t going to buy the phones from Cingular directly. I made it clear to the Review Team agent that what I was attempting to do was going to be a common request among a large number of future iPhone customers and asked her to escalate this issue to her managers for review.

What confuses me about this situation is that Cingular would penalize me for switching early. I tried to become a Cingular customer today, paying a total of at least $600 in monthly service fees between now and the release of the iPhone, and purchasing a new phone in the interim. Cingular really isn’t interested in having me as a customer right now. I have more buying power if I wait until June and become a new Cingular customer at that time, committing to a new, two-year contract. So now, my plans have changed. I will keep my T-Mobile accounts active until June and then look for someone to take them over when hundreds of thousands of other people are trying to do the same. Switching early isn’t going to happen, and I’ll be lucky to get out of my T-Mobile contract without problems.

UPDATE 01/14/07: I emailed Cingular CEO Stan Sigman yesterday and have already received two personal responses from representatives of “HQ – Office of the President” (over the weekend!). I have been informed that someone will be contacting me on Monday. I’m not asking for anything personally from Cingular – I just want them to make the process easier for iPhone fans that are willing to switch early.

UPDATE 01/14/07, #2: I submitted this blog entry to digg.com yesterday and am surprised to see that it (so far) has reached a digg level of 1,100+, is one of the top ten stories on digg, and has resulted in over 16,000 visitors to my blog. I am disappointed by some of the comments (see my digg comment log), especially those that are passing judgement on either my motivations or my intelligence. I posted this blog entry because I wanted to document the process of switching to Cingular. My hope was that others thinking about switching (prior to the release of the iPhone) would learn from my own experience and be better prepared. This will be a common issue for many future iPhone owners attempting to switch early. I want my experience with Cingular and Apple to be the best it can be. I will post any response I get from Cingular on Monday.

UPDATE 01/15/07: I just approved all of the comments on this post that were suck in the moderation queue. I had turned off auto-posting due to problems with SPAM awhile back. Similar to the comments on digg, the responses here range broadly from support to contempt.

UPDATE 01/16/07: I received a response from Cingular by email, but the information given to me (e.g. contract requirement, phone pricing, etc.) was mostly a rehash of the news from MacWorld last week. The Cingular rep gave me her phone number and I will plan to call on Wednesday for more information.

UPDATE 01/17/07: I wasn’t able to call the Cingular rep until late in the afternoon. I left her a voicemail and sent an email asking her to call me. Nothing new to report. All I am trying to accomplish at this point is to explain my experience over the weekend and see if Cingular might have some better path for customers that want to swtich early. I don’t expect much, and plan at this point to switch in June as a new customer.

UPDATE 01/18/07: The story is over. I received a call today from the Cingular customer representative that was assigned my case. She has read this blog entry and the advice given to me is to wait until June. The customer representative was polite, but it was clear that Cingular had a set of policies in place regarding a one-year contract minimum and didn’t see much value to the customer in creating any special offer for future iPhone owners wanting to switch early. Her point was that by waiting until June, iPhone customers will be eligible for the 30-day no-questions-asked money-back guarantee if the service or the phone is not to the customer’s liking. A fair point, if you buy the phone from Cingular. What if you buy from the Apple Store? I suspect that a considerable number of early adopters will opt to buy directly from Apple, and the return policy should, in all likelihood, resemble the return policy on an iPod or a Mac, which I believe is more restrictive. Anyway, we have an answer – Cingular doesn’t want iPhone ’switchers’ just yet, the title of this blog entry has been validated by Cingular directly. I’ll see you in June, AT&T Wireless Cingular AT&T.

UPDATE 01/20/07: One last note…I found someone to take over my son’s T-Mobile contract on Craigslist. I bought my son a cheap Cingular Go Phone with no contract yesterday. Reception at my home and work are both excellent on the Cingular network, which was one of my concerns. When June rolls around, I will now only have two contracts to worry about, instead of three. One of the two remaining contracts expires in November 2007, and other expires in June 2008. I found it easier to transfer a contract than expected, although the buyer and I were on the phone for over 30 minutes with T-Mobile dealing with various departments and all. If you are going to do this, make sure that you can be on the phone with the contract buyer during this proess, as there are issues for both parties to address.

I am composing this blog entry on the flight back to Portland from San Francisco. I was able to make it to MacWorld again this year, mostly due to the fact that the company I work for, The 451 Group, has an office in San Francisco, and this year, MacWorld corresponded with some work meetings. Shuttling between the office and MacWorld is convenient, with only three blocks between the two locations. Being a member of the press and analyst community means a free media pass, and while the majority of the content at MacWorld does not directly relate to open source, I do end up meeting with a number of vendors each year that have open source related products for the Mac.

When I worked for Excite in the late 90’s, I would time trips to the Redwood City to correspond with MacWorld. At that time, I was writing a regular column on Mac OS X for MacWEEK, and also qualified for a media pass. When I worked for La Quinta from 2001 to 2005, I couldn’t justify a trip out to San Francisco, and every year, the company’s CIO always happen to have his annual strategic planning meeting during the keynote. The agony! I’d do my best to avoid news tidbits and race home after work to watch the video stream of the keynote.

This year, I was able to catch the keynote live, within the reality distortion field in row 13. In front of the media section were rows and rows of VIPs – Apple employees, relatives, business partners, and personal friends of the company’s executive team. Al Gore, a member of the Apple Board of Directors was absent this year, as were a number of the celebrity regulars that trek up to San Francisco for the event from Los Angeles.

The big news this year was the iPhone, and there’s no value in me rehashing any of the details of the device. I will say that the iPhone is the type of device I have been wanting for over a decade, since my love of the now defunct Apple Newton. There was a time in the mid-1990s when I would carry an Apple Newton, a mobile phone, and a digital camera. Just a few months ago, I gave up my digital camera after buying a Sony Ericsson K790a camera phone. Three megapixel was good enough that I really didn’t need a carry around another device.

With the iPhone, I will be able to carry a single device – wow, how long have many of us hoped for this day to come?! One device. Just one. That’s it. One device for making phone calls, reading and sending emails, browsing the web, taking pictures, listening to music, watching TV shows and movies, updating a calendar, and even creating a grocery list. This is pretty damn impressive. There have been some devices already that have done all of these tasks, but they all lacked in fairly major ways. I’ve owned a Sidekick, I’ve owned a BlackBerry, and I’ve almost ended up both a Treo and a Windows Mobile device during the past few years.

On the MacWorld expo floor, there were two iPhones for viewing – both under glass and in some form of demo mode, showing off various functions of the device. The lucky few high-profile journalists were able to get some time with the device and the Apple executive team for Q&A. It’s times like these that I wish I had Walt Mossberg or David Pogue’s job.

I’m thrilled by the iPhone and I intend to buy two – one for my wife who’s been a happy BlackBerry Pearl customer for the past few months. I intend to buy the 8GB model for the extra $100, which will allow me to give up my 30GB video iPod. I won’t be able to store nearly the amount of music and videos I do today, but at 8GB, it’s just enough that I can customize the media content from time to time, opposed to making my iPod the storage device for it all.

The iPhone isn’t exactly perfect, however. There are some glaring omissions from the device that Apple introduced, and I hope Apple addresses as many of these omissions as it can before the public release in June. These won’t stop me from being an iPhone buyer, but I believe they will negatively impact the overall opportunity of the device to achieve the level of sales that Apple is anticipation (10M by 2008).

No developer access. While we do not have an official statement from Apple yet on the ability for developers to create applications (or at least widgets), two reputable sources are reporting that Apple executives confirmed that the device will not be open to third party developers. Update 01/12/07 – Steve Jobs has confirmed in several interviews that the iPhone will be a closed platform…at least for now.

Woah. Think about this for a moment. WTF, Apple?! You have this brilliant mobile platform that could truly revolutionize the mobile phone industry and you are going to block outside innovation from the device? What are you thinking?! What possible reasons do you have from making the iPhone a closed system? With the iPod, a closed system made sense – limited functionality, limited interface inputs – there wasn’t much opportunity here for an application market. The iPhone, on the other hand, is a ’smartphone’ with voice and touch screen inputs, and access to the Internet. It’s a perfect platform for cool applications that extend the functionality of the device into areas that Apple has no interest in doing as part of the standard feature set. A great example here is enterprise applications. Providing a developer toolkit could open up new markets for this device. I predict a huge uproar from the Mac development on this front and hope that the pressure is strong enough to impact Apple’s plans.

No instant messenger client. Apple borrowed the iChat interface for SMS messaging, but what about Internet-based instant messaging? One of the greatest features of the Sidekick is the support for instant messaging. Yet, this is lacking from the iPhone. I don’t understand this at all. Why would this functionality be absent from the iPhone? There are certainly no technical hurdles here, nor can I imagine that Cingular has any problem with this. Apple must think that either a) the market for mobile instant messaging is limited or b) that its inclusion would somehow be confused with SMS. Reality check here – SMS is good for some things, and horrible for others. I can’t have an active, back and forth conversation over SMS, and I can’t rely upon all of my colleagues to be comfortable using SMS throughout the work day to exchange information.

No removable battery. I’ve owned two iPods that had battery life problems after a year of use. How can we be sure here that Apple won’t have battery issues with the iPhone? Can you imagine the outrage of customers having a phone with a bad battery after the warranty period with only an expensive, in-store battery replacement? Plus, what about active users that want to carry a backup battery when they’re on the go? Nope. The five-hour talk time limit of the battery will require some active users to recharge the phone during the middle of the day, which may not always be possible. What if I want to watch a movie on a cross-country flight and then make some phone calls from the airport when I arrive? Nope. The battery will be dead before I arrive at my destination.

And then there are the annoyances – no Flash support for the web browser, no 3G, no support for iPod games, no purchasing of music or videos over the air, the strong likelihood that you will not be able to use music as a ringtone (thanks to Cingular), and the list goes on.

None of these annoyances, or the three main issues I listed above will dissuade me from purchasing the iPhone in June. While my blog entry has mostly focused on the shortcomings of the iPhone, I can’t wait to make my first call on my brand-new iPhone!