Jun

11

Apple and AT&T Need to Start Communicating – Fast!

June 11, 2008 |

image Today’s iPhone rumor of the day… hey… wait… I thought we were done with rumors after Monday’s keynote…

[Update: turns out this was a rumor indeed and completely false – however, the point here is that the missing communication from both companies is encouraging these negative rumors]

Well – today’s iPhone rumor, according to this post, is that you will have to return your 1st generation iPhone to upgrade to an iPhone 3G:

I just finished an e-mail exchange with an AT&T spokesperson who told me that if you upgrade from your current iPhone to iPhone 3G at an AT&T store, you need to turn in your first iPhone to qualify.

Currently, I have a message into Apple and haven’t heard back on what its in-store policies are. AT&T says they do not know what Apple’s policy is, so this post only regards AT&T stores for now.

If this is true, then this is crazy – people bought that first iPhone – without subsidy – so it’s theirs.

However, the real problem here is that both AT&T and Apple have been doing a horrible job at communicating over the last few days (they could learn from Twitter – and that tells you something). There were too many unanswered questions after the keynote and the answers to all of them so far have turned out to be rather disappointing: data plan costs more and doesn’t include SMS; activation process in-store only (huge hassle); upgrade policies are still unclear and all we know is based on rumors, leaks, and just wild guesses.

And judging from the post I quoted above, they aren’t even talking to each other.

The way both sides are going right now – they will lose a good number of loyal customers by playing very old school cell phone carrier games that we all hoped Apple was above.

Maybe hanging out with the dirty kids of the cell phone business has indeed infected Apple…


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