I recently took a trip back to the US and figured I’d stop in at an Apple store to play with the iPhone. I liked it - just about loved it, until I had problems with their sales associates.
On my first attempt, I sat and waited for help for 15 minutes. The whole time, I watched the Apple reps talk to the teens that where all over the store. They explained facts that I barely cared about to 16 year old girls who the geeks where obviously interested in.
On my second attempt (this was a Mall - on the way back to the car), I managed to snag a rep in 3 minutes (the girl chatting guy). He was pretty upset at my three questions.
1 - I didn’t know that the iPhone was a quad band phone - thats correct, right? The response was: “…yes…” in a very monotone fashion. I didn’t care much because I liked what I saw. My next question was a severe shot in the dark (very severe), but I had to take the chance. I was willing to drop whatever cash it took if I could have an iPhone. My question: I live overseas due to the military - is there anyway that I would be able to get around the AT&T contract?” and his response was even better than the first one, a very rehearsed “AT&T is the only carrier that the Apple iPhone uses” and he was even more annoyed. My last question apparently hit the annoyance button head on: “Do you know who the provider for the iPhone is overseas?” (I’ll admit at this point that I had been just about as close to off-grid as can be during my vacation - I hadn’t even had time to check online for this answer) He looked at me, gave me a look and repeated his second response word for word in a very pissed off tone. At that, I turned and walked out, finally annoyed at the guy that had just spent a half hour chatting to some teenager about the pros and cons of Apple products in school, at home and how his Apple discount related to her phone number…
Oddly, during the writing of this, I found out that there is a pretty hefty rumor(?) going around about the whole “Use requires 2 year…” being missing from the commercials you all see in the US. I didn’t buy an Apple laptop because they wouldn’t ship overseas to APO (Soldiers and their families) and because I’m a .Net developer in a full Windows environment. Don’t are - I’m done with Apple for at least the next few years. Maybe by the time I’m back to the US I’ll take a look at them again - we’ll see.
At this point, it looks like the OpenMoko is my new phone. I’ve been eying it for over a month now and I think that it’s my best option. It allows me to do what I want, with my own carrier, with more features than most phones and much more expandability than any other phone on the market. I’ll be reading over the website a little more and we’ll see if that’s my new phone - now, the developer edition or waiting till October? Hmm..
