T-Mobile dominates AT&T with new ad

T-Mobile (USA) just started airing a new ad on TV that directly attacks AT&T and Apple. Well, not so much Apple as AT&T’s crummy network restrictions. No one is a fan of the numerous handicaps AT&T places on iPhone customers… handicaps that don’t exist on other networks. Verizon and now T-Mobile have been very vocal with their competitive offerings. In fact, they like to take AT&T restrictions and advertise the snot out of them. If we liked Android, we wouldn’t be on AT&T… but there’s a reason we’re called CocoaTouchApps. T-Mobile’s new ad offers video calling on your data plan, not just a wifi network. It’s filmed in the typical “Apple” style and shows an iPhone being burdened by AT&T’s network. It’s a great ad and truly speaks to every frustrated AT&T customer out there. It just may get people to switch… probably not. Video after the break.

2011: the year of LTE

Several news sources have recently reported that AT&T has finally signed the papers authorizing Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson to get cracking on the infrastructure necessary for the transition to LTE (4G). That’s not very big news… but it could be tremendous for those of us who have had continuous issues with the AT&T network since the introduction of the iPhone. We’re still very adamant that any network would have terrible service with the massive amount of extra data iPhone users eat through on a daily basis, but 4G could be awesome. Don’t get too excited yet, the 4G rollout will take quite some time. They’ll be doing trial runs later this year, much like Sprint’s Chicago introduction: most people won’t have access to the 4G network during the trials and possibly far into 2011… and even that could be limited depending on your market. Cocoa Touch Apps is based near downtown Denver, so we’d expect to see the 4G network here sooner rather than later — especially since we have a major Alcatel-Lucent office 20 minutes from here. We also need to realize that the introduction of 4G doesn’t mean awesome service: 4G phones will theoretically have the ability to rollback [...]

Apple’s dictatorship has lasted long enough

By now, almost everyone is familiar with the fact that Apple “allows” us certain privileges with the iPhone OS. Be warned: this is an editorial piece that will most likely anger some and affirm others. Apple has become drunk with power… so drunk, in fact, that they honestly believe their users will put up with anything they do. What will it take for all of the Apple fanboys to get pissed off, or are we forever pathetically committed to a company that thinks it can control our every move? I’m surprised that we haven’t hit the point of revolution already. Take for example this past week’s removal of boob apps from the App Store: the totals for app removal are well over 5,000 at this point. Anything that references boobs, or has any sort of “sexual” content within the app has been removed from the store. Apple essentially decided to remove anything that could possibly turn us on. How can they really determine what turns us on? Even after this removal, we can still find applications with half naked men washing cars — this definitely doesn’t turn us on but could still be considered offensive material in some circles. They [...]

Apple ups the app size for 3G downloads

In a somewhat surprising move, Apple actually increased the 3G download size to 20MB from the previous 10MB. If you were out and about trying to download applications on your iPhone, you were only allowed to download it if the app size was 10MB or smaller. That size was increased to 20MB today. It appears that it’s not world-wide. Some countries are still reporting the 10MB cap, but thank goodness U.S. AT&T customers are good… otherwise we might see some serious uproar. This is great news for those of us who are away from Wi-Fi a lot. We tend to do most of our app updating and downloading while we’re waiting for stuff to happen. Waiting in line at the grocery store, check for app updates. Waiting for the guy at Starbucks to detail his no-whip venti double mocha triple espresso slim (whatever), browse the top downloads. This applies to iTunes content as well: download the latest music video while you’re in the bathroom at the movie theater. Apple is obviously working with wireless providers to make our experiences better. This also comes at an important time before the iPad launch. Keeping an iPhone application under 10MB isn’t necessarily an [...]

iPad Analysis Part Two: The Hardware

Welcome to the second part of our iPad analysis trilogy. Please make sure you have read the first post about the iPad’s software. We’ll be following this article up with our conclusion, which will combine everything we’ve learned about the software, hardware and hopefully formulate a verdict. Here’s everything that we know and you want to know about the hardware: things may change as we find out more about the iPad, but for now, what you see is what you get… and don’t forget to click the iPad to the right for an “exclusive story.” Warning: some parts have extreme technical content that we tried to break down into readable information. Dimensions The device itself is only 0.5 inches thick in the center and tapers off to the edges just like every other Apple mobile device currently on the market. It’s 9.56 inches tall and 7.47 inches wide… it weighs 1.5 pounds without the 3G assembly and 1.6 pounds with it (roughly five times the weight of an iPhone). These dimensions are the root cause of all of our complaints with the hardware in this device. If Apple made it just a little bit thicker, they could have actually included [...]

Apple and AT&T remove VoIP 3G restrictions… Updated

After developers have had some (very little) time to dig through the new 3.2 SDK, iCall announced that it already has a 3G-capable Voice over Internet Protocol update in the store today. They also announced that Apple has removed the 3G VoIP restrictions in iPhone OS 3.2. We’re not quite sure how they managed to get their app out so quickly, but mad props to them for being the first — soon to be followed by, well, everyone. We haven’t heard of iCall specifically, but we’ve known about Fring since it debuted in the App Store so long ago… we’ve never covered it here, but it’s been on our iPhones for a while now. It looks like Fring, Skype, Google Voice and the many other VoIP apps will finally be able to do what they needed from the beginning: make a call anywhere. Apple initially limited this ability due to what we all assume was a request from AT&T. There’s been a lot of speculation about the true reason behind it, but we’re just happy to see the restriction removed. What does this mean for the iPad? Probably exactly what you think. The iPad will most likely be able to [...]

Apple Tells AT&T Customers to Update: Does Nothing

This afternoon at 12:05 PM Mountain Time, we received a text message from AT&T on behalf on Apple. Read for yourselves, it says that there has been an update available from Apple for your iPhone 3G since Monday. Great. So what? This update was obviously intended to improve the 3G connectivity that AT&T and pretty much every other carrier has struggled with. The sad and pathetic part of it: Apple and AT&T think it’s crucial enough to send a text message to every iPhone 3G owner. In reality, most of our readers are telling us that the update either didn’t improve anything or made it worse. We’ll stick with our previous verdict: don’t update unless absolutely necessary. It won’t help much.

2.0.2 Killing 3G?

We’ve read a lot of reports, blogs, forums… whatever saying that the supposed 3G fix through Apple iPhone firmware 2.0.2 has actually killed a couple a lot of iPhones and their ability to call out through 3G. We can definitely say that we’ve noticed a difference. Here at work, in Denver, we could typically get 2 bars of 3G service all the time… now we’re lucky if we have any bars.