AT&T Wireless Scam Artists?
Some background. I previously owned an HTC 8525 (Windows 6 [upgraded] smart phone), and moved to the raved about Nokia N95 (Symbian 60 ver 3 awesome). Ok… so I was poking around and came across this:
MEdia™ Net - from AT&T Wireless’ Q&A section (link):
Q. What is MEdia™ Net?
A. MEdia Net gives you access to all the cool things you can do with your wireless phone—email, Web sites, games, and more. It is wireless Internet access for your wireless device.
- Mail & Messaging: Check your Yahoo! Mail, MSN Hotmail and chat with friends with Yahoo! Messenger and Upoc.
- Sports: Get the latest scores from CBS SportsLine and ESPN.
- Ringtones, Games, and Graphics: Personalize your phone by downloading your favorites.
- News & Finance: Stay informed with round-the-clock headlines from CNN.
- Entertainment: Get local movie times and reviews, dining recommendations, and more.
- Weather & Travel: Check your forecast from The Weather Channel, get flight times, and traffic reports.
Neat! This MEdia™ Net shindig should allow me to do what I need on my N95 (and my PDA, but we’ll not get into that)… and the MEdia™ Max Unlimited feature looks like a good fit. As a result - I pick up the phone, and now have this featured added to my plan… and had the $39.99 (PDA Personal plan w/ 1500 txt message - no longer available) feature on my plan,as required by AT&T at the time for the PDA’s, removed.
Here’s a paraphrase of the conversation I had with the nice lady on the phone at AT&T Wireless:
Me - “Is there a bandwidth difference between the PDA plan and the MEdia™ Max (i didn’t say ‘tm’)?”
Nice Lady - “Not that I’m aware, I think it’s just if you have a PDA, you’ll be accessing your email and the Internet more frequently”
Me - “Oh, neat. So since my phone isn’t a PDA, I can get this MEdia™ Max Unlimited?”
Nice Lady - “Yep, would you like me to remove the PDA features from your plan?”
So, this confused me, as I told my friend Genevieve to do the same thing with her N95 about a week ago… and she got a guy telling her “The N95 is a smartphone, you’ll need to upgrade to the PDA data plan”… buh? (image right)
Ok… so the wheels started turning pretty quick in my head:
- Does the iPhone qualify for the MEdia™ Max Unlimited Plan (yes - at least I think so)
- Is the iPhone capable of email access? (yes, without MMS even… heh)
- Is the N95 not a smart phone? (email, office, gps, camera, qik.com, web browser… hmm)
- Why are Windows Mobile users getting charged $15 more a month?
- Why does it seem that “some people” get the same features for $35 that others have to pay $50 for?
- What the hell qualified a phone as smart? (answer)
- Is AT&T aware of what a smartphone really is? Are their employees universally aware?
I’m going to figure that I just got lucky because I outright asked for the MEdia™ Max Unlimited Plan and got someone who was completely unaware what the hell the N95 is, count my lucky stars and give this bit of advice to people that have … a “smartphone” that’s not an iPhone:
Call AT&T - ask for the MEdia™ Max Unlimited Plan - if they say no, hang up and call back. Save yourself $180 a year.
Unless I’m completely missing something. Which … I just speed tested my phone after a reboot and I’m still getting 4.2 Mbps over their air… and uh… I’ll keep testing to see if there’s a downside here to paying less, anyway.
