Category: Observed (Page 17 of 24)

If commoditization has brought the price of wireless broadband routers under $50, why is Apple still charging $249 for an Airport base station?

AT&T Wireless, despite having lost me as a customer last week, sent me my free phone upgrade yesterday.

Want it?

The city is cold and wet this morning, the snow a stark turnaround from the mild weather of the previous week. But the rhythms of the city are unchanged, the general tenor of the subways no more aggravated than any other Monday.

The newspaper salesman on 15th and Park has retreated from his usual corner to a dry spot by the subway staircase. He takes my $10 bill without complaint. “See you tomorrow,” he says with a genuine smile, recognizing me, expecting my return, even though I only buy from him one or two days per week.

The breakfast cart on 33rd and 9th has a big cooler atop its front wheels, filled with juices and water on ice. I buy a Tropicana and a buttered egg roll; I don’t usually buy juice from a cart, so I have to ask, “How much?” The two people inside grin and say, “First time shopping here?” I say yes, and one says, “Oh! Then take a donut, on us, any one you like. Welcome!” I decline the pastry—”Get out of here, you’re gonna make me fat”—and the other vendor gives me a free banana instead. “See you soon!” they say as I depart, sheepishly, breakfast and freebie in hand. And indeed they will.

The snow has stopped and the clouds are lightening. At lunch I will try and become a regular at the local deli.

The masses are chattering: both Slashdot and Engadget are discussing the AT&T “upgrade” of the Sony Ericsson T68i.

The Engadget article unearths some useful news, too: the T68i was only using half of AT&T Wireless’s network capacity, which is prompting their switch. Of course, the marketing folks at AT&T Wireless would rather downgrade my phone than admit that yes, the poor reception I’ve experienced is real, not perceptive.

But without this knowledge, I simply came to believe my cell phone service stunk. I switched to Verizon Wireless Tuesday and am thrilled with my reception thus far. So much for my free phone.

I received a postcard in the mail Monday telling me that Sony Ericsson and AT&T were sending me a free phone, a brand-new T226. Great news! My T68i is a year and a half old and is starting to fall apart.

Something felt fishy, though. My T68i was a $200 investment, and this new phone isn’t costing me a penny. So I went to the Sony Ericsson T68i Upgrade Web Site to find out more.

Impressively, Sony Ericsson is not shy about the upgrade specs; a big link on the home page goes to a comparison page. Unimpressively, the new phone is a major downgrade.

A list of what my new phone won’t have that my old one does:

– worldwide operability

– a calendar

– 7-field phone book listings (the T226 has 3 fields)

– voice-activated dialing

– Bluetooth and infrared (no more linking to friends)

– a modem (no more Web access)

– shortcuts (no more typing 7-8-4-2 to play solitaire)

These are not minor issues. I used my phone overseas and want to do so again this year. I used four and five fields for my contacts quite often, and I relied on my shortcuts.

And that’s just the features I use. The T226 also has no voice-activated dialing, no PC synchronization, half the memory and less picture and personalization features. It does have polyphonic ringtones and a more colorful display.

The Sony Ericsson T226 is the free-with-contract phone for customers who sign up for new plans. That I am expected to consider it an upgrade from my expensive T68i is wholly unimpressive.

I thought the new phone might keep me on AT&T Wireless for a few more months before I ported myself to Verizon and away from AT&T Wireless’s poor suburban GSM reception. But I doubt it.

The fuss about George Bush attemping to ban gay marriage with a Constitutional amendment saddens and disgusts me on multiple levels.

Bush is only making noise about it to deflect discussion of more pressing, damaging issues that could undermine his re-election campaign (note the timing of his amendment announcement on the same day as the grilling of the director of the CIA on Iraqi intelligence). Even worse, he is turning a personal issue into a political one. Notice how Dick Cheney doesn’t say a word about gay marriage since his family’s opinion would undermine the election campaign. I suspect that deep down Cheney thinks the issue is none of his boss’s business.

Worst of all, though, is how Bush wishes to insert a restrictive clause into a set of Constitutional amendments that for the past two centuries has increased personal freedoms, not diminished them. He aims to place marriage in a straitjacket alongside a long list of proud American freedoms. (This Metafilter post nicely frames the amendments: “20 out of 27 deal directly with giving people more rights and only one [prohibition, later repealed] took away rights. If passed, 28 would be the only standing amendment to limit rights of citizens.”)

What happened in San Francisco last week, with thousands of gay and lesbian couples lining up for legal marriages, will someday be hailed as a watershed moment in American liberties, much like Susan B. Anthony’s work and Rosa Parks’s stand before them. Women and minorities had to fight for decades against persecution, prejudice and political rhetoric before making their way into a (mostly) equal and accepting society. Homosexuality, sadly, is going to have the same fight.

Thirty years from now we will look back at this era and wonder how so much of the country was so stubborn and wrong. In the meantime, one can only shake one’s head and hope wiser judgment prevails against fear and intimidation.

It’s been a pretty busy news week if you’re a socially liberal New York Jew.

San Francisco is marrying gays, and that makes me happy. Enough said.

Mel Gibson is his father’s son, and that makes me sad. Note that ‘The Passion of the Christ’ is riddled with inaccuracies that will likely go ignored by proud, hard-line Christians.

Alex Rodriguez is a Yankee, and I have no shame for the Yankees’ payroll. You want parity? Fix the system. The Yanks are the only team that voted against the current revenue scheme about which everyone is complaining.

Oh, and my dog got a terrible haircut Saturday. Not all news is national.

I’m not sure why the new shuwarma place on St. Mark’s and Third rates as worthy news fodder for the New Yorker, but I empathize with the submissions for the name-the-new-joint contest that ask for the return of St. Mark’s Pizza, the eatery that is being replaced. St. Mark’s made a terrific slice; more than once I begged them to deliver to my apartment, outside their usual range.

An added note of sadness for the owners of St. Mark’s Pizza, too: they just renovated the place in 2003 before the purchase and subsequent closing.

What makes a good bagel? in the New York Times. Agreed! Bagels should be crisp and heavy-doughed. I will have to make a few Saturday trips to the outerboroughs to check these places out for myself. (And while I’m at it, I’ll bring the missus to the Mill Basin Deli, where her cousins still crank out a good pastrami sandwich.)

See if you can make sense of this: JetBlue won’t advance-book the last pet slot on its flights—because it has to leave the space open for people who don’t book in advance.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the policy. Here’s how it works. JetBlue permits three pets to travel in-cabin on any one flight. We called today to put our pet on a return leg from Florida on New Year’s day, only to be told that two pets were booked on our flight, and the third pet slot could not be given to us on the phone.

Why? Because that third slot is for use by airport personnel only.

And what do airport personnel do with that slot? They use it to aid owners who show up with animals unannounced and unreserved.

As a result, even though I followed protocol, and called a week in advance to bring my pet on a flight with space available for pet travel, JetBlue won’t book the pet travel because they need to see if a less prepared customer shows up and circumvents the policy.

On one level, this makes some sense. If I forgot to book my dog for a trip home, I too would want to slip on the flight with him. But JetBlue has taken this to an absurd extreme: yes, there is room on the flight; yes, you could conceivably fly with the pet; but no, you can’t determine this in advance. However, if I show up unannounced with my dog on New Year’s Day, and I’m the first person to do so on the flight, bingo! I can take him.

I can understand reserving theater seats for walk-up sales, but we’re talking about the transport of a live animal, one who will be in Florida and needs to get home to New York with its owners. JetBlue needs to either permit the advance booking of my dog or stop advertising a three-pets-per-flight policy that is a misnomer at best.

The message from JetBlue to me is simple: don’t bother following protocol. Just show up and demand to get on the plane. Yeah, because that will be fun on New Year’s. Looks like my dog is staying home—and I’m flying American next time.

Update, January 2: After seven phone calls—more than one to JetBlue corporate headquarters—the pooch flew happily home. I still have yet to receive a decent policy explanation from anyone, though. And we will be thinking twice whenever booking JetBlue flights to Florida.