AT&T, not the most consumer friendly..
Now that I’m an AT&T customer I pay more attention to what they’re up to in the news (as well as with the telcos in general, if you hadn’t guessed). It turns out they’re up to no good. Last week Sean sent this article in to me about how AT&T is hobbling the new BlackBerry 8820. That’s right, apparently in order to prevent anything from impacting their iPhone sales, they’ve made RIM lockdown the GPS functionality on 8820’s sold through AT&T. This sucks for any AT&T customers who were going to pick one of those up and it is yet another demonstration of who wears the pants in the carrier/handset maker relationship. AT&T basically told RIM that they had to do it or they wouldn’t buy the 8820 or any future products. Honestly, I wish RIM had called that and seen where the chips fell. RIM is a huge seller, people love BlackBerries, what would happen to AT&T’s subscriber base if they no longer sold them?
As if that wasn’t enough, I just read this piece on how the Cingular (now AT&T) contract was ruled unconscionable by the courts. Unconscionable! Apparently there was a clause in there saying you couldn’t enter a class action suit against the company and instead had to enter mandatory binding arbitration. Do you think they’re worried about their crappy anti-consumer practices? Couldn’t be…
Is it like this everywhere? Do television and telephony companies all hate their clients all over the world?
