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I hope Apple/AT&Ts service plan presentation motivates other carriers to simplify their offerings.

The UPS call is also great for people waiting on heat sensitive shipments like wine or food where it shouldn’t be sitting on the porch all day under the hot summer sun.

Actually, there are six rate plans for the iPhone, not three:

http://www.apple.com/iphone/easysetup/rateplans.html

Click the “more minutes” link at the bottom of the chart to see the next three…

I pay $59.98 for unlimited data w/ 1000 anytime minutes and unlimited nights/weekends on my Blackberry Pearl with T-Mobile.

I also have EDGE access, and know how SLOW it is. I felt that Apple was a bit misleading on their commercials showing the NY Times website and google maps as being extremely quick and snappy.

That being said, once the iPhone is available with a faster data network, I plan on switching carriers if needed, and getting one. They should be cheaper by then, as well.

I count 15 plans between individual, family and existing customers.

I spent an hour last night on the websites of AT&T, Verizon, Qwest, and Time Warner Cable, trying to compare and sign up for internet service (and possibly wireless/telco service, had something looked attractive) for my new house. I left empty-handed and frustrated because of how difficult it was to compare product lines, get accurate long-term prices, and just navigate the sites.

I went to bed wishing that Apple ran the world, thinking precisely of this iPhone-plan matrix and the ease of getting service (assuming the example video is accurate).

Tonight I will try again to find a company willing to take my money. None seem to want it.

@James: Now go to AT&T and count all the plans they offer there. Try to find a product matrix as intuitive as the one Apple shows. And try to figure out the practical difference between purchasing the “AT&T Unity” and comparable “Cingular” wireless plans.

@James: Sorry, should have stated: if you’re correcting Jason, you’re right. But if you’re also saying Apple is as complicated as the other, remember that as a consumer I don’t really have 15 choices here. I have no more than six, depending on whether I’m just looking for an individual or family line. Only three choices if I’m a current customer. Easy.

@Justin: I’m not arguing that the display isn’t intuitive, or that it’s not better than others. I’m just making an observation that it’s more complex than stated in the OP.

I think the text message limit is too low especially considering the nature of the iPhone’s SMS iChat-like app. If T-Mobile gets one thing right its that the Sidekick data plan has unlimited text messages. Apple hopefully will get iChat on the iPhone soon enough and this won’t be an issue. When they add iChat and a faster network, I’ll switch in a heartbeat.

Is it just me, or is the table on Apple’s rateplans page (http://www.apple.com/iphone/easysetup/rateplans.html) broken? Firefox / PC. Someone needs to tell Apple that tabular data demands tabular markup.

If T-Mobile gets one thing right its that the Sidekick data plan has unlimited text messages. Plus blackberry accounts have unlimited BB email and the BB 2 BB messages.

As people have posted, EDGE is a joke. Comparing an EDGE phone’s data capabilities with my K800i’s UMTS is unbelivable – UMTS is fairly low latency and pages come through at an acceptable speed. EDGE is just so goddamn slow and that’s with ‘mobile’ versions of pages it’s barely worth bothering with – you’d only ever use it in real emergencies, whereas UMTS is fast enough to use all the time.

Not only that, AT&T has a decent UMTS network too which they’ve invested billions in, so why on earth is apple too cheap to put a UMTS chip in is beyond me – it’s not a $99 phone. I hope they don’t repeat the same mistake with their European launch because if they do it will be a laughing stock.

I simply cannot believe that the iphone is a good buy until they sort out this ‘oversight’, especially for the cost involved.

Is it me or does the exchange between Jason F. and Mark I. sound a lot like two teenage girls twitting over the latest boy band news?

- There are new pictures of Justin Timberlake on the web!

- Oh cool, checking

- I love that he’s wearing Unlimited, of course people will just look at the price of his other clothes and compare those to other celebrities big pouty face

- These clothes are totally driven by Justin, it’s obvious! They are just too stylish to have originated with his new girlfriend. :)

tehehehehehehe

While the unabashed Apple-worshipping made me throw up a little in my mouth you have to give Apple kudos for reducing grown men to giggling teen girls. Now that is some powerful marketing! Love’em or hate’em, they’re doing something right.

@James: Right on.

What I find somewhat discouraging is the fact that even though the plans continue to climb steeply in price ($169.99 and $219.99 a month? Youch!) you still only get 200 SMS messages.

Although, you can always add SMS bundles if necessary. You’d just think that after getting that much out of a single account every month you’d be a little more generous with the number you’re allotting. ;)

(Somewhat off-topic, but I know that AT&T has those “Rollover” minutes: do they do the same for unused SMS messages?)

What I like about the iPhone rate plans is that you don’t pick a plan while standing at a kiosk flipping through brochures with some kid supposedly helping you out or trying to activate it by calling some other kid at a call center. Instead, you take the phone home, sit comfortably at your favorite computer, hook it up to iTunes and walk through the activation steps on your own time at your own pace. You can even transfer your number from another carier from within the activation process in about 20 minutes with just a few fields and the click of a button. If AT&T has their act together on the back end, they’ll have a winner here just in terms of customer experience alone.

UPS ’s automated alert system is a nice customer service perk, but they’ve got bigger issues to deal with. Hope you got the package delivered to work, because their pickup centers are closed on weekends and, at least in the Chicago area, at 6PM every evening. Makes it pretty difficult to pick up a package if you have a job with regular business hours.

Their online tracking system is unreliable, too. Just this week it told me a package was out for delivery at 5AM Tuesday. Then at 8PM Tuesday, it updated to say the package had just arrived at the processing center.

Whenever the option is available, I choose USPS over UPS – but if you can afford it, FedEx beats them both for reliability and convenience.

At the price of the phone, we should get unlimited minutes too. And why is that, FedEx or UPS or USPS or whatever, I seem to receive every 3 out of 4 packages broken? What kind of a user experience is that?

...but at least there are multiple price points on Salad at Bennys.

http://www.38thsignal.com/

re automated UPS call: so did I, just last week. I was quite impressed myself.

The rate plans are crazy but the setup seams really nice and easy. Anyways check out http://www.iphonethebook.com Its a book coming out soon that well tell the story of the iPhone. Looking for people to submit blog posts and stories and even this chat for the book.

Send us an email at hello [at] iphonethebook [dot] com

The heads up on signing for a package is great. When I got my MacBook last week I had to wait all day for FedEx not knowing when they were coming.

38thsignal…that’s hillarious!! that was sort of the right thing to go after having read this incredibly significant post…

i love it, like everyone these days, but what i don’t understand is all that talk about edge/gprs! i mean, wtf? is that really the latest shit in the us?

what about umts? i am typing this on a mac book via my cell phone’s 2 mbit umts connection.

you can get a umts phone at every wonky cellphone dealer around the corner these days.

is there no such thing in the states? will the european iphone sport umts?

You’ve only hit the big time these days when there’s a parody blog about you. Steve Jobs has one, Paul Thurrot, now 37s. Next it’ll be “Cautious Snowball”.

38th Signal rocks http://www.38thsignal.com/

I have a sneaking suspicion that ‘unlimited’ data isn’t really (come on, this is a telco we’re talking about!), and that some customers will end up making a huge public stink in the next year (or sooner).

If AT&T is smart, they will use traffic shaping (latency or jitter) rather than a cap to achieve the same result, which would obscure the existence of the policy, but someone is going to notice eventually anyway.

You’ve only hit the big time these days when there’s a parody blog about you.

You know you haven’t hit the big time when you have to post a series of anonymous and fake sounding comments about your parody blog.