I preface this by reminding you that I've been accused of being particular. I'm not sure I agree with that adjective, but I often sometimes know exactly what I want.
I've spent the last week working through my purchase of the Verizon iPhone. Seems easy, no? And, before I continue, I have to explain the title to this post before I hear from all of you. I know that I'm talking about various services, hardware, and software providers - not just a phone. But, isn't that the point? I'm a consumer. I want a "phone" that does what I want: manages my emails, text and picture messages, accesses my calendar, and thanks to verizon coverage...even can make a phone call. OK, smart phones are here so I want a few well integrated apps, too.
I'm also a Google fan, but for the reasons that seem right to me. They do things well. They integrate. They are innovative. I'm an Apple fan. I love their hardware. I'm typing this on the sexy, very user friendly 11" Macbook Air. I'm not a Verizon wireless fan. Their customer service sucked 8 years ago when I left them for T-mobile and I have a bit of an elephant memory. Plus, I'm no expert in wireless history and technology, but I dislike arbitrary uniqueness and don't know why the service isn't GSM like the rest of the world.
I thought I had the perfect plan figured out. My sister offered to allow me to join her V friends & family plan -- and that provided the added benefit of cutting almost $50 from my monthly phone bill, along with the potential to just give my phone/# to my niece once she's ready for a phone sometime in the future. This helps ease my irritation of provider contracts. Then, I would "port" my current phone # to Google Voice.
For those of you not familiar, GVoice is the outcome of Big Brother's purchase of Grand Central a few years ago. It enables you to customize voice mails per caller, emails voice mail transcriptions, and just manage your call life pretty efficiently. It evens handles text messages.
Seems perfect, right? Well, even with my fastidious research, I missed that GVoice currently doesn't handle MMS (picture) texts. And by handle, I mean not only is it not able to receive/send, it doesn't even tell the sender (my friends/contacts) that it doesn't -- they just enter some cybernetherworld. In my pursuit of perfection, this is a big deal for me. I don't want to bother people with having to remember to use "x" number for calling & regular texts and "y" number for MMS texts.
I'm not going to go into my issues with Apple and Google as competitors. That is for another day and getting more interesting by the week -- check out the recent Apple "in-app" subscription policies and Google's response that are potentially troubling to a consumer. The iPhone has weak (at best) Google services integration, but I want one. I can live with the native apps being suboptimal but the service still needs to be there.
So am I complaining about Google? About Apple? About Verizon? Yes. I want what I want.
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