After having a terrible time with AT&T cellphone reception at home for my iPhone, I purchased an AT&T MicroCell the past October which has pretty much eliminated dropped calls and “can you hear me now” reception problems. For the amount of money paid, if you can get over the fact that it should work in the first place (so why pay more), the MicroCell is worth it. In addition to being affordable to anyone who has the budget for an iPhone, the thing just works and only needs to be rebooted about once a month.

Why get it

Reception on AT&T iPhones is notoriously bad in the US. Talk to anyone, and they’ll tell you a tale of woe. As one person put it, “I’m on Verizon because I believe I should have a phone that makes calls.” For love of the iPhone, my wife and I suffered with near non-working reception in our home for a little over a year. If you wanted to make or receive a call, going to the back porch seemed the best option, and even that was dicey.

This poor reception covers voice and texting, as well as the 3G data network. If you have wifi at home, the 3G network is less important, but not being able to use your phone and txt people is stupid, esp. when you look at that $60-80 iPhone bill each month.

Buying the MicroCell

For some reason, the MicroCell isn’t available everywhere. I’d been checking my area for awhile, and once AT&T’s Uverse became available in my neighborhood, I figured the MicroCell would too: sure enough, it was. Once I hooked up AT&T’s Uverse (maxed out the top speed, of course), I also picked up a MicroCell. It was actually really easy: just go to the closet AT&T store and buy one. Having a physical store where you can actually do things like this is nice (in contrast, beyond initial setup, try doing “complicated” things like trading leased equipment at a Clear store).

After rebates and promotions at the time, I ended up paying $100 for it. One thing AT&T does that I loath is giving rebates in the form for “gift cards” instead of just cash or a credit – as long as you go and transfer them to some more general gift card (I bought Amazon Gift Certificates for myself), it’s no big deal, but it’s tedious and the cards never worked at stores I tried.

By default, voice minutes are deducted as normal. You can pay a small fee to get unlimited voice when you’re making calls on the MicroCell. But, since both my wife and I already carry an absurd number of roll-over minutes (read: we don’t use all the minutes we buy each month, the absolute minimum), we didn’t need unlimited voice. And that’s with us using our phones as our primary phone.

Setting up the MicroCell

Once you unbox it, you plug the MicroCell into the wall and then plug in an Ethernet cable to its port – with the new AT&T Uverse 2Wire modem with a gaggle of Ethernet ports, this was easy.

Then to activate the MicroCell, you log into the web admin console, setup some basic info like the address (due to some FCC regulations, I believe, you have to register the location of the device – you can move it around but have to re-register it) and the phone numbers of the phones that can use the MicroCell. I added my wife and I’s and a few of our friends who I knew had iPhones and would be over frequently. You can add up to 10 numbers, and 4 can be used at the same time.

Then it’s just the usual matter of waiting some unspecified time for it to “finish” cooking. The manual said it could take up the 24 hours, but it was pretty quick.

And then it starts working, you’re ready to go.

Daily Use

Once you have it hooked up, you’ll see “AT&T M-Cell” as your carrier on your iPhone. You should have 4 to five bars coverage as well. Mine fluctuates, as the above picture shows.

The MicroCell doesn’t fix reception issues 100%. Every few weeks, a call will get dropped and more frequently, dialing out will take a noticeably long time. I haven’t really kept track, but anecdotally it’s just fine. The reception we get now is leaps and bounds above what it used to be.

When you’re leaving your house, you can stay on the phone and your call will jump to the normal network (which in my neighborhood means it goes down in quality). If you’re arriving home, you’re call won’t jump to the MicroCell. I’ve had a few crappy moments leaving as my network quality goes down, but I don’t come and go chatting on the phone that much.

With these box-with-cords home devices, you’re always on cold-reboot watch. Inevitably, the magic box stops working and you need to reboot it to restore service. For the most part, the MicroCell is set-it and forget-it. Occasionally, once every 1-2 months, I have to hard reboot the device because my phone isn’t connecting to it. This is the standard box-with-cords procedure: unplug the power, wait a few seconds, and plug the power back in. Then things are back to normal for the next 30 to 60 days. I’ve had to restart my 2Wire AT&T router/modem more often.

Overall: worth it

The MicroCell is worth it if you’ve had reception problems at your home. It’s frustrating to have to pay more (just a one time charge though) for something that should work in the first place, but, as they used to say: wish in one hand and spend money on Apple-related products in the other and see which one fills up first.

I didn’t want a tablet. No, seriously, look it up. It has never been at all clear that the form factor will work for me. And yet here I am, in the market for a tablet. What happened?

A number of things. It didn’t help that Lenovo killed off the device that I actually wanted, the Skylight, which was essentially a tablet-like piece of hardware in a netbook form factor. Not that I can blame them, not when its chip manufacturer Qualcomm is running around admitting that Apple’s iPad obsoleted smartbooks before they even arrived. Probably because I wanted one, the smartbook category died a quiet, unacknowledged death. The reason I wanted one, however, remained.

The simple fact is that a modern laptop is more machine than I need while traveling. Even my underpowered Thinkpad X301 and its ultra-low-voltage chip represents a surplus of computing capacity. What do I really need while I’m on the road, after all? A browser, a text editor, a terminal application and some form of MLB At Bat, be it native or Flash. For that I just don’t need much machine. I wouldn’t mind the excess so much if the costs weren’t so high. But for the power that a laptop affords, you trade weight, battery life and size. I’m aware that the new Macs, for one, can get better than five hours to a charge. But I’m also aware that five hours does not a full day make, and that even the MacBook Air tips the scales at three pounds.

What I want is a machine I can carry sans briefcase on a day trip to New York or Boston. More specifically, this:

• Battery Life:
  I don’t want to have to walk into a room at a conference and look for a charger. Actually, I don’t even want to bring a charger on a day trip. Which means I need seven or eight hours to a charge, at a minimum.
• Connectivity:
  Wifi, obviously. Ideally, I’d like 3G (EV-DO/HSPA) or 4G (LTE) connectivity on a non-AT&T network, simply because I can already turn the Nexus One into an AT&T hotspot so an alternate carrier would give me more options.
• Cost:
  Anything more than the iPad is too much, given the quality of that device. Less is better, obviously.
• Display:
  Basically, it needs to be at least twice the size of my Nexus One (3.7″). There are just some things it’s easier to do on a full sized – or nearly so – display.
• Size:
  This one I’m unsure about. Would the Galaxy Tab’s 7″ display be sufficient? Or would 10″ be better? Probably I’ll have to use them to find out; I hope the carriers make their tablets available under the same 30 day return policies as their handsets.
• Weight:
  Can’t weigh much more than a pound. The Galaxy Tab’s .84 lbs is just about right.

What about the software, you ask? Funny thing: it’s juts not the priority for me – I’m far more concerned with the hardware. Any of Android, Chrome OS or webOS would probably be acceptable as a tablet operating system. For me, anyway. Google’s Director of Mobile Products, Hugo Barra, was unequivocal in his belief that Android isn’t ready for that device type, which while technically true probably isn’t going to help Samsung’s marketing efforts.

Even the iPad’s iOS would be workable were it not for the fact that it’s tethered to iTunes, and thus to a Mac or Windows desktop. I’m excluding primarily desktop oriented operating systems such as Windows or Ubuntu because they’re not quite there for these form factors, in my opinion.

Add it up, and I’m probably getting a tablet, in spite of their unfortunate lack of a keyboard. The question is which one? The answer to that is as much timing as anything else.

For reasons that I cannot fathom, we are nine months post-the iPad announcement without a credible alternative on the market. This, in spite of the availability of obviously workable alternative operating environments in Android and webOS, and possibly Chrome OS. Whether the massive latency is due to difficulties in design, market factors and uncertainties, or something else, the fact is that the would-be challengers to the iPad are massively late to market. To the point that many have not only missed the Back to School rush, but might not make the holiday shopping season either. In theory, we’ll see Samsung shipping its 7″ Galaxy Tab on a variety of carriers in the near future, but most of the rumored arrival dates for tablets are a quarter to two quarters away.

It’s baffling.

The choice before me then is to wait, or do what I did with the iPhone: tread water using the Apple product until such time as its competitors are sufficiently compelling. The majority of the private feedback I’ve received about tablets encourages me to wait: those who’ve seen or held the forthcoming iPad competitors consistently say nice things about them. But that means putting up with a laptop during one of the two busiest portions of the year for me in terms of travel. Suboptimal.

What do you think? Do you have interest in a tablet?

Like a lot of people, I reacted to the news that AT&T was dropping its unlimited data plans with alarm.

You could see this coming from a mile away, of course. AT&T’s brand has been so massively damaged by its ongoing network issues – I was dropped five times during a single phone call from Denver this week – that it’s actually worth asking whether the iPhone exclusivity has been a good or bad thing for the carrier. All of which helps explain why I, like Rafe, had no problem in principal with the decision to stratify data plans.

I had even less problem with it when I discovered that the plan actually wouldn’t impact me, at least in the short term. I was shocked, frankly, when I discovered just how little data I actually consumed. Even with the assistance of MLB At Bat and its gameday streaming audio and on demand video highlights, I haven’t managed to crack even the 1 GB plateau in the past six months. So the 2 GB plan, which is actually cheaper than my current unlimited plan, would theoretically work for me.

But for how long? I’m quite happy, the above discovery notwithstanding, that I locked in my unlimited data plan days before the plan’s expiration. Why? Because AT&T’s pricing works for what I’m using now. It’s far less likely to be reasonable for what I want to use in future.

It was a bit ironic, in fact, that news of the demise of unlimited data plans predated the announcement of NetFlix for the iPhone by mere days. I’m not aware of the bitrates for what they’re going to pipe down to handsets, but I can’t imagine that streaming movies and TV isn’t going to dramatically increase some customers data consumption. For those of us on Android, meanwhile, there’s the forthcoming FroYo feature allowing handsets to stream music from a home library. Which DropBox, incidentally, has already launched support for. And what would happen if MLB ever got around to fixing its asinine TV broadcast blackout rules, and legions of MLB At Bat users began watching the games, daily, on their handsets?

The simple fact is that AT&T is removing the unlimited data plans just as they’re actually going to become useful for mainstream users. Which is their prerogative, because their network is so awful they clearly had to do something. But it can’t really be defended as a positive development for customers, because even if they don’t need unlimited today, they are likely to soon.