The North Charleston ATT store was deserted today, except for a few
irate customers wondering aloud if it wouldn't be better to get an
Instinct from Sprint than wait 2 more weeks for the FruitFone Vaporware.  
"We won't have another shipment in until Wednesday, 60 more phones, and
they're all sold on the waiting list.", the sales humanoid stated flatly
to a businessman who looked like he really wanted one and was
unaccustomed to being told "no" by anyone below his pay grade.

After he stormed out, empty handed, I snagged one of the 3 demo units
that replaced the old 2Gs on the iPhone kiosk.  2 had crashed, so I
booted them both back up for them.  Plugged constantly into their
docking stations, they were all charged up, so that wasn't the reason
for the crash.  No 3rd party software had been installed, which I found
kinda sad with all the freeware they COULD have been displaying for the
App Store as a sales gimmick.  I suppose they might have been
embarrassed over some of the more stupid freewares I found on the store
when I went there with their iphones for a looksee.

I put SPEEDTEST into Google in hopes of finding a FruitFone-compatible
net speed test website because the FruitFone won't play most speedtest
sites using JAVA or Flash.  PC World, of all places, has a pretty neat,
though amazingly TINY buttoned FruitFone/sellphone speed tester it could
play, complete with latency and speed testing so I ran it 5 times over
the course of 10 minutes and averaged out some of the worst readings,
like a recurrent 2500 ms latency ping that kept popping up.

The main ATT store has such a shitty signal in it with no cheater
repeater to boost up the signals like Verizon does to their shitty
signals it may have screwed the testing up.  I hunted around to the end
of my security-device tether stuck to the back of the FruitFone to make
sure I didn't steal it and found a hotspot at 4-bars of pilot channel
signal so did my testing holding the FruitFone above my head to the
curious onlookers panting over its very existence.

The fastest download I got was around 550Kbps with the average 3G speed
only doing around 350-400Kbps and the worst I saw was 230Kbps on one
pitiful test at 10AM on Monday morning.  Latency varied between 300ms
and 2500ms something awful on the ping tests, not good if you're going
to play video or even the simplest gaming, which I suppose it won't do
anyway.  The YouTube client played fairly well, but did balk a few times
to reload its buffer before continuing to play Ron Paul's rants to
Bernanke and the Fed shadow government.  The YouTube app, unlike MyTube
on the Maemo tablets, doesn't get video processing to make the pictures
look better.

The web pages that would load without Flash/JAVA and the other toys it
doesn't support look pretty nice, UNTIL you multitouch the screen to
zoom in or out or slide it to another page.  Then, it has to load that
page part like a tile on Google Earth does when you move suddenly from
the tile you're looking at to a new tile somewhere else....not a new
webpage, just a new piece of the existing webpage.  This makes the piece
of webpage you're looking at now load faster, at the expense of having
to wait every time you move offscreen to a new piece of the whole
webpage, later as you read on through the spam.  I want my browser to
load once then let me slide around without loading again, like Firefox
does on the Nokia Linux tablets.

Something I never noticed before on the old 2G FruitFone was the
"focusing" it does when I zoomed in or out.  Boot Google News' main page
and wait for it to load.  Now spread zoom to an area of the page you're
looking at, the only way to get the icons on Google News far enough
apart to click with your fat finger.  Watch what happens to the "focus"
of the text.  When you first zoom in (or out or move violently), the
text you're looking at looks like a video camera with autofocus does if
you move too fast....out of focus.  Then, within a second or so, the
text "focuses" so you can read it, finally sharpening up into the font
the webpage dictated if it exists.  I find it very annoying that I can't
zoom then start reading because I can't immediately see the letters.  
Anyone know what's going on during this "focus period"?  It must have
something to do with the display decoder and font codec conversions
between the display processor and the Samsung main processor.  It's a
very noticable lag in focusing the fonts..and pictures.

I tried the Map program out to the end of the security tether and
couldn't really do anything because it never got a GPS lock from the
signals bouncing off the cars in the parking lot through the big plate
glass windows so can't see how the routing and GPS accuracy looked.  I
wanted to put the map program in "overland mode" so it wouldn't process
out errors and always put you on the nearest road to its current fix and
see how accurate it was, but my keen-eyed ATT rep was in no mood to
untether something he couldn't sell me on commission, anyways, to take
out into the parking lot for some real GPS testing.  The app is just
Google maps and Google satellite using GPS data if it can get a fix.  It
looks curiously like a web based app with GPS overlay data.  I wonder
how it will work, if that's what it really is, where ATT has no signal
and no wifi to connect it to.

Speaking of wifi, there's this goddamned BOX that kept popping up every
time you went to do something because the store has a wifi in the demo
FruitFone's wifi configuration saved to connect it to, rather than let
you see how fast 3G ATT really is.  I had to tell that damned popup
window NO, I DON'T WANNA CONNECT TO WIFI about 20 times every 10 minutes
while I was playing with it.  I suppose this is ATT's idea to get the
damned FruitFone hackers OFF OUR DATA SYSTEM to reduce costs and
increase profits.  The box had no way of telling the FruitFone to stop
asking me if I wanted to connect to the wifi and get off the 3G, of
course, making me further suspicious this is ATT-based thinking.  I
asked my steeley-eyed ATT rep if he would turn off the wifi for a while,
but he lied and said he didn't know where it was.  I hope ATT doesn't
hire men that stupid.

At about this time a man and wife came in with two dead FruitFones and
seemed a little unhappy from their loud voices across the lobby so I
fled the scene, releasing my handler to go into protect mode, in case
these irate customers had any weapons and the will to use them.  I heard
one of the desk jockeys say something to the effect it would be mid
afternoon before "the server", whatever that means, might come back
online long enough so they'd have at least sellphone service once again.

Trying to sneak listen I perused the main sellphone kiosk in the center
of the room and simply fell in love with the new LG VU I stumbled across
that was playing ESPN sports channel off its little pull-out 700 Mhz
digital TV receiver.  It has a beautiful picture that didn't balk a bit
in the middle of the store with all the other sellphones making RF
noises until I completely collapsed the TV antenna into the case and its
buffer finally ran out of data.  Even then, when I moved my hand away
from the collapsed antenna, the TV resumed playing fine.  I looked
around at some of the other cable channels this new TV plays and they
all looked great in landscape mode I wish stupid MobiTV would implement
on Alltel's Axcess TV offering on my ROKR Z6m so I could see the TV
picture.  The VU has a great 3" picture with nice loud sound!  I
supposed the rest of its smartphone features worked.  I didn't check
them out because the man and wife had raised their voices 20 db by that
time and I didn't want to be in the line of fire, so I left the store
quietly as possible under those conditions.....(c;

My condolences to all ATT front line employees until someone gets the
FruitFones up and running without crashing much.  They're certainly
catching hell for it in Charleston, SC, today....It's no wonder my
steeley eyed handler wasn't too friendly!

He probably would have let me have that demo unit if I'd brought him
some beer.  He looked like he could use a few, chugalugged quickly.

Well, that's my OPINION and what happened to me this morning after all
the hub-bub and lines.  I'd get a VU if I were going to be on
ATT....Cool American-only TV, but no World TV unless you can tether it
to the Nokia tablets.

Verizon is faster than Alltel but you can't use more than 5GB so what
does it matter.  Alltel unlimited is much faster than ATT 3G, even in
the ATT store!  Alltel still wins the data connection war, which is why
I'm a customer, for now.