[G1 Android Development] quicksite:
re my agreement that T-Mobile is dropping the ball

First off, just want to say how exciting this is. For months the crafty hackers here have been trying to get android running on a WING but of course ran into driver issues/linux etc. As usual Google is fast to reespond to market conditions and user acceptance... meanwhile the US Cell Carriers remain so satisfied with being behind the curve.

korndub -- I agree with you that it is unreasonable that level 1 tech support know the esoterica about phones they sell. But, I have been observing a downward trend at T-Mobile for past 5 years . I had been with verizon before that for a few years - and T-Mobile was a fantastic improvement over Verizon's "I don't give a ****; we have the best network" attitude. Sprint's coverage was a joke, and I wanted to avoid ATT at all costs, due to their domestic spying on Americans without legal permission to do so. So, going in, I was initially satisfied with T-Mobile. That's chnaged.

This began when I first got the MDA 4 years ago, and support was terrible, even at Level 3 support. Just to get the basic functionality of the device to perform too backflips. At that point it also demontsrated to me that the whole coroporate culture at T-Mobile was not at all focused on high-end users. A level 3 Cust Support person admitted as mcuh to me, becuase 4 years ago the market for a touchscreen phone was miniscule.

I had this discussion with T-Mobile when I was in a tiny town in the country of Serbia and saw all the other versions of the same HTC phone with TWICE the Ram and TWICE the processor of the MDA. It's not that they snickered at what the "great America" was producing... It's more their disbelief that they, who have such a hard time acquiring products due to economic embargoes, could easily buy in their country a phone twice as good as the MDA.

Okay fine, I thought, as I discovered this site and began to understand the entire set of capabilities of my phone that were not even ATTEMPTED to be taken advantage of by T-Mobile. No matter how many times I would be specific about which features I really needed (as a web businessman on the go), T-Mobile was not even smart enough to set up a system that funneled such feedback directly to Product Develeopment. Instead we'd get clueless reps being nice and trying hard to do their jobs -- but THEY were crippled by a lack of internal communications infrastructure that would have made a big difference by the time the WING came out.

So what does T-Mobile do? They release the WING with the very same already old-fashioned slow processor, i mean wtf? If not for this site, I would not be able to even run some basic apps like Google Maps using GPS etc while haveing another app open.

Trust me, i know one of your answers will be to describe to me the difference between the US market and the European/Asian markets. I get it. They are willing to pay for more expensive phones -- yet they get much more flexibility with carriers and rate plans without the restrictive contracts. And the T-Mobile argument -- as of just 6 months ago -- was that Americans are just not conditioned to spend $500-800 on a phone device, and thus US carriers HAVE to make choices that help them subsidize the phones, yet get the usage revenues... Thus, I was explained, they went with the older (cheaper) MDA processor in the WING.

But that's not all. The wifi hotspot network has been wrecked by the snags caused by ATT/Apple's barging in on T-Mobile's Starbucks deal. I was happy to see that T-Mobile was ready to sue aggressively, and achieved an outcome where t-mobile users would still be able to access Starbucks hotspots -- but they'd have to put up with the inferior ATT wifi infrastructure.

I've spoken to really top-notch level 3 Hotspot Engineers at T-Mobile, and they are frustrated as hell that they've had to work through ridiculous infrastructure problems with ATT now running the network.

Okay, once again, not THEIR fault that for past 3 months I usually have not been able to get an authenticated session at Starbucks, or that at LAX airport over Thanksgiving where there was a strong T-Mobile wifi signal, I couldn't connect. In both cases Level 2 tech support acknowkedged it was on their end.

I am not nitpicking. I am saying that T-Mobile corporate doesn't seem to understand customer behaviors and usage models for their high end phones. Which has had me ready to jump ship, sucking the AT&T bullet, and getting an iphone. But my tricked-out WING achieved by the great hackers here at XDA is still a better phone with better features than iphone.

All I can say is, T-Mobile management better get it together or they are going to be crushed once Android is running on any kind of device. The US market is no longer going to tolerate the "this is the only deal in town, take it or leave it" attitude. I m sorry to go so off-topic here but I think it is really very relevant. The Windows OS is going to lose market penetration exponentioally as the Android OS spreads like wildfire.

Send an email to one of your bosses' bosses and have them read this :) It's reality based, not hostile.