T-Mobile ad pokes fun at FaceTime

I thought about this commercial yesterday and had a good laugh...My girlfriend just got a new iPhone, and she called to cancel her T-Mobile account. The operator told her she was jealous and wish they had the iPhone :)

Very effective ad, I rewound it and watched it twice.

Apple spent years picking on Windows in this format, but Apple, like any other company, has its own screwed-up products and its great to see them get as good as they give.

What I really want to see is a public service announcement for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in this format, with Gates and Buffet on the right, talking about how they and 50 other billionaries have pledged over half their fortune to charity, while a Jobs lookalike is on the left, explaining why he refuses to join them, and how his only known public contribution was to the cause that he personally suffered from.

Maybe that would embarrass him enough to stop trash talking other companies for 10 seconds and do something meaningful and selfless.

And it's ALWAYS a good business strategy to mock Steve Jobs ...

Pretty rich coming from T-mobile as a Netherlands iPhone user.

It's only on T-mobile here (the worst network in Holland - Apple are great at choosing the crappiest carrier). They offer no Facetime over 3G, no tethering and no Skype over 3G. Their 3G network is so bad it's embarrassing, I get no cover more often than I get cover and there's no Edge to fall back on.

Oh and being in Holland the service from T-mobile is atrocious. I've nearly punched staff at the Amsterdam office.

Anyway thank god for Jailbreak and My3G and MyWifi.

As someone who does mobile development, I have Way Too Many Phones, scattered across all the networks. In my opinion and experience, there's no clear universal winner.

Here at my house in North Seattle, I actually get better AT&T signal and speed than on the others; to my dismay, my Droid only gets two bars of signal on Verizon here, and while Sprint has reasonably solid 3G, their 4G is sort of 'hold the phone just right, close your eyes, and pray.' T-Mobile comes in a solid second there. On the other hand, in downtown Seattle I get better signal from Sprint and Verizon than I do from AT&T or T-Mobile. Heading out towards the Cascades, I get better signal on Verizon than any of the others.

The differences become more dramatic when I travel.

T-Mobile and AT&T both have horrible service near my company's office in Connecticut, but Verizon's very solid. (I didn't have a Sprint device last time I was out there to test it with the other three.) In New York a couple of years ago, I found AT&T service to be more along the lines of a sick joke ("now you have signal... wait, now you don't. Oh, look, there's a bar of service... HA HA! Try again, sucker!"), while Verizon was slow but consistent. Conversely, I had pretty good T-Mobile service down in California, while it hardly seemed worth turning the AT&T phone on.

Really, there's no one-true-perfect network. Which one works best for you is going to depend on a lot of things, and one of them is 'where you use your phone most often.'

AT&T has already lit up a bunch of HSDPA+ towers, including one on top of my office building. I routinely get over 5mbit/s there while tethering my laptop via wifi. USB is even faster. Unfortunately their network elsewhere in NYC is spotty but it has gotten better over the last year or so and they claim to be pumping a ton of money into it.

My phone is JB'ed and using Facetime over HSDPA+ looks exactly like doing it over wifi. I bet that once AT&T has deployed it more broadly they'll unlock 3G Facetime. The Verizon iPhone will help a lot too once a couple million whiners get off of AT&T and bring VZW's network crumbling down. Then they'll be stuck for 2 years, freeing up bandwidth for the rest of us.

As for the commercial: Meh. I've seen that meme done do death. That said it's pure BS with see Sprint and T-Mobile claiming 4G networks when it was recently determined that WiMax, LTE and HSDPA+ are not true 4G. Once again, tech speak has turned into marketing drivel.

oh yeah, that's why I wanted to jailbreak my phone to unrestrict 3G.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and this ad is pure imitation. Apple's ad agency should be giving high-fives all around.

A one time copy-cat parody ad is effective but if T Mobile makes this a running ad campaign then it just shows a lack of imagination.

I think that AT&T needs to get off their a s s e s and extend Facetime to 3G.

You don't need FaceTime on wifi to do do video chatting. Tango is a free app in the App Store that allows you to do so on a 3G network and it works just as well, if not better!