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Last few weeks I was diving into a few gadgets I was missing on before. The place where I sit throughout the day has the worst possible reception spot for AT&T network – my AT&T Tilt (TyTN II) drops to GPRS in the middle of downtown Manhattan. A dozen steps towards any window improves the situation, but it’s not always possible. I asked people around, but since mostly they’re wielding iPhones with bad enough reception already, there was no way of knowing what would work. Testing with regular phones as well as Samsung Blackjack showed that the problem persists to the spot, rather than device (especially since I had flashed an updated version of radio). Recalling my previously very much decent experience with Verizon, I went to the closest store and bought Blackberry Storm.

Now, usually I would go for Windows Mobile device, but I wanted to explore a bit into realms of other mobile OSes. I was mostly interested in Blackberry, since it has, by far, one of the biggest markets. Besides, it just look different from anything RIM had produced before.

My overall impression is mostly positive. The phone is a tad smaller, significantly thinner and definitely weights a lot less than TyTN II. Storm has a 3.5mm headphones jack – something that’s been missing from a lot of HTC devices. I also liked the screen and the idea behind the different approach to touch (honestly, I love it). The cellular service was a lot better in my spot and I was almost sold to keep the phone. Although, after couple of weeks of light use I figured a few things that prevented me from staying with the phone – at least for now.

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Last week wrapped up with Pandora announcing the release of Windows Mobile client. Everybody cheered – but for less than a day. As it turned out, there’s always a fly in the ointment. The cost of fun is $8.99 per month in addition to any data plan you already have. Even if it’s an unlimited one, like mine.

Outraged just like anyone else, I immediately shot off an e-mail to Pandora’s support.

Hello,
I am a very dedicated Pandora listener. Aside from enjoying Pandora from my desktop I had encouraged a number of people to try Pandora for iPhone – every time with huge success.

Now, I myself is not an iPhone user – for number of reasons I cannot use iPhone for everyday tasks. It doesn’t mean I have extra money in my pocket, it just means that I use devices that benefit me the most.

When I have heard about the discriminatory policy that Windows mobile users must she’ll out extra money for same service everyone else enjoys for free I felt somewhat betrayed. Definitely upset. Outraged.

However, before jumping to any decisions, I’d like to hear from you the reasons behind such discrimination and, if there are any plans to rectify the situation.

Surprisingly, just a few hours later (that is – 3AM Friday night) I got a response.

Thanks for writing us, and thanks for recommending Pandora on the iPhone to your friends! We were very happy Apple allowed us to offer Pandora for free.

Getting a mobile device to support Pandora is, to a very large degree, up to our potential cellular and platform partners.

Currently there are four WinMo devices which, just like the iPhone, support Pandora for free (advertising-supported). Two on Sprint, and two on Verizon.

We’re very happy we were able to work with these partners to reach this agreement.

It’s up to other carriers how to set the pricing and availability of our service on their network and associated devices.

Best wishes,
–Ian
Pandora Listener Support

If all the above is true it means that AT&T effectively taxing everyone who’s not an iPhone user for using data plan they already paying for. Why this is happening – because AT&T thinks they’ve got it all and can get away with anything they want or because of some other reason – I don’t know. There’s a thread on AT&T’s forums, but no official response has been issued yet.

Pandora’s blog has it this way (in response to comments of disappointed users):

…we share your desire to see Pandora be made available for free on our AT&T implementations. In the mobile world, the carrier has all of the pricing power. If you try to go around their wishes they can, and will, block traffic to your application. Our strong preference is for Pandora to be available ad-supported free everywhere and we’ll continue to work with AT&T in the hopes that they’ll come around to the same view for the Windows Mobile phones on their network.

On the other hand, the Pandora application is available from PPCGeeks forum. I swapped SIM card from AT&T Tilt into Samsung Blackjack and testing the app right now. So far the quality is decent (close to FM radio) (as I am sitting home within stable 3G zone) and delay between songs (while the buffering occurs) is acceptable.

In any case, there remains less and less competition in mobile markets and providers are pulling all sorts of unfair deals knowing that customers will either eat it or not, but there’s really no serious alternative between AT&T and Verizon (Sprint and T-Mobile are really not in the same field).

Yesterday I noticed that the very first domain I ever tried to own, but never did – CatBegemot.com (it’s coming from here, if you must know. Not that I am infatuated with Woland figure, it’s just that specific character – Cat Begemot – is very appealing to me.) is actually free (as in Deleted and available again), so I decided to waste no time and grab it. Unfortunately, the place I am working from right now blocks the access to all three domain registrars I am using – GoDaddy, Moniker and NameCheap.

No problem, I said, I have a smart phone (it’s AT&T Tilt at the moment, equipped with Windows Mobile 6), so I’ll just go get it from there! Yeah, right.

Namecheap loaded fine, but refused to acknoledge my credentials. No matter how many times I reloaded web site and tried to sign on – no luck. I was thrown back to the same page requiring login and password. Sorry, Namecheap, no business for you today.

Moniker loaded fine too, even allowed me to sign into my account. Next step – check if domain is available. I never realized it until that day that every time you check for domain name Moniker checks for all the available extentions. Guess it’s an upselling technique. What threw me off was those AJAXy boxes that roll for a moment and then present you with a checkbox – empty if domain is available or filled if it is taken. Obviously, boxes never got their AJAX stuff to work, so no way to register domain there too. Moving on.

GoDaddy was the scariest place to go on my smartphone, mainly because you can hardly see any useful features behind heavy advertising. Just imagining all that mess on a tiny (comparing to 1920×1200 24″ screen I have at home) smart phone screen was giving me creeps. Nevertheless, I jumped on the task. Quite a few minutes later, when all the junk loaded over my 3G connection, I was able to log in and submit a domain search. As you might have guessed, another button was teh culprit. The Go To Checkout button happened to be powered by some AJAX or JavaScript or whatnot and simply doesn’t work on mobile version of Internet Explorer. Sorry, you loose!

It wouldn’t be me if I left the problem unresolved. A little search around turned up two unblocked providers – Joker and Name.com. While I’ve stumbled on more than one occasion of negative feedback about Joker on WHT, the Name.com sounded like a reasonable choice, so that’s where I went. The whole transaction took no more than ten minutes and ta-da! Finally, after almost 10 years of exile, the catbegemot.com is in my posession.