The New York Times today looks upon the plight of poor AT&T, saddled with millions of new customers paying thousands of dollars a year. Jenna Wortham writes:

Slim and sleek as it is, the iPhone is really the Hummer of cellphones. It’s a data guzzler. Owners use them like minicomputers, which they are, and use them a lot. Not only do iPhone owners download applications, stream music and videos and browse the Web at higher rates than the average smartphone user, but the average iPhone owner can also use 10 times the network capacity used by the average smartphone user.

If that 10x number didn’t come from AT&T, where did it come from? Seems like they might be starting a “we didn’t want the iPhone anyway” campaign so that investors treat them more nicely when they (are rumored to) lose their carrier exclusivity next year.

The result is dropped calls, spotty service, delayed text and voice messages and glacial download speeds as AT&T’s cellular network strains to meet the demand. Another result is outraged customers.

So even with AT&T’s outrageous prices, they can’t make this work? This week I’m canceling my AT&T service because it would cost $150 a month to get what T-Mobile charges me $80 for. (Two lines with shared minutes, texting on both lines, unlimited data on one, and even tethering. I also love T-Mobile’s customer service, staffed by friendly humans who don’t just read from scripts.)

With nine million users paying in excess of $100 a month apiece, they’re grossing a billion dollars a month, and they’re complaining about having to upgrade their network? They could probably fund rebuilding their entire network from scratch with the $15/month they charge to send more than 200 text messages. (Text messages are pure profit, because they’re sent using extra space in packets sent between the phone and the carrier.)

All of the cited problems, of course, would be lessened without carrier exclusivity. Don’t want 9 million iPhone customers clogging the network? Then don’t sign a deal requiring that you’re the only network they have access to. Hilarious.

But! The real reason I’m posting is because of the photos that accompany the article, including a shot of the AT&T command center and its big board:

A few thoughts:

1. If they’re gonna make it look like an orchestra pit, then I hope the head of IT is wearing tails.
2. Do they get night & weekend minutes because the lights are out? Wouldn’t the staff be a little happier if the lights were turned on?
3. And most important, I wonder what kind of coverage they get in there. It looks like the kind of underground bunker where you can’t get any signal. And if I’m not mistaken, those look like land lines on the desks.

Via this Slate article from Farhad Manjoo (writer of tech-hype articles with Salon and now Slate), I just read about Droid, the typeface used in Google’s new Android phones. More specifically, he references this Forbes article, describing the background of the font, and its creator, Steve Matteson of Ascender Corporation in Elk Grove, Illinois.

Some background from the Forbes piece:

In fonts, Google has a predilection for cute letters and bright primary colors, as showcased in the company’s own logo. But for Android Google wanted a font with “common appeal,” Davis says. Ascender’s chief type designer, Steve Matteson, who created the Droid fonts, says Google requested a design that was friendly and approachable. “They wanted to see a range of styles, from the typical, bubbly Google image to something very techno-looking,” Matteson says.

The sweet spot—and the final look for Droid—fell somewhere in the middle. Matteson’s first design was “bouncy”: a look in line with the Google logo’s angled lowercase “e.” Google passed on the design because it was “a little too mannered,” Matteson says. “There was a fine line between wanting the font to have character but not cause too much commotion.”

Another proposal erred on the side of “techno” with squared-off edges reminiscent of early computer typefaces. That too was rejected, along with several others, in favor of a more neutral design that Matteson describes as “upright with open forms, but not so neutral as a design like, say, Helvetica.”

I haven’t had a chance to play with an Android phone (as much as I’ve been happy with T-Mobile, particularly their customer service, do I re-up with them for two years just to throw money at alpha hardware?) so I can’t say much about the face, but I find the font angle fascinating, particular in light of Apple’s Helvetica-crazy iPhone and iPod Touch. (Nothing says late 1950s Switzerland quite like a touch-screen interface mobile phone, after all.)

Ascender Corporation also seems to be connected to the hideously named C@#$(*$ fonts found in Windows Vista and Office 2007: Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, Corbel, Cariadings. In the past several years, Microsoft has shown a notable and impressive commitment to typography (most notably, hiring Matthew Carter to create Verdana, and other decisions of that era), but the new C* fonts have that same air of creepiness of a family who names all their kids with names that start with the same letter. I mean sure, they’re terrific people, but man, isn’t that just a little…unnecessary?

I apologize that I’ve been too busy and distracted with preparing Processing 1.0 to have any time to post things here, but here’s a quickie so that the page doesn’t just rot into total embarrassment.

Slate this morning announced the availability of a poll tracking application for the iPhone:

I haven’t yet ponied up ninety nine of my hard-earned cents to buy it but find it oddly fascinating. Is there actually any interest for this? Is this a hack? Is there a market for such things? Is the market simply based on the novelty of it? Is it possible to quantify the size of the poll-obsessed political junkie market? And how is that market comprised—what percentage of those people are part of campaigns, versus just people who spend too much time reading political news? (I suspect the former is negligible, but may be tainted as a card-carrying member of the latter group.)

To answer my own questions, I suspect that it was thrown together by a couple of people from the tech side of the organization (meaning “hack” in the best sense of the word), who then sold management on it, with the rationale of 1) it’ll generate a little press (or hype on, um, blogs), 2) it’ll reinforce Slate readers’ interest in or connection to the site, and 3) it’s a little cool and trendy. I don’t think they’re actually planning to make money on it (or recoup any development costs), but that the price tag has more to do with 99¢ sounds more valuable and interesting than a free giveaway.

Of course, anyone with more interesting insights (let alone useful facts), please pass them along. I’m hoping it’s an actual Cocoa app, and not just a special link to web pages reformatted for the iPhone, which would largely invalidate this post and extinguish my own curiosity about the beast.

Update: The application is a branded reincarnation of a poll tracker developed by Aaron Brethorst at Chimp Software. Here’s his blog post announcing the change, and even a press release.

By way of Darling Furball, a blog post by Steven Frank, co-founder of Panic, on his personal opinion of Apple’s gated community of software distribution, the iTunes App Store:

Some of my most inviolable principles about developing and selling software are:

1. I can write any software I want. Nobody needs to “approve” it.
2. Anyone who wants to can download it. Or not.
3. I can set any price I want, including free, and there’s no middle-man.
4. I can set my own policies for refunds, coupons and other promotions.
5. When a serious bug demands an update, I can publish it immediately.
6. If I want, I can make the source code available.
7. If I want, I can participate in a someone else’s open source project.
8. If I want, I can discuss coding difficulties and solutions with other developers.

The iTunes App Store distribution model mangles almost every one of those tenets in some way, which is exasperating to me.

But, the situation’s not that clear-cut.

The entire post is very thoughtful and well worth reading, it’s also coming from a long-time Apple developer rather than some crank from an online magazine looking to stir up advertising hits. Panic’s software is wonderful: Transmit is an application that singlehandedly makes me want to use a Mac (yet it’s only, uh, an SFTP client). I think his post nicely sums up the way a lot of developers (including myself) feel about the App Store. He concludes:

I’ve been trying to reconcile the App Store with my beliefs on “how things should be” ever since the SDK was announced. After all this time, I still can’t make it all line up. I can’t question that it’s probably the best mobile application distribution method yet created, but every time I use it, a little piece of my soul dies. And we don’t even have anything for sale on there yet.

Reading this also made me curious to learn more about Panic, which led me to this interview from 2004 with Frank and the other co-founder. He also has a number of side projects, including Spamusement, a roughly drawn cartoon depicting spam headlines (Get a bigger flute, for instance).