AT&T and Apple came together in 2007 to provide the United States with the most innovative smart phone that swept the market by storm. Year after year since then, they have broken sales records and haven’t looked back. This seemed like a match made in heaven, and for both parties involved, it was. There is a problem with this match made in heaven though, and AT&T knows it’s time to change. Consumers have bad mouthed AT&T for quite some time now due to the network issues that the iPhone has caused, especially in the metropolitan areas. I don’t blame them either.
The company has been working hard to try to keep the network running as smooth as possible, but it’s pretty hard to do with a device that’s known to be a data hog, even when it doesn’t seem to be. AT&T also hasn’t had the best rep when it comes to promised 3g deployment across the USA. Well, AT&T has made some bold statements, a lot of which are publicly available 24/7 right on their website. Statements that will mean a better service for their customers in what seems to be a very near future. I’m talking about their 2011 3g and LTE deployment (Labeled as 4g by the mobile giant to compete in the marketing department with other big players).
Finally they are breaking free of the hold that iPhone exclusivity has had for the past 3.5 years, and is expanding on what consumers have been begging for. Now before you think I’m bashing the iPhone, I’m not. I’m simply stating that with having a great selling phone like the iPhone, AT&T had no real need for any other high end devices that would compete with it. They could do it all based on the iPhone. With the threat of the iPhone going to other carriers, however, AT&T now needs to put the focus onto new bleeding edge devices, and needs to put their new mobile broadband deployment into the reality of it’s consumers.
AT&T seems like they’re heading in the right direction too, with the ever promising Motorola Atrix 4g and the rest of the high end Android lineup at&t has revealed at CES 2011. Without the iPhone being the center of attention at AT&T, they know that they need to bring it hard when it comes to top of the line Android devices, since they seem to be the future. Any way, the whole point of this post, is that I want to know what you, the community, thinks of AT&T’s direction and where they’re going with the device line up and network improvements they spoke about CES 2011. Discuss below!