Yesterday, I received the digital tablet that I won in a drawing at the recent IABC World Conference in San Diego. No, not an Apple iPad…a Blackberry Playbook.

My expectation that this would finally replace my long-dead and missed Palm T/X was soon shattered. Turns out that the Playbook doesn’t offer a contact/calendar feature that I thought would be standard on these tablets.

No, to get those, I would need to use the Blackberry Bridge software to add the contacts and calendar items from my Blackberry smartphone.

Trouble was, I didn’t have a Blackberry smartphone. Neither does 99.9% of the world’s population. This seemed like either a real oversight by Blackberry, or a misconceived plan to attract tons of new business on the strength of the Playbook’s appeal.

In my case, it kind of worked. Rather than hand my new Playbook over to my teenaged daughter, I looked into my AT&T contract, and saw that, for an $18 fee and 2-year recommitment, I could get a refurbished Blackberry Pearl smartphone.

So I did that this morning, and expect the “new” Blackberry Pearl to arrive sometime next week.

I hope that Blackberry hasn’t gone out of business by then, based on the bad news that I read later.

This is another reason why Apple continues to dominate. Its competitors keep shooting themselves in the foot, while Apple methodically churns out nice products that people buy in droves. Unless those people get stuck with the leftovers, like me.

Advertising Age yesterday posted a video in which Verizon CMO John Stratton discusses the “Map War” it is conducting with rival service provider AT&T.

In the video, Stratton states that the cellular service provider market has cycled back to a focus on network reliability, rather than available phone choices, as the primary differentiator among service providers. Of course, as AdAge points out, Verizon has hung its marketing hat on network reliabilty ever since it introduced us to the “Can you hear me now?” guy.

I don’t know whether Stratton is correct that customers will focus more on network reliability than phone products. He admitted that the introduction of the Apple iPhone disrupted marketing when tens of thousands of customers drooled over the iPhone and had no problem going with AT&T, which had an exclusive distribution agreement.

I experienced something similar today at work, when I overheard a coworker talking about his new Motorola Droid, which he purchased through a Verizon “buy one, get one free” promotion. I asked him if he was happy with Verizon, and he said, “Oh yeah, the coverage is great.” But he really wanted to show us the cool features of the Droid.

Back around 1990, when I was working in the public relations department at Cellular One in Schaumburg, Ill., network reliability and reach were the primary marketing angles used by us and our primary competitor, Ameritech. At Cellular One, we ran story after story about the most recent cell towers that we built, and how that would improve coverage and reliability. We couldn’t keep our coverage maps as current as we would have liked, because new cell towers were being introduced at a fairly rapid pace.

But that began to change for two main reasons:

• Local communities became disenchanted with the many cell towers dotting their landscapes, and were less inclined to approve new towers, and
• Reception with existing towers was average-to-good over the majority of Cellular One's "coverage area."

But all of the talk of coverage and network reliability ignores a basic fact that continues to be ignored by the media and service providers:

After you achieve a base level of network coverage, the experience of a particular customer depends far more on that customer's travel and cellphone usage patterns than the company that provides the cellular service.

For all of the advertisements that we see and hear that are focused on the benefits of a 3G or 4G network, the fact remains that the root of any cellular service is the transmission of data through the air. Those transmissions can be limited or blocked by natural and man-made obstacles including trees, hills, bridges, and buildings.

No cellular provider has the resources needed to blanket every city or state with unbroken cellular service. So–with the exception of occasional service outages that might occur at a particular cell tower–a customer’s impression of a network’s reliability will depend upon how many “dead spots” exist for that customer as he or she travels. That experience will be different for every customer.

That’s why I chose AT&T as my service provider. I talked with many people who live and work in the same general geographic area as me. I heard their experiences with AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and others. In my case, AT&T was considered to be more reliable by most people with whom I talked, and, in fact, I have been very satisfied with its service. Yet at the IABC World Conference in San Francisco last June, I spoke with Shel Holtz, ABC, who was looking forward to getting a new Palm Pre through Sprint. He had several unsatisfactory experiences with AT&T before he “abandoned” AT&T several years prior to writing the review of the Palm Pre on his blog.

It may not be wise for all cellular service providers to put all of their marketing chips into one basket, whether it be network reliability, new products, price or something else. Find what resonates and stick with it, as long as you can support any claims that you make. I get a sense that neither Verizon nor AT&T have been able to make an airtight case in the “Map Wars” battles.

Let me know what you think. Call me, if you have enough bars.

One week ago, I was in the process of getting my two teenagers new mobile phones at our local AT&T store. The knowledgeable and helpful store employee took time to pitch a new service being rolled out by AT&T: FamilyMap.

The service sounded interesting. Here is how FamilyMap is described on AT&T’s website:

Locate your family members with AT&T FamilyMap!

Get peace of mind by being able to conveniently locate a family member’s wireless phone on a map from your mobile phone or PC.

Want to verify that your child arrives home from school each day? Set up a Schedule Check to automatically get location information sent to you via text message or email.

Locate any phone indoors or outdoors on the AT&T Network!

Doesn’t that sound great? Who wouldn’t want to be able to locate a family member in an emergency, or just for “peace of mind”? I decided to sign up for a 30-day trial.

Even after just one week, I can say with confidence that FamilyMap is going to lose customers pretty quickly. The reason? It’s not accurate enough.

How it works
Let’s let the AT&T FamilyMap site explain it:

AT&T FamilyMap uses a number of techniques to determine a phone’s location. AT&T phones that have A-GPS (Assisted GPS) return the most accurate locations when they have a clear line of sight to GPS satellites. For example, the phone is outside or is in a car near a window. For phones where A-GPS is not available, FamilyMap uses cell tower information to provide the most accurate location possible, which is usually within a few hundred yards to a few miles of the phone’s actual location. This includes iPhones, non A-GPS phones, as well as A-GPS phones that are not in a clear line of sight to GPS satellites.

In some situations, AT&T FamilyMap will not be able to locate a phone. The most common reasons are:

• The phone that you are trying to locate is deep inside a building or car.
• The phone is surrounded by tall buildings, hills, or trees.
• The phone is powered off.
• The phone’s battery has run out.
• The phone is not in AT&T network coverage.
• Service on the particular line/number has been terminated or suspended.

Another step to take “for security reasons” is to send a text message to each person you want to track, and they need to accept the text.

For security reasons, phones receive a text message from AT&T FamilyMap when they become locatable. Additionally, locatable phones receive a periodic notification via text message that they can be located. These messages are received about once a month.

When I signed up for the FamilyMap trial, I pictured being able to locate either of my kids when I needed to reach them and didn’t know where they were. But I won’t be able to find them if they are outside of the AT&T coverage area or have their phone turned off.

Heck, as my experience shows, I might not be able to find them even if they are within three feet of me–if I rely on the results of the FamilyMap search.

Just before writing this, I asked FamilyMap to locate me and my daughter. I had confiscated my daughter’s mobile phone until she finished her homework, so it was sitting on the computer desk, about 3 feet from my mobile phone. Here is the result:

You can see that it shows us blocks apart. You can’t tell that it has neither of us located at our home. In fact it has both of us about one mile away from our house!

In several trials, I was only impressed once by the service’s ability to locate someone. It did show exactly where my son was umpiring a baseball game at a local field. But that was the ONLY example of an accurate result.

AT&T, why would you think that sending a parent on a wild goose chase to find a child would bring us “peace of mind”?

I’m going back to the “old school” method of sending a text to my kids and having them tell me where they are. The answer may still be inaccurate, but I won’t be paying $14.99 per month for it!