Your screwed if your really serious about moving away from AT&T and going with Sprint and/or Verizon for decent GPS smartphones.

The only ones that really ever worked for me are the Nokia N95 3G version or the E90 Communicator.. the E90 is not 3G though..just EDGE.

Neither relies on Cingular for Telenav or that crap.. their GPS is independent of the Cingular/AT&T network and works really well.

The Windows Devices are brutal in terms of GPS support and interface (not to mention speed)

Good luck.. all Cell Phone carriers are pretty much the same in terms of nickel and diming you these days.. but at least with AT&T I can buy unbranded unlocked phones from Nokia and not have to worry about Carrier crippled phones.

I'm in the same boat as Pyro, but am a Verizon subscriber. Not after my contract runs out early next year, though.

I've considered that phone, but the Zack Morris form factor makes me pause.

Man where do you live? I've been rocking 3G almost everywhere I travel.. my Symbian Slingbox client is awesome now.. I was wowing people on the plane on Sunday when we landed pulling up the Eagles game live as we sat in the plan waiting for the doors to open.

I would say quite the reverse.. our Tower investments are doing nicely mainly from AT&T orders for increased capacity..

Dropped calls arent capacity issues.. not making a call at all is capacity.. which was a huge issue in Las Vegas for me.. that whole area needs a serious boost in the amount of towers servicing LV. You may drop calls if your swapping towers while your on the train or car and the tower you jump to is at capacity.. that will drop a call... is that what you mean?

I know people in Cincinnati who have AT&T service, which supposedly covers the entire area, and occasionally they get hit with roaming charges for calls made when they were sitting in their houses.

I went through the whole "should I switch cell carriers" thing about two months ago. I asked tons of people at work and around if they liked their cellphone service and the resounding opinion was that AT&T and Sprint both suck big time in our area, and T-Mobile has some relatively large areas that are just dead all around. This doesn't even begin to account for the number of people I talked to who despise Cincinati Bell.

I ended up sticking with Verizon. I've had like three or four dropped calls in all the years I've been on the service, and every single one was to a person on another cell network.

The service is overpriced and I wish they had some cheaper plans with lower minute counts but at the moment I'm willing to pay the extra to get service that actually works.

Do you have the old-style CDMA AT&T network? If so, yes, that sucks, and you need a new phone. AT&T's GSM network is much, much better. (technically, it's probably not as good, but it has much better coverage.)

At one time, when they were a direct spinoff of AT&T, they had a CDMA network that was pretty good. For some reason, they decided they wanted to switch to GSM, but they tried to do it on the cheap, by converting existing towers from CDMA to GSM. This resulted in major impairment to BOTH networks, because they both needed ALL the towers... each network had only half what it needed. Subscribers were leaving in droves.... to save a few hundred million in capital costs, they ended up destroying something like, geeze, four billion in shareholder value? It was pretty messed up. So Cingular bought them. They were using GSM all the way along, and continued the rollout of more GSM towers. They maintained the existing CDMA towers in parallel. Then, the parent AT&T bought Cingular, so it's come full circle and it's AT&T Wireless again.(!) And they started dismantling the CDMA network completely and forcing everyone to GSM, but I don't think they've done it in all areas yet.

I find the GSM coverage to be pretty acceptable most places; it's quite good in the South, which was Cingular's stomping grounds. Their 2g data network sucks, but it's better than nothing, and it works pretty much everywhere. Google Maps is very fast even on very limited bandwidth; they do some amazing work with a tiny bit of data.

So, upshot: if you're still on a CDMA phone, that might be the problem. If you're on GSM, maybe you just have one that has crummy reception? On GSM, you can generally swap your SIM into other phones, so you can try a different unit to see if it really is bad coverage in your area.

sh*t, I might have to short it...

Well, swapping your SIM into another phone will let you prove that it's AT&T... from there, assuming it still sucks, maybe you should ask locals what they're using? I personally know very little about cellphone coverage nationwide.