My attempt to switch from Win­dows Mobile to the iPhone has been thwarted by AT&T them­selves, with an assist by UPS (what can brown screw up for you?). I’m stick­ing with Win­dows Mobile for the time being, and might go with the Pre when/​if it’s ever released.

I placed my order Sun­day, know­ing it would be processed Mon­day morn­ing and with the 2-​day air ship­ping AT&T was offer­ing, I should have it today, Wednes­day. How­ever, there’s a prob­lem. Apple dic­tates that AT&T use the same address as both the ship­ping address and the credit card billing address on all iPhone orders (this is accord­ing to AT&T). When I placed the order, my “billing address” on my debit card was still my old apart­ment, not the house where I live now. This hasn’t been a prob­lem for me since I get my state­ments elec­tron­i­cally, so it really hadn’t occurred to me to change it. (It’s changed now.) I had to put my old apartment’s address as the billing/​shipping address when placed the order or the web­site wouldn’t approve my card transaction.

I called AT&T Mon­day morn­ing to let them know that the ship­ping address was out­dated. The cus­tomer ser­vice agent informed me that she couldn’t change it because it was already at the ware­house being pre­pared for ship­ping, and that I should call UPS and have them change the ship­ping address. This meant I had to sit and com­pul­sively refresh the AT&T order page Mon­day until it finally showed me a UPS track­ing num­ber. Then I called UPS.

UPS informed me that they couldn’t change the des­ti­na­tion address until the pack­age had failed deliv­ery. They had to make at least one attempt, then I could change it. So I’d just have to wait until Wednes­day, then have them change the address and deliver it to me Thursday.

So I waited. I waited all day Tues­day and all Wednes­day morn­ing, check­ing UPS’s pack­age track­ing page to see when they tried to deliver it. Finally, I saw the excep­tion pop up and that they’d tried to deliver it and failed. I called UPS.

They informed me that their con­tract with AT&T for­bids them from chang­ing the deliv­ery address once a pack­age has been shipped, and that there was noth­ing they could do on my behalf. They did say that AT&T could change the des­ti­na­tion from their end.

I called AT&T and they told me that they weren’t able to change the des­ti­na­tion address. What I needed to do was refuse the pack­age… At this point I stopped lis­ten­ing and tried to explain that I can’t refuse the pack­age because I DON’T LIVE THERE and they needed to fix this. They had two options, as far as I was con­cerned. Change the deliv­ery address and get the iPhone to me on Thurs­day, or can­cel the order entirely so I could go buy some­thing else.

AT&T refused to do either. Here’s what they said would hap­pen. UPS was going to try to make two more deliv­er­ies to the address where they now know I don’t live. Then, after they fail at an impos­si­ble task two more times, they’ll ship the iPhone back to AT&T and only then can I can­cel my order.

Call me crazy, but this doesn’t fill me with a warm fuzzy feel­ing about AT&T and their atten­tion to detail. I got con­flict­ing infor­ma­tion from both AT&T and UPS, con­flict­ing not only with each other but with what they them­selves had pre­vi­ously told me. I don’t think sign­ing up for a two year stint with AT&T, with this in mind, is the wis­est thing I could do right now.

So I’m back to a 2-​device solu­tion, my iPod Touch and an HTC Touch Pro with which I’m con­tin­u­ally dis­sat­is­fied. Even vir­tu­ally stock with no 3^rd party soft­ware, the Win­dows Mobile device is slow, buggy and unre­li­able com­pared to the iPod/​iPhone. Unfor­tu­nately, the iPhone is shack­led to only one car­rier here in the United States, a car­rier that has baf­fled me by doing what I believed was impos­si­ble: pro­vid­ing even worse cus­tomer ser­vice than Sprint.

While I will con­cede that Black­ber­ries have become real smart­phones rather than the uppity pagers of yore, I have to won­der at the thought behind this par­tic­u­lar announcement.

AT&T Rel­e­vant Products/​Services is prepar­ing for a Elec­tion Day sales surge on Nov. 4, when Research In Motion’s Black­Berry Bold will launch at AT&T’s stores nation­wide for $299.

Com­mu­ni­ca­tions — Black­Berry Bold Set for Elec­tion Day Launch

So they’re releas­ing a new prod­uct on the same day as the most impor­tant elec­tion in many of our life­times? Because that won’t be a distraction.

There have been rumors float­ing about for a while that RIM has some seri­ous prob­lems with the Black­berry Bold, among them heat and bat­tery life. Despite the hope­ful, happy tone of this press-​release-​masquerading-​an-​article, I have to seri­ously won­der if RIM/AT&T picked this date in hopes of turn­ing what had been a hotly antic­i­pated launch into a safer, lower-​profile “soft launch” in hopes that any early adopter com­plaints would be lost in the hub­bub around Obama’s elec­tion. And if there really isn’t any­thing wrong with the Bold, why choose to launch it on a day when absolutely no one will be talk­ing about it?