Privacy also took a swift, hard roshambo in the rights this year as everything from Apple’s poorly coded location recording system to Google, Facebook, and Twitter being forced into decade, or double decade privacy oversight, to lack of disclosure surrounding Carrier IQ making headline. On the flip side, the media earned more than their usual share of fail points for once again never missing a chance to linkbait and headline grab at Apple’s expense.

Netflix decided to take one the most successful, most loved brands in modern media and jack up the prices without proper PR, then split the company into Qwikster, then not split the company, then… we got lost. Instead of making streaming more solid and reliable — and available internationally — they spun in circles. Twitter likewise decided that poor communications, creating unease and distrust among developers, the #dickbar, and now the #dickapp re-design, and generally putting their user base last is something they’re now big enough not to have to care about.

And then there were the patent problems — Apple and Android makers suing each other, Lodsys suing independent developers, and generally everyone taking the tools of innovation and wielding them for consternation.

Vote up top and tell us why you voted they way you did in the comments! These are your awards, so get to it!

• See all 2011 TiPb Readers’ Choice Award polls

The 2010 TiPb Awards have begun and it’s time to vote on all your favorites. This time it’s a booby prize of sorts, the iPhone/iPad/Apple #fail of the year. Hey, every device and company has its share of ups and downs, right? With Apple level highs can only come equally deep lows, and 2010 saw some doozies!

But there can only be one 2010 TiPb Award winner, so vote up in the pole above and then let us know why you chose the #fail you did in comments below. (And if you don’t see your favorite #fail here, add it as a write-in as well!)

• White iPhone 4
• Antennagate
• No camera on iPad
• Proximity sensor bug
• Ping
• No custom SMS tones in iOS 4.2

Ready, set, vote!

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We start discussing iOS 4.1 and Game Center but Skype and Ustream kill the podcast half way through. To be continued in iPad live #21 this Sunday. Apologies to everyone! (And don’t ask about the puppets!)

Credits

Thanks to the TiPb iPhone accessory store for sponsoring the podcast, and to everyone who showed up for the live chat!

Our music comes from the following sources:

• I Called You — iPhone Remix by Pete Leidy
via Sneakmove iPhone Ringtone Challenge

According to a Gizmodo reader who took his iPhone to the Apple Store Genius Bar due to issues with dropped calls, he was told a 30% failure rate in New York City is normal.

Now, we all know AT&T’s network crumbles beneath the weight of the iPhone (and suspect any other single network might as well), but it’s not often we get numbers to go with it.

AT&T claims to be improving their network and adding more frequency, but with a fail rate that high, New Yorkers will believe it when their calls stop dropping.

The minute our iPhone calendars turned from August 31 to September 1, TiPb’s email box started getting many colorful variations of “Summer is over, where’s our [redacted redacted redacted... redacted!] MMS and tethering!

While Apple showed off the front-end for MMS and tethering back in March, released it along with iPhone 3.0 in June, and most of the rest of the world has been enjoying it ever since, AT&T is a notable, and increasingly infuriating exception. Late summer (and when is that exactly?), and that it will be no extra charge, is all they’ve said. And whether you personally would use MMS or not, right now you don’t even have that choice.

We’ve heard all the excuses, from AT&T’s network can barely handle the iPhone as-is, and MMS and especially tethering would bring it, crashing and burning, to its knees, to a rumor that AT&T had to manually turn on MMS for every single iPhone account on their system. We’ve also heard it may be announced as part of Apple’s September 9th event. That would be very late summer indeed.

But that’s all we’ve heard. There’s been no status update from AT&T that we can find, no attempt to keep their users in the loop, no expression of sympathy for the frustration their users are voicing (or emailing us!). AT&T is being almost Apple-esque in their lack of communications and for a company that’s in the communications business — and is charging high monthly rates to its consumers — that’s just not good enough.

Is it?

PREVIOUSLY: Gizmodo is reporting the dreaded AT&T DATA DOWN! for Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana. Any iPhone users having problems there or thereabouts? Let us — and each other — know in the comments.

UPDATE 2: The error turns out to be the human kind (via GeekBrief.tv):

We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.

UPDATE: Looks like it’s fixed. Anyone still seeing the problem?

Looks like Google Search may be having some trouble this morning! As I write this, every search on Google, including searches for Google, get flagged as “may harm your computer” and if you click the link, you get an intercept page with an even bigger warning.

I’m guessing the engineers in Mountain View are on it, so enjoy the fun-making while it lasts!

NOTE: It only seems to be broken (for me!) if you’re not logged in (i.e. not logged into Gmail or any other Google service). If you’re logged in, Google search returns results normally.

[Thanks Antony for the tip!]