Still waiting to get your hands on the new iPhone 3G S? Here’s something that should occupy you for a few minutes while you wait: A side-by-side-by-side-by-side comparison of four iterations of iPhones going through various speed tests, performed by Pali Research analyst Walt Piecyk. And as a bonus, a clip of the new iPhone vs. the Palm Pre, featuring a surprise twist.
Did you wait in line this morning to buy a new iPhone 3G S? If you want to take advantage of its “tethering” feature and use it as a modem, you’re going to have to wait a while longer. And you’ll have to pay–though it’s unclear how much that’s going to cost.
Don’t want to pay $1 for a song on iTunes? Try $80,000 a pop. That’s what a federal jury in Minneapolis has told a woman to pay the music industry for illegally downloading 24 songs, bringing her total bill to $1.92 million. Her response: “Good luck trying to get it, because you can’t get blood out of a turnip.”
I’m a Sprint customer, so the wireless company knows where I live, how to find me online, what kind of phone I have and what I spend each month. And it knows my contract expires at the end of the month. So why isn’t it trying hard to keep me from the clutches of AT&T and its iPhone?
Comcast and Disney didn’t see eye to eye over the latter’s decision to join Hulu last month. But they’re still able to work together on other online video projects. Hence today’s announcement that ESPN, the Disney-owned sports behemoth, will be offering its streaming video service to 17 million Comcast broadband subs.
Nope, Twitter still hasn’t trotted out a business model yet, and that may or may not be a problem for potential acquirers like Google or Microsoft. But it’s a nonissue for a growing number of start-ups hoping to succeed simply by positioning themselves in Twitter’s general vicinity. Today’s example: StockTwits, a day-trader-meets-Twitter site that just raised $800,000 from venture capital firm True Ventures.
Mystery solved, sort of: AT&T is taking the blame for crippling the SlingPlayer iPhone app. The company’s rationale: The iPhone’s too powerful, and our network isn’t powerful enough.
The SlingPlayer iPhone app–software that lets you watch programming from your own TV on your Apple handset–will go on sale at iTunes sometime after midnight Eastern tonight. But it’s missing a crucial feature–the ability to work over AT&T’s network. What happened? “Ask Apple,” says a SlingPlayer rep.
Next to no news from the Apple earnings call this afternoon, which is just the way Apple execs like their earnings calls. Once again, the company provided no information about CEO Steve Jobs’s health except to note that he is still scheduled to come back to work in June. And the company continued to pooh-pooh the concept of netbooks–supercheap, supersmall laptops with very little horsepower that are the hottest part of the PC business right now.
Recession or not, there are plenty of people still willing to plunk down $199 or more for a high-end phone. Especially if it’s Apple’s iPhone: AT&T reports that it activated more than 1.6 million iPhones in the last quarter. If you’re a glass half-empty sort, you could note that the number is down from 1.9 million in the last quarter of 2008, and down from 2.4 million in the quarter before that. But AT&T isn’t complaining.
That was quick. Time Warner Cable is shelving plans to charge its Internet customers based on usage. For now, that is.
The cable giant had planned on charging customers in four locations on a “consumption” plan in which they’d pay between $15 to $150 a month based on the amount of data they hoovered via the Web. But noisy opposition to the plan surfaced immediately and has been getting louder over the past few weeks.
More drum-beating from Eric Massa, the Democratic congressman who has decided to make an enemy/example out of Time Warner Cable, which wants to charge its broadband customers based on their Web usage. The New York rep says he’ll introduce a bill that will prevent Time Warner and other pipe providers from “capping” their broadband offerings.
A New York congressman has a message for cable companies that want drop their all-you-can-eat broadband Internet plans: Don’t even think about it. That instruction comes from Rep. Eric Massa, a Democrat who represents the Rochester area, and it’s aimed specifically at Time Warner Cable, which is starting to experiment with broadband “caps” in Massa’s hometown. But any of the big Internet pipe players contemplating charging their users on a per-use basis–and most of them are–can expect to get similar blowback from lawmakers.
Last week, AT&T and Federated Media debuted “March Tweetness,” a Twitter-endorsed page geared around the March Madness college basketball tournament. It was Twitter’s second attempt at what amounted to an advertising play, and I thought it looked modestly promising. And now it’s gone. At least temporarily. The problem? No one checked with the NCAA, which keeps a tight grip on any and all college sports trademarks.
Earlier this week, Twitter started rolling out its first ad experiment–an “ExecTweet” page, sponsored by Microsoft. Here’s the next one–a “March Tweetness” page, sponsored by AT&T.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
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