ArchiveMay, 2008

We’re not missing anything, are we? When you go to a cell phone store, what are your expectations? Certainly not the best price, and certainly not unbiased advice. If you could find that at the local store, there’d be no need for online stores like Wirefly.com.

So we found it amusing that this notion – that carriers and salespeople have other motivations — appears to be scandalous over in Great Britain.

As the British television investigator reports, these are “some of the mobile phone industry’s most closely guarded secrets,” secrets that “the mobile phone industry doesn’t want you to know.” We learn how “their stores sell us deals that many of us don’t want or need, and in the process make sure that they and their employers earn secret commission.”

I should invite this guy to spend a weekend at a mall in the U.S. He’d get enough material to last the rest of the year.

Television on the phone. It will be highly useful on trains, waiting for planes, or for the more brave, watching while walking down the street. What better way to while away the time in a dentist’s waiting room?

In order to watch TV signals on the phone, a couple things must first be present: a decent color screen on the phone, and a way to receive TV signals. The latter has become pretty common – almost every phone made today has a decent screen. Receiving a TV signal on the phone is a much more interesting challenge as there are several ways to accomplish this goal.

Many of the east-Asian phone companies have integrated regular TV receivers directly into the handsets allowing the users to watch regular broadcast TV. This solution so far has not been adopted into the United States. The two technologies currently found in the states can be divided into two major groups: those that rely on the data-features of the carrier and those that have discrete TV signal broadcasts.

TV as Data
Sprint and Verizon have focused on pushing TV service through their 3G data services. TV shows are converted to digital files and then sent to the phones. This technology is a close cousin of the way video is distributed on the Internet.

The Good: Since the TV signal is piped through the data services, broadcasts are generally available every place the user has a good data connection.
The Bad: Picture quality is mediocre and the TV isn’t a live feed (no sporting events).

Enter MediaFLO
AT&T has decided to go a different route to serve up TV to the cellular phone. They are rolling out a network that distributes TV via discrete signals. In a nutshell, they are broadcasting TV by itself and the phone can pick up on it. As of now, Wirefly offers two phones with AT&T’s Live TV functionality: the LG Vu CU920, and the Samsung Access.

The Good: The TV feed is live, and picture quality is pretty good.
The Bad: The current network where the signal is broadcast is currently limited to certain major citites.

The Bottom Line
TV on the mobile phone is still a developing technology and the coming years will see a lot of upgrades, alterations, and probably false starts. That being said, even somewhat choppy quality is better than nothing when stuck in a dentist’s waiting room.

Research In Motion (RIM) is launching a new high-end version of the BlackBerry cell phone this summer. The BlackBerry Bold is expected to launch in mid-summer on the AT&T Network 3G (probably late summer on Wirefly; we expect it to cost between $300 and $400. It is aimed at BlackBerry’s core base of business and power users.

From sources all around the web, plus the official press release, here are the key features differentiating the BOLD:

• Superior Performance. Supports tri-band HSDPA high-speed networks around the world and comes with integrated GPS and Wi-Fi. The BlackBerry Bold will come preloaded with 1 GB of memory and will support up to 16 GB in capacity.

• Stunning Display. The screen resolution is twice as vivid as the current Curve 8310 model, making for a very sharp display.

• Rich Multimedia. 2-Megapixel camera with video recording capability media player for watching movies and managing music collections.

• Powerful WiFi & GPS. Integrated GPS, WiFi and a host of multimedia features. Improved rendering capabilities, faster download speeds and ability to support simultaneous voice and data. The BlackBerry Bold smartphone even allows users to navigate while on a call.

• Talk time of 5 hours, with standby of 13 days.

• Black leather back panel that can be swapped for other color leather plates.

Like the Curve and the Pearl, BlackBerry’s consumer-oriented phones, the Bold will likely expand RIM’s user base of 14 million consumers. It’s a beautiful and BOLD cell phone.

Touched off by Verizon Wireless’ introduction of Unlimited Plans back in mid-February of this year, all of the major wireless providers are now offering Unlimited Calling Plans to new and existing customers.

Unlimited plans are not new to the industry, both Cricket and Metro PCS have long offered these types of plans as one of their key differentiators. The original “AT&T Wireless” briefly offered an unlimited plan for $99.99 (called the Charter Plan) back in third quarter of 2002 to promote their new GSM/GPRS network. However, this is the first time that all of the wireless providers are in on this new “category” of plan. Yes I say “category” because I suspect that unlimited plans may actually be here to stay - at least for some.

For $99.99, Sprint tops the competition with the “Simply Everything” plan, which includes almost everything - Unlimited: Voice, Data (email & web), Messaging, and Push-to-Talk. T-Mobile is the next best value with Unlimited Voice and Text Messaging for $99.99.

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