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As the list of smart things you can do with smartphones grows, so does the risk of identity theft if you lose it.
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Here we show you a cool Windows 7 skin for Windows Mobile using Wisebar Advanced Desktop. To get it, click here: pocketnow.com
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A couple of questionable pieces of evidence have recently been made public that point to the existence of two potential Windows Phone 7 devices.
First up is an unspecified AT&T Windows Phone 7 device. A released photo of an AT&T retail sign provided some evidence that the phone could hit the market some time over the next few months. The second piece of evidence comes from a supposedly pictured T-Mobile roadmap for the second half of 2010. Included in the picture is the HTC Schubert, a Windows Phone 7 device discovered by Conflipper.
Windows Phone Thoughts will keep you updated as these rumors are either confirmed or debunked.
Check out the rest: Windows Mobile News copy
AT&T doesn’t want mobile data usage to slow, but it’s herding users toward new punitive mobile data plans and Wi-Fi hotspots. The company handled 20 million Wi-Fi connections in first five weeks of 2010, the same number as all of 2008, said John Donovan, AT&T CTO of Operations, speaking at the MobileBeat conference in San Francisco today. And today 51 percent of AT&T’s post-paid subscribers have devices that handle both voice and data, with an additional 5.8 million non-voice-centric data devices.
AT&T CTO of Operations John Donovan
So basically, there’s a crapload of demand for data delivered to mobile devices — which “shortens the distance between intention and action,” as Donovan put it. “By 2014, total traffic in 2008 rounds to zero.”
Donovan acknowledged existing strains on AT&T’s network. “We will move heaven and earth to get out in front of this demand,” he said.
But AT&T is sending mixed messages on mobile bandwidth consumption. On the one hand, it’s abandoning the precedent of basically unlimited mobile data — with new usage-based pricing charging up to $75 per GB. That will surely have effects on both users and developers taking pains to consume less data. Perhaps, though, they’ll move to Wi-Fi.
On the other hand, Donovan talked up the tremendous continuing growth of bandwidth-hogging apps like video. From the fall of 2009 to spring 2010, Donovan said, YouTube daily video views doubled to 2 billion views per day. “We agree with Cisco,” he said, citing that company’s projection that 90 percent of web traffic will be video by 2013. “This video wave is going to be big.”
Donovan is hoping big bandwidth usage will mean big money for AT&T. He said he expects the company to be involved in creating its own apps and “enablement layer,” in addition to providing mobile infrastructure. That could point to plans to get more hands-on with mobile OS competitors, and try to own more value-added services as part of customers’ monthly bills. “We have experience in the wired broadband side in how these things can take shape and we’ve got to jump in and compete for everything that we do,” Donovan said.
Thirty-four percent of U.S. cellphone owners have used their mobile device to record a video, 54 percent to send someone a photo or video, 20 percent to watch a video, and 15 percent to post a photo or video online, according to the most recent data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
Will Metered Mobile Data Slow the App Market’s Growth?
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MobileBeat 2010, VentureBeat’s third annual conference on the future of mobile, starts on Monday at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Recently added to the program is John Donovan, CTO of AT&T Operations, who completes a powerful keynote lineup that includes Phil McKinney, VP & CTO of HP’s Personal System Groups, Omar Khan, Chief Strategy Officer of Samsung, and Omar Hamoui, AdMob founder and now Google’s VP of Mobile Ads. Newly added panelists include Christy Wyatt of Motorola Mobile Devices, Pooja Midha of MTV Networks Digital and Ian McKerlich of T-Mobile who join a stellar array of insiders such as Erick Tseng of Facebook and Kevin Thau of Twitter.
GigaOM readers can click here to use the promo code “VB-gigaom” to get 15% off. Join 500 mobile industry leaders — from the major U.S and international carriers, to the top device makers, developers, startups, marketers, investors, and press — for two packed days of exciting content, power networking, and deal-making.
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What’s the new corporate spectator sport? How about throwing your partners under the bus. Learning from Apple, which has made that particular practice an art form, AT&T says a software bug in Alcatel-Lucent’s gear is the reason why the upload (or uplink, in jargon) speeds dropped significantly over past few days. I had reported about the speed bumps over the weekend. In response to widespread complaints, AT&T issued this statement today:
AT&T and Alcatel-Lucent jointly identified a software defect — triggered under certain conditions — that impacted uplink performance for Laptop Connect and smartphone customers using 3G HSUPA-capable wireless devices in markets with Alcatel-Lucent equipment. This impacts less than two percent of our wireless customer base. While Alcatel-Lucent develops the appropriate software fix, we are providing normal 3G uplink speeds and consistent performance for affected customers with HSUPA-capable devices.
That statement shows that AT&T’s upload speed problems are bigger than the company has let on. Two percent of AT&T’s wireless customer base works out to approximately 1.74 million of the total 87 million wireless customers. Or roughly 6.5 percent of their total 26.8 million 3G customers at the end of Q1 2010.
Check out the rest: GigaOM
Guess what is the new corporate spectator sport? How about throwing your partners under the bus. Learning from Apple which has made “throwing partners under the bus” into an art form, AT&T says a software bug in Alcatel-Lucent’s gear is the reason why the upload (or uplink in jargon) speeds dropped significantly over past few days. I had reported about the speed bumps over the weekend. In response to widespread complaints, AT&T issued this statement today:
AT&T and Alcatel-Lucent jointly identified a software defect — triggered under certain conditions – that impacted uplink performance for Laptop Connect and smartphone customers using 3G HSUPA-capable wireless devices in markets with Alcatel-Lucent equipment. This impacts less than two percent of our wireless customer base. While Alcatel-Lucent develops the appropriate software fix, we are providing normal 3G uplink speeds and consistent performance for affected customers with HSUPA-capable devices.
Check out the rest: GigaOM
AT&T today announced a mobile payment processing service for all of the carrier’s smartphones, that enables vendors to take credit and debit card payments on the go. AT&T is working with Apriva, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based company that provides point-of-sale transaction technologies for the wireless market, to deliver the service. With the new offering, AT&T is looking to own a small slice of the mobile payment market, estimated to generate more than $633 billion in transactions by 2014.
AT&T’s AprivaPay service starts at $14.95 per month for mobile vendors who want to process payments via a browser. By using a web client, AT&T can offer the service on its entire line of smartphones. Business owners that use a Microsoft Windows Mobile 6 device can opt for the $19.95-a-month AprivaPay Professional, a full, rich client that supports Bluetooth wireless printing and credit card readers. AT&T says that actual card transactions are handled by Total Merchant Services, which charges vendors using AprivaPay its own processing fees as well.
The AprivaPay offering is another method AT&T is using to shed the “dumb pipe” stigma facing wireless providers and to goose revenue. But the carrier faces challengers in an increasingly crowded market — Square launched with an iPhone card reader in May, while VeriFone’s PAYware Mobile reader arrived even earlier this year. Such software and services focus mainly on Apple’s devices. Since not every mobile vendor has embraced the iPhone just yet, AprivaPay gives AT&T a chance to gain payment processing customers — and revenue — on other platforms.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): A Mobile Payments Glossary
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Japanese wireless provider NTT DoCoMo will allow customers to easily switch handsets and even take their phones to other carriers by inserting a different SIM card beginning next April, according to TeleGeography. The research service reported that the carrier will unlock handsets tied to its network and will include SIM-unlock software on its phones. Such a move essentially removes the carrier lock that ties a phone to a network, but for full customer freedom in Japan, DoCoMo’s competitors would have to follow suit.
DoCoMo currently enjoys the largest subscriber base in Japan, serving 49.8 percent of all Japanese subscribers at the end of May. DoCoMo says EMOBILE holds 28.3 percent, SoftBank has 19.7 percent and KDDI/au rounds out the group with 2.2 percent of the market. Even though SoftBank has fewer than half of DoCoMo’s subscribers, the carrier has one advantage: Apple’s iPhone. The phone is SIM-locked to work exclusively on SoftBank’s network, a scenario that’s unlikely to change in the near future.
Here in the U.S., the unlocked phone market stays small because of the huge amount of subsidized (that is, locked to a network) hardware. And even if the model were to change, consumers wouldn’t have total freedom, due to differing network implementations. With AT&T and T-Mobile, we only have two GSM providers to use with an unlocked handset. And then there’s the frequency variances — while I can swap my T-Mobile SIM with one for AT&T in my Nexus One, the phone would lose speedy 3G service because the phone uses the 1700 MHz band for HSPA, which is specific to T-Mobile’s service. For this reason, even an unlocked AT&T iPhone in the U.S. will only have slow EDGE data speeds on T-Mobile’s network.
A more open future here in the U.S. may be arriving with LTE, however. Both AT&T and Verizon — the two largest U.S. carriers — will implement LTE with 700 MHz spectrum. Although LTE will initially be used solely for data, eventually voice will be piped over the network, which opens up the possibility of handset swapping between the two if they follow DoCoMo’s lead.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): 4G: State of the Union
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AT&T, the primary wireless carrier for Apple’s iPhone recently came under fire for the changes it made to its wireless data plans and pricing. These changes came despite complaints about the quality of Ma Bell’s network, which is known to behave much like a starlet with an addictive personality. Apparently this isn’t the end of woes for some of our readers who are complaining that their data upload speeds (on an iPhone) have taken a nosedive in recent days. One individual lamented that his upload speeds were down to a crawl as he tried to upload photos. “I saw upload speeds drop from over 1 Mbps to under 100 kbps,” he wrote. Are you experiencing similar problems? Are non iPhone users having the same problem with AT&T’s network.
(PS: We have been in touch with AT&T and are waiting for the official response.)
Check out the rest: GigaOM
