It’s been known for some time that Microsoft’s automotive passions couldn’t be sated exclusively by Ford, at least not for long. Sync has been giving the blue oval some serious tech cred for years now, and while we’re still eagerly awaiting the SHO to get its own app store, we’ve also been wondering what other, fresher companies will do with the tech given the chance. We’ll be finding out next week, with Microsoft and Kia launching Uvo (short for “your voice”), the fruits of a partnership that we’ve known about since 2008. It’s another implementation of Microsoft’s Windows Embedded Technologies, the guts behind Sync, and so while we expect that’ll mean the two systems will be inherently very similar, we’re also expecting a fresh new skin and some funky new functionality. How funky? Sadly neither of the two are willing to say just yet, but you’ll have all the details as soon as we do — about this time next week.
Looks like Motorola’s fully back in the game: not only does it have the hottest Android device you can (currently) buy in the Droid, word today is that the company’s dished out somewhere between $2.5 and $3 million for at least one Super Bowl commercial. It’s been a while since Motorola last spent so lavishly on an ad campaign, so we’re super curious to see what device the ad is for — the safe bet is obviously the Droid, but CES could bring both the AT&T-destined Backflip and Sholes Tablet, so it’s all up in the air. Our main hope? The return of HELLO MOTO.
Every cellular network has its problems with voice quality, occasional dropped calls and imperfect data coverage. And AT&T has some things other networks don’t: It has even been ranked the fastest 3G network in some wireless surveys, such as the 12-city bandwidth test recently performed by Gizmodo. The company is also clearly responding to the problems, rigorously pumping out upgrades for networks in major cities all over the nation, according to its 2009 press archive.
Yet AT&T has taken some serious heat. A Consumer Reports survey, which polled 50,000 readers spanning 26 cities, ranked AT&T as the worst cellphone service in the United States. Meanwhile, YouGov’s BrandIndex survey showed a steady decline in AT&T’s brand perception.
AT&T has a perception problem, to say the least, and most of that can be tied to its performance as the sole carrier of the most popular phone in the nation, Apple’s iPhone.
“They had some interesting parts this past year,” said Michael Gartenberg, an Interpret analyst. “You’re Apple’s partner with sharing the iPhone, and you’re getting booed louder than Microsoft. That means you’re not hitting it the way you should.”
Surely, AT&T made a number of mistakes this year, and many of them were indeed related to the iPhone. From mixed messages to broken promises, here we document the communications company’s communication failures of 2009.
Mixed Messages
Boos echoed throughout the audience at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in mid-2009, when Apple vice president of marketing Phil Schiller delivered the bad news: Tethering for the iPhone would be provided by 22 carriers around the world, but not AT&T.
The second piece of disappointing news: Multimedia messaging, the ability to send images and videos through a text message, would be immediately available for 29 carriers around the world, but not for AT&T customers until “late summer.” More boos greeted the announcement.
In statements sent to the press, AT&T was quick to defend its network when customers complained about the lack of immediate MMS and tethering support for the iPhone.
“We absolutely will offer MMS on iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G with 3.0 upgrades in late summer once we complete some system upgrades that will ensure our customers have the best experience with MMS,” AT&T said in a press statement. “These upgrades are unrelated to our 3G network.”
Three months later, the company posted a video (above) explaining the challenges of supporting the enormous growth of data usage thanks to the rise of smartphones. When speaking about MMS for the iPhone, a company spokesman said, “We’ve been working for months to prepare the radio access controllers in our network to support this launch. That means calibrating base stations all over the country; frankly, that’s a very time consuming process.”
Unrelated to the network, huh?
Also in September 2009, AT&T acknowledged in an interview with The New York Times that it faced challenges because of the data-guzzling smartphones.
“It’s been a challenging year,” said John Donovan, AT&T’s chief technology officer. “Overnight we’re seeing a radical shift in how people are using their phones…. There’s just no parallel for the demand.”
Then, a few weeks ago, AT&T’s CEO of mobility, Ralph de la Vega, said 3 percent of its data users are taking up 40 percent of AT&T’s wireless capacity, and that the company was working on ways to cut down their usage. That would imply plans to impose some sort of limitation on data use. Currently AT&T offers all of its iPhone subscribers unlimited data plans.
Over the course of a year, AT&T went from denying network issues to acknowledging there were challenges in supporting data. And then de la Vega pointed fingers at heavy data users. That didn’t go over so well: De la Vega’s statement inspired the satiric blog The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs to launch Operation Chokehold — a protest with the intention of bringing down AT&T’s network.
Dan Lyons, the author of that blog, was joking, but angry customers took him seriously and actually tried to assault the network with heavy data usage. Though the protest did not come anywhere near to overloading the network, Operation Chokehold made headlines all over the web.
Empty Statements
Earlier this week, AT&T’s website briefly stopped selling iPhones to New York customers — for reasons unknown. Bloggers quoted customer service representatives who said New York was not ready for the iPhone, because there weren’t enough towers to support it.
That explanation made no sense: If the network were already overloaded, how would slowing down online sales address the problem? iPhones were, after all, still being sold in brick-and-mortar stores in New York, so suspending sales online would be ineffective.
A few hours later, a different customer service representative said the sales were suspended due to fraud issues — a plausible explanation. But customer service employees are not considered official representatives of the company.
AT&T’s official response? A statement that explained nothing: “We periodically modify our promotions and distribution channels.”
After the story had already been reported by countless media outlets, AT&T resumed online iPhone sales in New York, turning it into a non-story in just a day. But it was too late: Bloggers had already drawn conspiracy theories about AT&T being unable to serve New York.
Something worth noting is AT&T has a responsive, stellar public relations team that uses a Twitter account, a YouTube channel and a Facebook page to interact with the media and consumers. The story could’ve been defused in a matter of minutes with a clear, believable explanation. Instead, AT&T used its PR to respond with an empty statement, leaving the world guessing the reasons for the suspension of iPhone sales in New York.
Broken Promises
AT&T broke a few promises. The company missed by a few days its “late summer” deadline of delivering MMS, which was minor. More notably, the company did not deliver an official tethering plan to AT&T iPhone customers this year, even though de la Vega said during the 2008 Web 2.0 Summit conference that tethering would arrive for the iPhone in 2009. With 2010 just two days away, there is still no tethering plan for the iPhone.
AT&T has also effectively broken its promise of “unlimited” data, by restricting the ability of certain apps to access its 3G network. In mid-2009, Apple rejected a TV-streaming iPhone app called SlingPlayer.
SlingMedia told Wired.com it had to modify the SlingPlayer application to work only with Wi-Fi — not on AT&T’s 3G network — in order to gain Apple’s approval. Apple made that request on behalf of AT&T, whose terms of service state television signals may not be viewed on a device over an AT&T internet connection.
“Slingbox, which would use large amounts of wireless network capacity, could create congestion and potentially prevent other customers from using the network,” an AT&T spokesman said. “The application does not run on our 3G wireless network.”
The effective crippling of the SlingPlayer app raised concerns among many that Apple and AT&T were closing the mobile web by regulating the type of content that could be accessed over the 3G network.
Will 2010 Be Better?
Despite damage to its brand in 2009, AT&T is still seeing massive subscriber growth, so the company is still doing great from a shareholder perspective, said Tero Kuittinen, an MKM telecom analyst. According to the company’s financial results, AT&T generated $40 billion in revenue and $10 billion in profit in the third quarter of 2009.
Kuittinen cited clever marketing and a good selection of phones from Apple, LG and Samsung as reasons for AT&T’s success.
“That’s the dream of any company,” Kuittinen said. “To provide bad service at high prices and still have great benefits.”
No, you still can’t have one (not yet, at least), but we’ve received a number of tips directing us Modacoforums, where admin Paul claims to have rooted Google’s not-so-mysterious Nexus One. We can’t validate the “superboot” file works, but the adjacent picture has popped up from another forum member as apparent anecdotal confirmation. Instructions for Windows, Linux, and OS X users can be found along with the necessary materials. What do you say, hacker community, any chance we can get multitouch loaded into the device before it ever becomes official to the world at large?
The App Store is oozing with sleaze; sex-themed apps are everywhere. But here’s the thing: these “porn” apps are always terrible. Here are some of the worst, and how to fix this, the most important problem in the world.
First, here are a few of the worst, collected by Intern Kyle and myself. It’s a list of disappointment, of broken promises, and most importantly, of no nudity.
Of course, you can pick up your iPhone right now and go to a porn site. It’s a smartphone. It has the internet. Some sites even have iPhone-optimized video streaming and navigation, because apparently, just like on every other device that’s been connected to the internet, people use their smartphone for porn. This is an inevitability.
And Apple has a ratings system in the App Store. It has a 17+ rating, for apps with violent, crude or sexual content—or app that have a browser function, which could be used to access objectionable content. Most of the apps above are 17+, which means that if parents so choose, they can block their iPhone-having children from even being able to download them. It follows that they could do the same for 18+ apps, so why haven’t they?
I can understand Apple not wanting to get into the porn business, which, by taking 30% of developers’ revenue, I guess they would sort of be doing. But the current setup just doesn’t make any sense. You can buy an app with a built-in browser, which can access the most horrible smut on the web, and get a 17+ rating. But if you link said app to one of those sites, and disable general browsing, suddenly it’s verboten. Again, I can understand how we ended up here, but the results, as you’ve seen, are depressing.
It’s fair to say that most people just assume there are porn apps, when there really aren’t. But there are hundreds of apps that look like porn apps, cost money, and that are, effectively, bait-and-switch scams. Apple can fix this in two ways: they can open the floodgates and just let people have their real porn apps, which would effectively kill these in-between semi-porn apps, or they can revise how the App Store works: by instituting a 24-hour open return policy for paid apps, like the Android Market has, people would simply return these worthless apps, and developers, now unable to trick people into giving them boner money, would stop making them. They would tumble down the rankings and into oblivion.
Anyway, no matter what Apple does, people will continue to look at photos of naked humans on their iPhones. It may make the company squirm, but there’s no reason to pretend it’s not happening, and to let scammers screw up the App Store more than they already have. So do something, Apple! The fate of the world depends on it, a little!
Move over, MiFi — this Sprint Overdrive dual-mode WiMAX / EV-DO mobile hotspot that just hit our inbox has taken over as our new object of broadband desire. Our tipster says internal training on the Sierra-built device has already begun, and that the unit itself features a microSD slot, support for location services, and has a 100-foot Wi-Fi range — but sadly we don’t have pricing or availability deets to share yet. We’re hoping we find out more at CES — and we’d bet that new dual-mode U301 WiMAX modem that leaked a couple weeks ago makes an appearance as well. Fingers crossed.
Update: The same tipster that sent us the information to start with is back with a few tidbits on the U301. According to the anonymous individual, that USB modem will be launching in February for $49.99 on contract. Also on the horizon? A WiMAX home desktop modem with a special price plan of its own.
It’s been more than a year since NVIDIA announced its Ion platform, promising to bring HD video and gaming to the underpowered Atom CPU. After all the hold ups, we started to wonder if we’d ever see the platform packed inside a netbook, so imagine our surprise when no less than four Ion-based machines launched in the past few months. With bigger screens, better specs, more graphics muscle and, of course, the resulting higher price tag, each of these Ion machines promises quite a bit, but which one lives up to the hype? We got them all together and spent the past few weeks testing the ASUS Eee PC 1201N, Lenovo IdeaPad S12, HP Mini 311 and the Samsung N510 — follow on past the break for our complete faceoff.
If you’re like me, you either own or know someone who owns a couple dozen old issues of the National Geographic magazine stashed away in a box somewhere in the attic or the back corner of a closet somewhere. Unfortunately, all that paper is wasting away slowly wasting away, and if you ever want to show off those old issues you may be out of luck if you’re not storing them properly.
We asked Maximum PC’s Will Smith to describe the cheapest PC you can build, and he said he’d do it, if only to talk you out of spending so little. Here’s what you gain, and lose, by going ultra cheap.
Over at Maximum PC, we just posted a guide that show’s you everything you need to know to build the cheapest PC I’d recommend to anyone for use as his or her main PC. It’s a surprisingly beefy machine, capable of playing games, ripping DVDs, editing video and photos, and playing 1080p video with nary a dropped frame. For a mere $647, we managed to pack a quad-core CPU, a great video card, 4GB of memory, and Windows 7 Home Premium into a surprisingly fashionable mid-tower. However, if you don’t need as well-rounded a general purpose PC, you can go cheaper, especially if you’re willing to make some sacrifices. Let’s take a look at the parts we used, and then we’ll start making cuts.
Let’s look at the price chart. If you’re not a gamer and aren’t using one of the handful of applications that’s accelerated by general-purpose GPU-based computing, then there’s no good reason to spend 25% of your budget on a videocard that will lie fallow for most everything you do. The Gigabyte motherboard sports integrated graphics that will do everything you need to do, including hardware accelerated decode for video playback. Pulling the videocard brings our total cost down below $500, to $481. Not too shabby, but we can save even more.
If you’re not going to be running tons of apps, editing photos, or encoding videos, that quad-core is massive overkill. To save a few bucks, we’re going to replace that quad-core Athlon II with a single-core Sempron LE-1250. It costs less than a Blu-ray disc at Best Buy, a mere $32. Unfortunately, that still doesn’t get us below $400, so we need to dig deeper.
Since you ditched the quad core CPU, your PC won’t be up to running many applications at once, so we can cut back on memory. You can buy a generic 1GB stick for $22 at Newegg, which is the minimum requirement for Windows 7.
Since you won’t be creating content, there’s absolutely no reason to spend big bucks on a massive 500GB hard drive. In fact, you could probably even get by installing Windows on a decent-sized flash drive, but that’s more expensive than what we have in mind. It’s tough to beat a more-than-adequate 80GB drive for a mere $35. Oh, and while we’re at it, you should ditch the optical drive. Odds are, you won’t need it for anything after you set up your machine, and it’s easier and faster to install Windows from thumbdrive (which you probably already have anyway).
After more than halving the price of our PC, Windows is looking mighty expensive. At $105, the OEM edition of Windows Home Premium is more than a third of the total cost of this machine. It’s time to start thinking about Ubuntu, which will get our total price down to a cool $200. But wait, we can go even cheaper.
If you’re just going to browse the web on this machine, why spend money on a real CPU? A Foxconn Atom motherboard that comes with the CPU costs a few bucks less than our AMD motherboard alone, so it’s time to trim the fat, yet again. Sure, we could spend a few bucks more and get the same CPU in a motherboard equipped with Nvidia’s Ion chipset, but EVERYTHING MUST GO!
For a machine with power requirements this meager, there’s absolutely no reason to spend 20% of our budget on a quality power supply. Instead, let’s get a case that includes an integrated power supply. It may not be reliable, but it sure is cheap!
Now, I’m reasonably certain that there’s no way to build a cheaper machine. The only bad news? You just built a nettop.
Will Smith is the Editor-in-Chief of Maximum PC and has been building PCs longer than he cares to admit. He enjoys long walks, Rock Band, and is anxiously awaiting the first great Android Phone and the Apple Tablet.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
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