Verizon Wireless customers could always trust that when their 2-year contracts were up, they would be able to get a discount from Verizon towards the purchase of a new device if they wanted to upgrade. The promotional discount ranged from $50 to $100 depending on the handset the customer wanted.
Verizon has said they’ll end the program this month, and current customers with an upgrade coming will be able to get their discount one last time but then never again.
This means that current customers will have to purchase upgraded phones at the end of their contract for the same pricing that new customers would pay, unless there’s a promotion that only new customers qualify for (in which case existing customers would have to pay the non-discounted price.)
The only good news is that existing customers won’t have to pay full retail price for new phones at the end of their contracts, which for some smartphones can be several hundreds of dollars.
This is Justin Bieber. All he wants to do is make you happy. He wants to play music for you and shorten your links. And now he finally has a venue for the latter. It’s Bieber.ly, and it’s Biebertastic.
The service will not only shorten your link into a Bieberific URL, it’ll overlay a Bieberazing image of the Bieb over your Bieberful site. Biebersome!
Well, it was fun while it lasted, but it looks like Virgin Mobile customers in the US will soon have to make do without their truly unlimited $40 data plan. Starting on February 15th, that will be replaced with a new plan that gives you 5GB of unhindered data use, and throttled bandwidth for anything used beyond that limit. For its part, Virgin says that most customers who use the BB2Go plan for “internet surfing and reasonable downloading will likely not be impacted/notice any difference,” but we’re sure there’s plenty of folks out there that will beg to differ. As you may recall, T-Mobile also introduced some bandwidth throttling of its own this past year, but it actually did so in lieu of overage charges, which is a bit easier to accept than throttling slapped on top of a once unlimited plan.
Most of us who want a media player just for music and the occasional video simply get a smartphone, whether it’s an iPhone, Android phone, or Blackberry. Still, there’s some evidence that the market for standalone media players isn’t quite dead, as the iPod Touch is still a pretty hot commodity, but it’s got the army of iOS apps behind it.
Still, iRiver, who’s been manufacturing media players at least as long as Apple has been, just unveiled the U100 Digital Audio Player, which looks attractive, comes with between 4GB and 16GB of internal memory (expandable via microSD,) an integrated FM tuner, and a 3.1-inch touchscreen display. The U100 also supports video playback in a variety of codecs and has Wi-Fi.
Pricing hasn’t been announced, but the iRiver U100 is destined first for the Korean market, where it’ll have to compete with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy Player long before it ever reaches North American or European shores.
The new Soul line of headphones by Ludacris joins the swelling ranks of celebrity-designed electronics.
Dre, Diddy, Gaga and 50 Cent all made appearances at CES either this year or in 2010 to show off their gadgets. Now Ludacris is a gadget mogul, too.
In this Wired video, Ludacris explains what he was aiming for with these headphones: Clear, balanced sound that doesn’t emphasize the bass at the expense of midrange and high tones.
Coming later this Spring from Ludacris and manufacturer Signeo USA, the Soul line will include three headphone models: the SL300 (noise-canceling, fully isolated over-ear headphones), the SL150 (on-ear) and SL100 (compact on-ear). In addition, the line includes the SL99 and SL49 ear buds.
This most definitely isn’t the first 4K camcorder to leak out of JVC’s stable, but it sure feels like the company is getting further from fantasy and closer to reality. At CES last week, the outfit’s latest prototype was as small as we’ve ever seen, with that object shown here being capable of logging clips at 3840 x 2160 pixels. It’s just barely bigger than the 1080p models already on store shelves, and it’s equipped with new internal processors that are over twice as fast as the silicon used in the firm’s current lineup. Sadly, we’re no closer to learning a release date or price, but the results shown down in the source link have us all kinds of hopeful for something within the next dozen months. Right, JVC?
For some, it’s a source of limitless information about nearly every topic imaginable. For others, it’s a focal point for poor research and liable. For most of us, however, Wikipedia serves one important function–it is, quite probably, the greatest time waster that the Internet has to offer.
Who among us hasn’t spent hours on end journeying down the Wikipedia rabbit hole, jumping from one page to the next, genuinely baffled by how exactly we ended up where we did.
In light of its 10th birthday this Saturday, we’ve decided to pay tribute to Wikipedia by featuring some of the staff’s favorite articles that are amongst the 3.5 million currently available in the English version of the site.
The following 10 articles are fascinating, goofy, mind boggling, hilarious–or all of the above.
A leaked preview of upcoming Android 3.0 release (aka Honeycomb) dropped last week on the Android developers’ YouTube channel. We certainly noticed, and of course the scrutiny of the drastically different UI began shortly thereafter.
Google’s official preview video (above) provides us with the most in-depth look we’ve seen of the OS since Google’s VP of engineering Andy Rubin gave us a sneak peek of it in December. It’s too preliminary to make any absolute judgments, but from what little we’ve gleaned from the video, there are a number of pretty big changes. It’s a complete interface makeover.
After Apple’s runaway success with its 2010 debut of the iPad, expectations on tablet offerings from competing companies in 2011 have been high. And at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, there was certainly no dearth of new tablet debuts. Estimates of the number of new tablets showcased at CES ranged in the 50s to the 80s. From what we understand, the Honeycomb operating system has been designed to take advantage of the tablet shape in particular.
What hasn’t been made clear yet, however, is whether or not Honeycomb will be a tablet-exclusive version, or whether it will also be available for phones.
Android UI director Matias Duarte speaks to the issue, however effusively, in an interview with Engadget: “What you see in Honeycomb is absolutely the direction for Android,” Duarte says when directly asked about portability.
From what we can see in the new video, Duarte’s influence on the new UI is palpable. He came to Google in May from HP-owned Palm, where he developed the webOS interface for Palm devices, seen below:
Duarte’s scrollable page widgets from the webOS interface above are reminiscent of those seen on Honeycomb in the recent video from Google:
The Rubin demo screen shot and the screen above grab from Google’s leaked video share the same minimalist aesthetic, even more so than “Froyo” version 2.2 seen on Samsung’s Galaxy Tab (an OS which Duarte had no part in creating).
Surface area is obviously greater when moving from a 4-inch smartphone screen to that of a 10-inch tablet, and the scrollable Gmail, calendar and browser bookmark widgets sitting side-by-side simultaneously make good use of the increase in screen size.
Another stark difference: the complete lack of physical buttons on the device itself. “With Honeycomb,” says Duarte in the Engadget interview, “you don’t need to have physical buttons.” Note their complete absence in the wide shot of the Xoom:
Instead, physical navigational buttons have been replaced with on-screen versions of themselves, as seen in the arrows in the Xoom’s bottom left-hand corner, while the full app menu is still accessible in the upper right-hand corner:
But manufacturers aren’t beholden to buttonless devices. “Our partners can take that and do what they want with it,” Duarte says in the Engadget interview. “If somebody feels that, for their application, physical buttons are absolutely the right thing to do? Great. They can do that.”
Other app demos in the video seemed relatively straightforward, with heavier emphasis on their tablet application. Google Books leverages the tablet’s shape for page-turning and reading purposes, much like opening an iBook on the iPad. Gmail interactivity remains similar to its “Gingerbread” application — scrollable inbox, no-frills white-and-gray color scheme — but is now separated into two columns for navigability’s sake.
The NAMM trade show — also known as the musician’s candy store — is kicking off today out in Anaheim, which means that audio-focused press releases are starting to pour in. Headset and mic manufacturer Shure is beefing up its line with the introduction of three new models — a set of buds plus two cans. On the bud side, the SE 215 slots in predictably beneath the SE315, offering a budget-friendly single driver in your choice of black or fancy translucent casing; it comes in at a retail price of $99, some $100 less than the SE315. Moving to cans, the SRH550DJ (pictured center) is — as the name implies — targeted at DJs with a “super-aural design” for full isolation and a 90-degree swiveling headband for flexible wearing positions; this one will set you back $99 on the store shelf. On the upscale side, the SRH940 is billed as a reference set with a premium padded headband, and you’ll pay for it: it’s $299 at retail. All three models will be available this spring; follow the break for the press releases.
Hot on the heels of Verizon’s iPhone announcement, it has also ended its “New Every Two” program that provides incentives for existing customers to upgrade.
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