Hasta La Gadget!

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Dell’s product placement deal with CBS apparently doesn’t stipulate whether its gadgets will be used for good or evil, as illustrated by their cameo appearances on the network’s NCIS:LA crime drama. In last night’s episode, lead do-gooder Special Agent Callen is seen preparing a Streak tabletphone for some audio recording action before a meeting with the baddies — who in turn whip out an Adamo XPS (yes, it’s still alive!) to seal a deal for some ultra-advanced weaponry. Yep, it’s a non-stop cliché extravaganza!

[Thanks, James and Tarek]

Continue reading Screen Grabs: Dell Streak recruited into NCIS:LA for some undercover duty, fights evil Adamo XPS

Screen Grabs: Dell Streak recruited into NCIS:LA for some undercover duty, fights evil Adamo XPS originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Oct 2010 09:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading Power mad modder rips the keys out of his Epic 4G, calls it a gamepad (video)

Power mad modder rips the keys out of his Epic 4G, calls it a gamepad (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Oct 2010 15:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you think wireless carriers in North America charge too much, you are right. An analysis of cellphone plans worldwide found that consumers in the U.S., Canada and U.K. pay the highest for voice and text service on their phones, while those in India, Hong Kong and Japan pay the least.

Receiving phone calls is free in most countries, except U.S. and Canada–that’s why the rate per minute is doubled for these two countries, say Chiehyu Li and Bincy Ninan in a paper published by the think-tank New America Foundation.

The cheapest postpaid voice plan is available in Hong Kong at $8.50 for 600 minutes a month (a penny a minute), while in Canada the cheapest plan is $38.70 for 250 minutes. By comparison, the least expensive postpaid voice plan in America costs $39.99 for 450 minutes.

Even when it comes to texting services, American and Canadian consumers pay more than almost every one else worldwide.

“The United States tends to fall in a band of countries that charge higher prices to individual wireless consumers for everything except pure voice service where prices are comparable,” say Li and Ninan in their report. “It is essential we consider steps that could be taken to encourage competition or impose regulation such that the U.S. becomes an engine of innovation for better and more competitively priced service offerings.”

This is not the first time that an analysis has shown that American users pay more for service on their mobile devices. In July, an analysis by Tableau Software showed American users pay some of the highest prices in terms of dollars per gigabyte (GB) of data on the iPad. (Check out their amazing interactive chart here.)

The New America Foundation’s analysis threw up some surprising results with respect to texting and data services.

Texting is Expensive But Data is Not

Texting is becoming increasingly popular in the U.S. but it comes at a stiff price–though if its any help, U.S. consumers can take heart that their counterparts in the U.K. pay more.

For postpaid text plans, the U.K. provides the most expensive plan at $7.70 for 75 texts a month (10 cents a text). The U.S. is a close second at $5 for 200 texts a month.

The cheapest text rate offered is in Sweden at $17.80 for 5500 texts. India and South Korea charge only a penny for every text sent.

Not surprisingly, when it comes to unlimited data plans on mobile phones, the U.S. does much better –landing in the middle tier of service rates. American users can get $30 a month plan, which is cheaper than Canada’s $72.90 a month for unlimited data.

But Sweden’s unlimited data plans are among the best, coming in around for $13.80 a month, followed by India at $19 a month.

If you want a detailed breakdown of how countries compare for voice, text and data, check out the analysis on New America Foundation’s web site.

See Also:

• How Google Could Have Changed the World With Nexus One — and Still
• Virgin Mobile Offers Unlimited 3G for $40
• Five Ways To Slash Your Cellphone Bill
• Is It Possible to Live Without a Cellphone?

Charts: New America Foundation

This article was written on February 22, 2008 by CyberNet.

As technology continues to advance there is no doubt that our ventures in space will get more extravagant. NASA, believe it or not, has plans to establish a colony on the south pole of the moon sometime after 2020. But no colony would ever be complete without a cellphone network, right? NASA seems to think so, and that’s why they are whipping up plans to do just that around 2012.

The project is called MoonLite, and will offer both voice and data communication. This is NASA we’re talking about so you would expect data transfer speeds to be measured in megabytes or even gigabytes, but that’s not exactly the case. The download throughput will be an excruciatingly slow 3Kbps, and the upload will be 2Kbps. That’s like 5% as fast as dial-up! I don’t think the scientists that will be inhabiting the colony will be spending any time on MySpace with speeds like that.

Hopefully the scientists don’t sit there and text message each other while driving their lunar rovers because it will take just one wrong turn and they’ll be floating around in outer space. And you thought the call from Mount Everest was special.

[via New Launches]
Thanks for the tip OldManDeath!

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