Hasta La Gadget!

You know, we love fighting the good fight — especially if it means calling out corporations on their untoward business practices. Today we’re joining David Pogue of the New York Times in calling foul on cellphone carriers’ insistence that users be forced to listen to those maddening, pointless 15-second canned carrier messages. In case you’ve held off on owning a cellphone or calling anyone who has one, they go a little something like this:

At the tone, please record your message. When you have finished recording, you may hang up, or press 1 for more options. To leave a callback number, press 5. (Beep)

Not only is Pogue mad-as-hell-and-not-going-to-take-it about the ridiculous idea that we still need to be told how to use voicemail, it turns out those additional messages are actually costing you cold, hard cash. He estimates that Verizon, for instance, is netting around $620 million a year thanks to these little annoyances. So what’s to be done? Well Pogue wants the citizens of the internet to take up virtual arms… and complain like nobody’s business. He’s wrangled together all the best contact points for the four largest carriers in the US (included for your convenience after the break). Let them know you know don’t want to pay for voicemail instructions. And hey, while you’re at it, tell them the price-gouging on text messages needs to go, too.

Continue reading David Pogue launches all-out war on canned voicemail messages

Filed under: Cellphones

David Pogue launches all-out war on canned voicemail messages originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’ve preordered one o’ them fancy new myTouch 3Gs, check your mailbox, front porch, back door, administrative assistant, or dirty, thieving neighbor — because it might be there. T-Mobile said that preorders would be shipping at the tail end of July, and sure enough, some folks are starting to get lucky; plebes without preorders will still need to wait until August 5, though, so, you know, either sit there and drool or shout nasty remarks about how you’d rather have a Hero in the meanwhile.

[Thanks, sun]

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

T-Mobile myTouch 3G preorders now shipping, arriving, being touched originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’re a kid stuck in a grown-up’s body, there’s a good chance you’re pining after a Sidekick — you know, just like the kind you had back in the day when you listened to Blink 182 and loitered on your skateboard around the plaza in front of the office building that has since enslaved you. Problem is, Sidekicks have never really been work-friendly devices — owing in part to their utter shunning of Exchange — which means you get stuck with a BlackBerry and an incessant desire to swivel the display. It’s kind of sad, really, and passers-by think you’ve gone mad as you sit on the park bench pressing your thumb desperately against a screen that will never, ever rotate, no matter how fricking hard you press. It’s cool, though, T-Mobile’s got your back: enter Sidekick Sync, an app that was promised when the Sidekick LX 2009 was launched and is finally available. It’ll be hitting the phone’s Download Catalog starting this afternoon, offering push email, attachment viewing, calendar and contact sync, and pretty much every other Exchange feature that strips you of your youthful innocence. For the pleasure of avoiding RIM’s powerful grasp, you’ll pay $4.99 a month — but can you really put a price on being able to wear DC apparel at the age of 30?

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Exchange support coming to Sidekick LX 2009 today for $4.99 a month originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Jul 2009 12:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Chart showing mobile devices visiting Wired.com

Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch are the overwhelming favorites for mobile access to Wired.com.

Color us surprised.

While we knew that our readers use and are interested in iPhones, we weren’t prepared for just how drastically the logfile numbers skewed towards Apple’s mobile platform. Taken together, the iPhone and iPod Touch represent 91.6% of the mobile devices accessing Wired.com during June, 2009.

The next closest runner-up, the T-Mobile G1, commands just 1.6% of the mobile device total (based on number of visits to Wired.com), and the Nintendo Wii — bizarrely — is the fourth most popule “mobile” device, with 0.7% of our site visits. (We assume that our logfile analysis software, Omniture, is just confused about how mobile the Wii really is.) The RIM BlackBerry 9000 and Palm Pre also have about 0.7% of total visits.

Grouping by manufacturer gives a slightly different picture: Apple, as before, holds 91.6%, but Nokia comes in second, with 1.7% of the total visits. T-Mobile has 1.6%, while RIM takes 1.5% and HTC 0.9%.

We know from previous logfile analyses that Wired.com readers are more likely to use Macs and Firefox than the general population. But when it comes to mobile access to Wired.com, the massive skew towards iPhones is a little surprising.

One reason is surely that our site is poorly optimized for most mobile devices, so phones that render websites pretty much as desktop browsers do — like the iPhone — are more likely to work well with Wired.com. If your phone doesn’t render ordinary websites well, you’re not likely to come here often.

Also, with 40 million iPhones and iPod Touches in the world, there are a lot of people using them to browse the web.

And as previous studies have suggested, people are much more likely to browse the web on an iPhone than on other smartphones, even if those other phones have comparably featured browsers. That’s probably due to the iPhone’s super-easy (or dumbed-down, depending on your point of view) interface. For instance, Nokia’s latest S60-based phones, like the E71 and the N79, have browsers capable of rendering web pages faithfully. But the interface is clunkier: It just takes more steps to scroll, zoom, and click on links than it does on the iPhone.

The result is plain: Far more people actually use the iPhone’s browser, at least when it comes to visiting Wired.com.

Our attention is still vaguely fixed on that Hero off in the distance, but let’s focus for just a minute — the myTouch 3G for T-Mobile is now in our well-guarded possession as it trudges toward a late July release for those lucky enough to pre-order. Other than a few silkscreened details, make no mistake — the myTouch is literally an HTC Magic in basically all but name (we compare it with a Rogers-branded Magic in our gallery below so you can see what we mean), and all things considered, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Like all of its Magic contemporaries, the phone feels small and well-balanced in the hand; one unique detail, though, is the crazy packaging which consists of a semi-soft zippered nylon case enclosed by a paper sleeve. It’s cool, different, and unlike a regular box, it’s something you’ll probably want to hold on to.

This is the first time we’ve seen it in that “merlot” shade, and in person, this is a great-looking color that could play well with anybody — man or woman, business or casual. It’s a touch of highlight without going overboard (unlike, say, the actual Highlight). Software-wise, this is looking like a bone-stock Android 1.5 build so far (notice the keyboard, for example), which plays with T-Mobile’s prior statements that its software value-add with these sets would primarily come through Market downloads. Stay tuned for our full review, but in the meantime, enjoy some visuals!

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

T-Mobile myTouch 3G unboxing originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Jul 2009 11:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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