HTC’s making some serious moves in North America at the moment — not to say that’s necessarily anything new — and the Touch Diamond2 and Pro2 are both getting love from every angle. That’s a good thing, we figure — and the parade of high-end Windows Mobile hardware continues with the Whitestone, a presumed Diamond2 variant with a 3.6-inch WVGA display and 5 megapixel cam. Test documents confirm that it’s CDMA / EV-DO, though we’re not seeing any evidence of GSM; that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not there since the FCC doesn’t care to test non-US bands, but we definitely expected to see a full report on EDGE 850 / 1900. Now that the approval’s in, Verizon, it’s your move — let’s get the ball rolling, shall we?
Each day I get a little bit sadder that Billy Mays is no longer with us. Good thing there are so many spokeassholes vying for position in the marketing pantheon.
UPDATE: Looks like there was a late entry to our list of current top spokesassholes: Miss Julia Allison has just signed a yearlong deal to peddle Sony’s wares. About time that her attention-whoring went global! [Sony Insider via Gawker]
Some of us were near tears when T-Mobile decided to drop Zeta-Jones as their official spokesasshole, but the good news is that she’s back. The bad news is that as soon as we heard her nerve-grinding accent, we remembered that those were tears of joy.
It was difficult to deem Sir Richard Branson as a spokesasshole. He is such a nice man and only wants innovative technology to reach those from “all walks of life”—assuming that they make $40 million annually, of course.
Lisa, Lauren, and Giampaolo are the biggest spokesassholes in the Laptop Hunters commercials. Lisa shatters eardrums with her exclamation of “WhaaaaAAAAaat?!?!”, Lauren followed the ads up with claims that they were unscripted, and Giampaolo is just plain smarmy.
Maybe one day he’ll button up the shirt and put on some sunglasses that don’t look like they’re his girlfriend’s. I hope he didn’t quit his day job (waiter? male prostitute?) when he landed this gig, because it won’t last long.
Verizon Probably Only Merged With Alltel To Get Rid of Chad
Verizon and Alltel may have merged, but we’ve still seen Chad’s picture looming around Alltel’s website. With his spiky blonde hair, laid back walk, and inability to take a hint, he’s a true menagerie of what this gallery represents.
Zune Spokesasshole Wes Moss nearly broke our douche point scale. If you can stand watching this Zune spot, after those Laptop Hunter ads, you’ll see why.
Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine are two ridiculously wealthy guys who decide, in their spare time, to become even more wealthy by peddling some overpriced headphones. Even if you ignore the fact that they’re distributed by Monster, and even if you admit that the headphones aren’t that bad—there’s no way the duo can’t escape the spokesasshole brand.
It’s not much of a secret that some of us here are Apple fans, but not even that stopped us from pronouncing Apple’s “I’m a Mac” guy and his smug attitude and thinly veiled disdain for PC as spokesasshole material.
Tamara Hope in the Return of the Stoner Commercials
The Palm Pre commercials started off terribly and only got worse until we stepped in with a remix. Though since it seems that Palm was really giving a nod to Ellen Feiss of Mac Switcher fame with these creepy “What is she on and where can I get some?” commercials, we’ll only rate actress Tamara Hope as half a spokesasshole.
We can forgive Michael Bay for not sharing video footage of Megan Fox washing his car, since he at least had her show a bit of skin in Transformers 2. What we can’t forgive him for his display of spokesassholery in this pitch for Verizon FiOS. By the fifth “AWESOME!” things turn from funny to “Please walk into the next exploding building, Michael.”
You’ve got to hand it to Kutcher. The man with a million Twitter sheep has risen from underwear model to annoying spokesasshole and GI Jane toy-boy. Though we can’t help but see Kelso every time he’s fumbling around on screen.
Still not convinced that the BlackBerry Storm 2 is alive and kicking in places outside of RIM’s “secure” labs up in Waterloo? How’s a seven minute long video showing off this perennially-leaked device for all you skeptics? The blur-free video shows off the updated SurePress screen that only clicks when the unit’s actually in use, as well as some size comparisons with the Onyx and Tour. The mystery man behind the camera says that even though his OS is super old — at least by pre-release firmware standards — it’s much faster than the previous-gen Storm. Also interesting is the fact that WiFi doesn’t appear to be present in the “Manage Connections” screen, although we can almost say with 100% certainty that there will be WiFi at launch. The full video’s posted after the break, conspiracy theorists: go wild.
Big Red’s flexing its 4G muscle today, announcing that it has successfully completed the first true tests on its nascent LTE network — end-to-end data calls that presumably approximate real-world usage. The action actually happened way back on July 15 in Seattle, while Boston just went down today — the two markets where Verizon said it’d be running the first trials — both on 700MHz spectrum won not terribly long ago. LG and Samsung provided the mysterious, unspecified “trial devices,” but don’t worry, Motorola fans — Verizon says they’ve got devices in the pipeline as well. Both Seattle and Boston currently have ten LTE cell sites live as the carrier trudges toward a 2010 date with destiny when it’ll take “up to 30” markets live, at which point EV-DO and HSPA will theoretically feel like trying to send packets via carrier pigeon. Progress!
Update: We just spoke with Verizon Wireless CTO Tony Melone to expand a bit on the trials. Here are some of the key takeaways:
Though they’re not talking speeds with these trials specifically, they’re confident in saying that everything’s in line for 7-12Mbps down and 3-5Mbps up at launch.
The trials are being conducted on commercial LTE base station hardware, but everything else is prototype (and changing very rapidly). The end-user equipment doesn’t currently resemble anything you’d actually buy.
Data modems will be the priority at launch, which makes sense considering the amount of industry flux with regard to voice over LTE. Though Verizon believes the solution will ultimately be some form of VoIP, there are several outstanding issues, including handling of 911 calls.
Everything in the trial so far leads Verizon to believe that they’re on track for a 30-market launch in 2010.
This doesn’t spell the end of EV-DO deployments — far from it. Melone says that upgrades could continue all the way through to the initial LTE launch and beyond.
Color us surprised. After hearing endless complaints about AT&T, especially in discussions of the iPhone, we had a hunch that the big A must be the most hated telecom company in the United States. A survey suggests otherwise.
Global marketing firm J.D. Power on Thursday released results of its wireless customer care survey, which graded telecom companies based on responses from 12,000 customers who contacted their carrier’s customer care department within the past year. Sprint received the lowest grade, scoring 704 out of 1,000 customer satisfaction points. AT&T scored slightly higher, with 730 points. Meanwhile, Verizon, Alltel and T-Mobile tied for first with 747 points.
The study rated customer satisfaction on how well wireless carriers could service their customers by phone, visits to a retail wireless store and on the web. (No, the firm did not poll AT&T customers about Apple’s ban of Google Voice apps for the iPhone.) That’s a small slice of what we consider to be “satisfaction” with a carrier, but too often we hear about AT&T iPhone customers complaining about spotty 3G network performance, dropped calls, poor quality, and the list goes on. (Here at Wired.com we’ve conducted two telecom studies of our own, and the numbers did not look pretty for AT&T.) We expected a lot of peeved AT&T customers to contact customer care to complain, only to be disappointed because most of these problems are network-related and thus not immediately resolvable.
Though the results are a little bland with three carriers tying for first, we find interesting the rather significant point difference between Sprint and the rest of the carriers, even AT&T. We just don’t often hear anyone talk about Sprint. Sprint customers out there: Is your experience really that bad?
Two weeks into the campaign, David Pogue has an update about Take Back the Beep. So far we’d say the winner by far is Sprint, who lets you remove the pre-voicemail instructions with a relatively small amount of hassle (we’re upgrading to green because Pogue has taken the carrier off his hit list). The other carriers have yet to get on board, however. T-Mobile says that “these comments are being taken into consideration in our planning,” but hasn’t promised any specific action — sort of promising, but hardly a win. Meanwhile, Verizon was quoted by ABC News as saying that you could already turn off the message, but apparently what the rep meant to say is that if you don’t like the message you can turn off voicemail altogether. Great. So far no hints of real action have come from big red, but the company is responding to complaints with a canned, “The voice mail instructions are there to assist the many callers who may be unfamiliar with the correct prompts.” so at least we know they’re getting the emails. AT&T is perhaps the most promising of the remaining carriers, saying that while Visual Voicemail (which doesn’t suffer in this way) is the true hotness, and it hopes to get that to other devices soon, “In the meantime, we are actively exploring how to shorten the voicemail message on our other handsets.” That sounds promising. In the mean time, we literally have no idea why these carriers haven’t gotten together over coffee and at least figured out a unified button for skipping over the messages. It’s true madness.
So here’s some interesting insight into the wild, rough-and-tumble world of wireless product launches: Verizon announced ZTE’s AD3700 USB modem today, a product that gained FCC approval over five months ago, which means it’s probably been getting a trial by fire on Verizon’s test labs since then. You’ve gotta figure that ZTE was working on the prototype for many months before FCC approval, so all told, this launch is probably a culmination of a solid year of work, cash, blood, sweat, and tears. Don’t you feel obligated to buy it now? Anyhow, the modem runs $79.99 after a $50 rebate when it launches on the 14th, which is actually a really solid deal considering that it’ll do EV-DO in the States and HSPA around the world for 3G service no matter where your job or your whimsical vacation travel habits might take you.
Forgot to set your DVR before heading out of town for the weekend? If you’re a FiOS TV DVR customer with a smartphone, you’re in luck. The company announced Monday that it is expanding the number of customers who can remotely set their DVRs via cell phone.
Any FiOS TV DVR customers can now program their DVRs via an Internet-enabled phone. In April, Verizon announced that FiOS TV DVR customers could program their devices via the Web, but only subscribers of Home Media DVR, which lets users watch shows they’ve taped on up to six TVs throughout the house, could program via the Internet and smartphones.
“Now, if you’re a FiOS TV DVR customer, you can use the Web site or a cell phone to review, change or add recording requests, delete recorded programs, browse and search TV and video-on-demand listings, set parental controls and more,” Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe wrote in a blog post.
Verizon also expanded access to its Media Manager download, which lets customers view photos, play music, and stream videos from the PC to FiOS TV DVRs.
“Until now, Media Manager has only been available to certain subscribers, but now we’re opening up the service to any TV and Internet customer who also has a DVR. There’s no extra charge,” Rabe wrote.
Those certain subscribers include Home Media DVR customers that also had FiOS internet. Now it’s open to all FiOS TV DVR customers who also have FiOS Internet.
To access Media Manager, sign into your Verizon.net account and download the program. Then, select the “Media Manager” option on the FiOS TV Interactive Media Guide.
We’ve been hearing about Verizon’s upcoming HTC Whitestone for a while now, and it looks like a new pic and specs for the upcoming dual-mode CDMA / GSM Touch Diamond2 variant have leaked out. Seems like a mixed bag — the revised case with a larger 3.6-inch WVGA display is impressive, but inside you’re looking at Windows Mobile 6.1 running on a 528MHz Qualcomm processor with 256MB of RAM, so you’ve certainly lived through this experience before. That’s pretty much the same case with the HTC Mega, which also leaked today: although it’ll ship with WinMo 6.5 and that hot new version of TouchFLO 2D, it’s a lower-end device with a 2.8-inch QVGA display, a three megapixel camera and yet another 528MHz Qualcomm proc with 256MB of RAM running the show. Oh, and just to round things out, there’s a pic of the Dopod-branded HTC Tachi, which probably means this one’s headed for China. Always nice to put a face to a name, though isn’t it? Pics of the Mega and Tachi at the read link.
It’s been some time since we last spotted HTC’s Touch Pro2 in the wild with a Verizon tattoo, and yet, there’s a tinge of unfamiliarity with these new shots. For whatever reason, on this model the HTC logo has been banished to the opposite reaches of the front display, whereas previously it was fit to share space right next to the Verizon logo / check mark. Everything else seems to be identical, however, including any indication of when and for how much we’ll be able to pick one up ourselves. Hey VZW, how’s that fire sale of the original Touch Pro coming along?
Update: As a good number of readers have pointed out, there’s now also video of the phone, with 3.5mm headphone jack to boot. See it after the break.
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