It was a fairly quiet week in the wireless world, but we still managed to share a few observations and kvetches-or as we like to say, here’s what got us hedgehogging last week.
Most carriers are still dancing around the potential problems that Slingmedia’s Slingbox brings. At last week’s WiMAX World conference, a trio of speakers from MTV, Sprint Nextel and MobiTV responded very diplomatically-though with a touch of negativity-when asked about the impact the place-shifting Slingbox is having on the content and mobile TV market. One person compared Slingbox to Napster, noting that the former illegal music downloading application helped to eventually drive Apple’s iTunes business. (Note the music industry wanted Napster to disappear.)
A SunCom Wireless representative in the audience noted the regional carrier was looking at a different pricing model for the data-heavy service, claiming their testing showed the service consumed 50 megabytes of data over a 2-hour period and that 2,000 mobile Slingbox devices operating at once would “crash our network.” Perhaps the better question is which companies are busy trying to snap up Slingmedia.
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Samsung is going to sell a 10-megapixel camera phone. Finally! Could it have taken them any longer to release a 10-megapixel camera phone? Nine-megapixel camera phone just seems so obsolete.
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Amp’d Mobile is offering new family plans that are cheaper than the family plans from Verizon Wireless. How can Amp’d rent Verizon Wireless’ network and then offer services at a cheaper price than Verizon Wireless? And doesn’t this make Verizon Wireless mad?
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Hiptop vendor Danger announced Australian carrier Telstra will sell its swivel-screen gadget. All you Australian Paris Hilton fans, rejoice! Can you Crocodile Dundee with a Hiptop?
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We’re still irritated Congress couldn’t pass some law making pretexting illegal. When you think of the stink and the ink that the media has spent on this issue-and how every politician was mortified that it was so easy to steal someone else’s phone records-and that NOTHING was done, it’s ridiculous. No, it’s just Washington. (Maybe we’ll let this go next week. Then again, maybe not.)
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Cingular is hosting a “Cingular Messaging Awards” event, where wireless users can send in witty text messages, funny self portraits or videos of their hottest dance moves to win. (Win what? We have no idea.) We would very much like to submit our entries for each of these categories, but we suspect all the things that we want to send in to this event are probably too inappropriate. Oh, and we’re probably not allowed to enter.
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Google acquired YouTube, and they’re calling the combination “GoogTube.” We need some funny-name combinations like this in wireless, but “Crown Signal” or “Global Castle” just doesn’t cut it. The best we ever heard in wireless was “Sextel” (Sprint and Nextel).
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Sprint Nextel raised the price of its text messages from 10 cents to 15 cents, which means that-because the carrier changed its service pricing-Sprint Nextel subscribers can cancel their contracts without incurring early-termination fees. Sprint Nextel said it increased the price “due to a rise in the cost of offering the service.” You read that right-the price for mobile TV is falling but the cost of text messaging is on the rise.
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And finally, Mr. T has a show for cell phones. You know that the mobile TV market has officially matured when B.A. Baracus himself graces the screen. FOOL!
