July 2010

Never mind face-time, Skype has done an about-face when it comes to its plans to charge for VoIP based calls over 3G, deciding to let the unwashed masses have their fill for free.

Never mind face-time, Skype has done an about-face when it comes to its plans to charge for VoIP based calls over 3G, deciding to let the unwashed masses have their fill for free.

Producers of content, not carriers, should pay the price for the masses of costly bandwidth being sucked up by cell surfers every day, according to the upper echelons of T-Mobile.

It was only a matter of time before Google became a military power, and now, with its Android army marching forward at a furious pace, it has finally happened. Or should we say ‘app-end.

Bookworms rejoice! Now rather than having to buy a Nook to read your favorite book, you can simply squint your eyes and read the latest Barnes and Noble Mills and Boon on your cell phone – providing you’ve got an Android that is.

The downward trend for Nokia Corp. (NOK) continues. Few companies can sustain a nearly one-third drop in profit for long, but Nokia did just that in the recently closed second quarter, reporting a 31% drop in profit from last year.

AT&T Mobility said it activated a record 3.2 million Apple Inc. iPhones on its network during the recently completed second quarter that included only about a week worth of the latest iPhone 4 sales. The strong activations helped push the industry’s No. 2 carrier to 1.562 million net customer additions during the quarter and ending the first half of the year with 90.130 million devices on its network.

If you’re a social geek like me, then Flipboard is the iPad app you’ve been waiting for, aggregating Facebook, Twitter and other feeds into a very appealing magazine-like style.

BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion Ltd. (RIMM) has been on a slow and steady march toward the consumer market for the better part of two years, and although much of its success of late has come from growth on that front its most current operating system and user interface look hardly consumer driven.

Microsoft employees, look under your chairs… yes, that’s right, you will all be going home with a brand new Windows Phone 7 device, yes, all 90,000 of you!

It certainly has been a chipper week for cellphone companies and component makers, with Qualcomm the latest firm to announce some rather stellar fiscal third-quarter earnings, thanks largely to the whopping success of Android smartphones based on the firm’s chips.

Some devices are so popular, so high flying, you need to literally look to the skies just to get your hands on, as is the case with Motorola’s much hyped Droid X, which sold out at Verizon on the first day it was offered.
RCR Unplugged was surprised, therefore, when we received the following offer from Continental airlines this week, offering us a Droid X. “Earn Miles and get a new DROID X by Motorola,” read the subject line.

Why installing iOS4 on an iPhone 3G renders the device painful to use.