Author: Serkadis

For those of you who were completely underwhelmed by the realities of Project Dark and have a fear of post-paid contract rate plans, T-Mobile has something new for you. Say hello to “T-Mobile Complete.” T-Mobile Complete, and the accompanying “Complete Kits”, will come with the phone of your choice and, uh, well…that’s about it. No contracts, commitments, or legalities involved. Now, we know what you are thinking, why is this news? Well, T-Mobile has stated that the BlackBerry 8520 will be included in these plans as well, and for the first time in the States you can get yourself a BlackBerry device and not be locked into a contract. Sounds good to us. Details are still scarce on the exact pricing of the 8520 and the accompanying pre-paid plan, but we’ve heard that the kits will start at $59 with unlimited talk plans starting around $50/month. What do you guys think? Good idea? No details on the T-Mobile website just yet, but you can hit the jump to read about the release.

T-Mobile announces the availability of T-Mobile Complete, a pre-packaged no-annual contract solution that offers the value of a monthly plan and the first pay-in-advance BlackBerry smartphone from a national U.S. carrier.  With T-Mobile Complete, customers can choose from four handsets starting at $59.99, which includes first month free. Customers can also choose from a range of unlimited plans starting at $50 per month. T-Mobile Complete is currently available nationwide at Best Buy and at select Walmart locations.

T-Mobile Complete kits are the easiest way to give phones this holiday season. Just buy the kit, wrap it, give it as a gift, and the recipient can activate service from anywhere, anytime – and they get the first month free! One of the four devices available through T-Mobile Complete is the BlackBerry Curve 8520 smartphone, the first pay-in-advance BlackBerry smartphone available from a national carrier.  Smartphones will be a hot gift option this holiday season – in fact, T-Mobile expects smartphones to account for 40 percent of its sales in the fourth quarter of 2009.

T-Mobile Complete is just one great holiday gift option from T-Mobile.  With a wide array of devices this holiday season – including the broadest lineup of Android smartphones of any carrier in the U.S. – there’s something for every type of customer.

Please let me know if you have questions about this new offering from T-Mobile. For more information on holiday giving, we’re happy provide our guide on how to give smartphones as holiday gifts.

Just because last week saw some big releases doesn’t mean there’s nothing left to look forward to in the near future. Up next on the queue is Battlefi…

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Here’s what happens when our beloved Scott M. Fulton, III is away from his test machine while covering PDC 2009: you get a Firefox beta announcement with none of the scores, charts, or metrics you’re accustomed to getting. Instead you just a plain old “Go download this!” message from yours truly.

Mozilla pushed out the latest beta last night, just a little over a week after we checked out beta 2. Mozilla says more than 80 changes have taken place since the last version came out, and they include the ability to run scripts asynchronously to speed up page load time, and a feature called “component directory lockdown.”

Well, it’s not really a feature so much as a loose end that was tied up. Component directory lockdown is an extremely simple concept: third party applications no longer have access to the “components” directory, and can only extend Firefox through traditional add-ons and plug-ins.

Johnathan Nightingale explained “component” extensions in the Mozilla Developer Blog this week, “There are no special abilities that come from doing things this way, but there are some significant disadvantages. For one thing, components installed in this way aren’t user-visible, meaning that users can’t manage them through the add-ons manager, or disable them if they’re encountering difficulties. What’s worse, components dropped blindly into Firefox in this way don’t carry version information with them, which means that when users upgrade Firefox and these components become incompatible, there’s no way to tell Firefox to disable them. This can lead to all kinds of unfortunate behaviour: lost functionality, performance woes, and outright crashing ??” often immediately on startup.”

If you are running 3.6 beta 2, you can simply go to Help > Check for Updates… to upgrade to beta 3. It can also be downloaded directly from Mozilla.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009

As the self-proclaimed “biggest fan of the WD TV Live” ’round these parts, I figured I owed it to my fellow enthusiasts to share some good news about this lovely HD media player. Western Digital has released the first new firmware update, 1.01.11, for its WD TV Live box o’ fun.

Unlike its older sibling, the WD TV, the new, Internet-connected WD TV Live HD media player can download and install firmware updates directly via Wi-Fi / ethernet. If you are not automatically prompted to download the new 1.01.11 update the next time you turn the device on and connect to the Web (as I was) for some reason, follow these simple directions:

• Turn your WD TV Live on
• Make sure you are connected to the Net
• Navigate into “Settings”
• Select “Upgrade Firmware” (or something along those lines)
• Sit back, enjoy a nice beverage, and let the Live take care of the rest

So what all is included in this first firmware update? Quite a lot, actually…at least according to the official release notes (PDF). But let’s just check out the highlights (per WD’s product update page):

* Added more USB WLAN adapter support. Click here for list of compatible adaptors.
* Added cover art display function when viewing music files in album view.
* Added user selectable on/off for fade in and fade out effect while browsing files.
* Resolved issue of no audio when there is only a single, center channel audio stream in a video.
* Other bug fixes and product improvements (see release notes).

Great, so now we’re all on the same page firmware. With that out of the way, I want to share my recent experience using Wi-Fi on the WD TV Live, as I was only able to test a wired ethernet connection back when I did our initial hands-on review.

For testing purposes, I made sure to use one of the approved Wi-Fi USB adapters per this list. Thus, I used the Belkin F5D8055 N+ Wireless USB Network Adapter (with my wireless G Linksys router).

Generally speaking, the WD TV Live’s network and Internet capabilities worked as advertised. I was able to stream video (non-HD, full DVD quality rips) over my home network with little to no noticeably latency. Connecting to and streaming videos from YouTube (including HD) worked like a charm, albeit with some (expected) buffering hiccups here and there. Connecting to Pandora and Live365 both worked very well, and streaming audio over my home network was a breeze, complete with album art being displayed.

Perhaps the most helpful feature (at least for me), is the ability to copy and paste new media files on the attached storage. In other words, I was able to copy a newly ripped movie from my desktop in the office, over the home network, and onto the attached hard drive. While not the quickest of transfers, I experience no problems copying/moving/deleting files over Wi-Fi, and thus have eliminated any need to physically move the hard drive to add new media to in the future. All in all, I give the Live’s Wi-Fi capabilities two thumbs up.

We knew that Walmart would be bringing the heat for Black Friday 2009, but we didn’t know they’d be going all-out with the Blu-ray goodness. Seriously, if you are looking for the most inexpensive Blu-ray player on Black Friday 2009, it looks like the Magnavox NB500 will be your best bet, because it’ll cost just $78 at Walmart. Oh, and if you need an HDTV to go with that deal, they’ve got you covered there as well. Check out the entire contents of the Walmart Black Friday 2009 sale after the break.

Continue reading Black Friday 2009: Walmart ad leaked: $78 Blu-ray player!

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By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

The Day 2 keynote is actually still ongoing at the time I’m writing this — it’s run 20 minutes over schedule, and the SharePoint demos are still going on. But here’s an assessment of the information we’ve received thus far today:
First of all, the first news on Internet Explorer 9. If you weren’t listening closely to Windows Division president Steven Sinofsky, you might have missed this little fact: The team is only three weeks into the project, having just started after the Windows 7 launch. Now, think about that for a bit: The implication here is that the development team cannot work on the operating system and the Web browser at the same time. This from the company that used to argue that the two components were inseparable.

Then there is the whole “three weeks in” news…It’s difficult to believe that Microsoft hasn’t really been working on a Web browser since last March, and I actually expect Dean Hachamovitch, who leads IE8 design, to contradict that bit of information. He and his team haven’t been lying dormant.

But assuming that’s true, why should the idea that it has done nothing with IE9 until three weeks ago, not come to the surprise and shock of Steven Sinofsky?

Obviously performance is an issue, and the fact that IE9 is crawling back from the brink is something that developers are taking note of. The proud disclosure that IE9 posted a 32% score on the Acid3 test score, elicited a tremendous groan…a bit like telling the audience that Chris Rock couldn’t make it but Carrot Top could.

So the demonstration of Internet Explorer 9 rendering functionality — specifically, moving the rendering engine from the decades-old GDI over to Direct2D — ended up falling a little flat. Even though the need for a smoother rendering engine is crystal clear to any user, especially in IE8, to the developers (a.k.a., the PDC audience), they want to be told what they can do to improve the Web user experience. Being told they don’t have to do anything to improve the experience is no help to them; it’s like telling a professional truck driver he doesn’t have to drive a truck. Then how is he going to make his living? Developers want tools so they can be the ones responsible for improving the IE experience, especially since there’s an obvious needs assessment that says it needs improving.

The IE9 news made the entire crowd unimpressed, which is why it was perfect (and obviously intentional) timing to take the bad taste out of developers’ mouths with the news of the laptop giveaways. It was a palate cleanser ahead of Scott Guthrie and the Silverlight 4 news, all of which was received very positively.

More and more, Silverlight is becoming Microsoft’s Web platform — in effect, replacing Internet Explorer in that regard, at least with respect to the company’s product line. Seeing Guthrie’s demo of the HTML control being housed inside the Silverlight-based frame (so, for example, a custom Silverlight app could host a Bing search or a Facebook application) made it clear that not only developers outside Microsoft, but the ones inside Microsoft, are paying attention to the possibility of Silverlight becoming the Web apps host of choice as opposed to Internet Explorer.

Just as Betanews readers have been saying, IE is becoming old news. Trouble is, the older that news becomes, the more of it there is.

A long string of interviews is next for us here at the conference, and we’ll report on what we’ve learned from them later tonight and throughout the week.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009

CrackBerry and BlackBerryOS are reporting a leaked OS 5.0.0.348 for the BlackBerry Curve 8520. RIM have said that it won’t be longer than 2010 before we start seeing OS 5 rolled out across a larger gamut of devices so it shouldn’t be long until this is official. So if you want it now, and you’re okay with some third party apps not working, then go ahead and give it a try. Usual caveats apply.

Download OS 5.0.0.348 from MegaUpload.

If you’re getting the error “File Temporarily Unavailable”, all you have to do is keep refreshing the screen. It took me about 15 refreshes to finally get the download to work.

© Kyle for BlackBerry Cool, 2009

Charlie Sheen's make-pretend conversation with President Obama concerning his 9/11 conspiracy theories, acted out by puppets. That has be the funniest thing ever, right?

Actually, no, it doesn't have to be…

Why so serious, puppets? Hasn't anybody ever told you that you're puppets?

Part 2 is over here (if you were even capable of making it to the end of Part 1)

(via Videogum)

The copyright industry lobbyists absolutely love to throw around the bogus and debunked stat that copyright contributes $1.52 trillion to the economy. That number is derived by taking any business that kinda sorta maybe touches copyright (including things like furniture and jewelry) and then assuming that all of the revenue they make is entirely due to copyright. Yes, that’s ridiculous. But, if the copyright lobbyists are going to use such bogus methodology to push their agenda, it seems only fair for those on the other side to use the same methodology. Last week, we wrote about a biased editorial by two newspaper industry lawyers in the WSJ (who failed to note the conflicts of interest), claiming that Google violated copyright law, and attacked the concept of fair use.

In response, Ed Black, from the Computer & Communications Industry Association wrote a letter to the editor highlighting those lawyers factual mistakes as well as the importance of fair use throughout the industry (thanks to Yano for sending this in). Most of the (short) letter discusses all the wonderful things that fair use allows, and then has this wonderful line at the end:

Businesses dependent upon exceptions to copyright contribute $2.2 trillion to the U.S. economy. They are responsible for one in eight jobs, for a total payroll of $1.2 trillion in 2006. Fair use is serious business; it is the glue that holds the Internet and new technology together. It is worth protecting.

This is fantastic. Of course, the number is just as bogus as the $1.52 trillion used by copyright maximalists, but I think that if they’re going to use their methodology to make such ridiculous claims, it’s only fair to do the same for the contributions to the economy of exceptions to copyright, and as the CCIA clearly demonstrates, the businesses that rely on weaker copyright contribute significantly more to the economy than those that rely on copyright. Thus, by the copyright maximalists own logic (and numbers), shouldn’t we be fighting to expand the exceptions to copyright law?

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One of the main reasons for Twitter’s success has been the openness towards third-party developers. While the core service has stayed mostly true to its minimalistic approach, users can get most of the features they need from all of the services and apps that cater to Twitter. In fact, these apps are so popular, that less than half of the Twitter users actually visit the site to keep up or send out a tweet according to new data from Sysomos.

“So, how do you use Twitter? That’s the question we wanted to answer with our latest report focused on the applications to use Twitter. We analyzed a sample of more than 500 million tweets collected over the past five months to determine the most popular applications to use Twitter,” the social media analytics firm wrote.

The study found that Twitter.com was, by far, the most popular way of posting a tweet, with 46 percent of the users preferring it. TweetDeck comes in a distant second place, with just 8.48 percent, followed by the popular iPhone apps Tweetie and Twitterific, with 2.83 percent and 1.63 percent, respectively. Seesmic, which has just launched a native Windows client, came in fifth, with 1.11 percent.

In Sysomos’ last report, Twitter.com was employed by 45.7 percent of the users, so the website managed to keep its mark… (read more)

We’ve got news, both good and bad. What do you want first? We’ll start with the bad news first. It’s easier that way, you know?

Hughes Telematics has created an app, mbrace, that will give lucky owners of certain Mercedes-Benz models the ability to control numerous functions of their car. Say your Benz is lost in a parking lot full of BMWs and Jags, the app can help you find your way.

You can even unlock the car right from your phone, although you should probably wait until you’re within eyesight to do so. The app can also contract roadside assistance or emergency services if you run out of gas or get into an accident. But there’s a catch; it’s not included in the price of the car.

Well, the first six months are free, but after that it costs $280 per year. The service is currently only available on certain new Benz models, but older models can be retrofitted for the service.

It seems that the service can even be ported to different vehicles with a bit of work. Hopefully Mercedes-Benz is just the first manufacturer to offer this service.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Early in October, Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski said there is a wireless spectrum crisis approaching, and that our wireless broadband consumption is growing so explosively that it would take more than 50 years to deliver the necessary spectrum at our current pace.

But an FCC task force has concluded that this is only a single part of the problem if we want to provide America with robust and affordable broadband. Over the last few weeks, the task force has identified critical gaps in policymaking, government programs, and trade practices in all corners of the broadband ecosystem.

Today, the Commission has put forth a list of these gaps, which narrows the main problems down to seven major points.

1.) USF Gap: The Federal Universal Service Fund (USF) does not support broadband deployment and adoption, despite consuming more than $7 billion in annual telecommunications subsidies.

2.) Broadband Adoption Gap: as broadband access increases, those without access (based on geography or income) are at an ever greater disadvantage.

3.) Consumer Information Gap: Users don’t know their actual broadband performance, and providers aren’t supplying them with that information.

4.) Spectrum Gap: The spectrum crisis Genachowski warned of in October, where wireless demand far outstrips supply.

5.) Deployment Gap: There is an extremely high cost for rural broadband and “middle mile” solutions.

6.) TV Set-top Box Innovation Gap: Most set-top boxes still haven’t integrated with IP-based technology even though they present a prime opportunity to deliver broadband to the masses.

7.) Personal Data Gap: Users need to have more control over their own information and greater privacy/security.

Before the Commission can submit its National Broadband Plan to Congress in February, it will work on devising solutions for these gaps.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009

The new BlackBerry Storm 2 is now available at TELUS on their 3G (CDMA) network for $199.99 on a 3-year contract. You can also buy the device sans contract for $599.99, but it’s rare that anyone commits that much cash up front these days. In any case, we’re hoping this device does well for TELUS.

See the TELUS site for more details of the upcoming BlackBerry Storm2.

© BlackBerry Cool for BlackBerry Cool, 2009

1. Newsweek runs the cover you see to your right. The text reads "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Sarah? She's Bad News for the GOP — And For Everybody Else, Too." They illustrate this statement with a portrait from Palin's recent Runner's World photoshoot. In the picture, Sarah Palin is wearing running clothes, grinning, clutching two Blackberries and leaning casually on an American flag.

2. Sarah Palin, the person who posed for this picture in the first place, is angered. The photo was meant to be "all about health and fitness," she Facebooked, and Newsweek's "sexist and oh-so-expected" re-use of the image "shows why you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, gender, or color of skin." She cannot name any books that have genders or skin (but then, who can?). Nor does she explain what the Blackberries have to do with "health and fitness."

3. Various people around the internet agree with Palin that the cover is sexist. Other people disagree. Some of us remember the last time Newsweek caused a controversy with its cover image of Sarah Palin.

4. An Indecision blogger and her editor spend almost an hour instant messaging about the Sarah Palin Newsweek cover. At one point your blogger's editor asks her to 'role play' a hypothetical meeting in the Newsweek editorial department.

5. We all know that Sarah Palin leaps at any chance to play the victim (it's cardio), even when she's invited the scrutiny, prompted the inquiry or posed for the photo. Also, any time a major political figure agrees to be photographed in an unusual setting, wearing anything less than a power suit, and those pictures are made public, they will be seen and published and republished. In public.

6. Yet here we have a political-type lady wearing shorts, on the cover of a national news magazine. That seems sexist.

6a. Or not.

7. All this discussion, and still no definitive answer to the big question: Did this photograph of Sarah Palin violate flag protocol?