I always see The Netherlands - my home country - as a small, easily graspable version of other, larger and more important western countries and even the west as a whole. In light of this, Tweakers.net's Arnoud Wokke points to a very interesting report about the Dutch telecommunications market. This reports notes a trend that, if present in the rest of the world, could have serious effects for phone makers.
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Member since:2006-10-11
Member since:2005-06-29
Not to speak for gfolkert, but it's been my experience that Verizon is the most expensive carrier by far. Like all of the other carriers, I get a 15% government discount even on personal plans, and I was trying to choose between Sprint and Verizon last year. Though Verizon had a better choice of phone hardware (they even still offered the BlackBerry Storm 2, a great phone in my opinion), I ultimately went with Sprint because the monthly bill was nearly $30 less for more features.
With Verizon I would have been paying, after taxes and fees, nearly $120/month for one phone with 2GB of hard capped data, unlimited voice minutes and unlimited texts. With Sprint I get truly unlimited data, unlimited texts and 450 minutes of voice (with free calling to any wireless number) for about $90/month. Given that I use, on average, 30 voice minutes a month, it was a no-brainer. I still got a very nice WP7 phone for free, in fact I preferred the HTC Arrive because of the keyboard, and I saved enough on the bill over the past few months to justify buying a Nexus S 4G so I'll have a great Android phone too.
In the interest of full disclosure, we have a femtocell (or whatever Sprint calls it) at the office since all the deputies and administrators are issued Sprint phones. This means I get a nearly perfect signal anywhere in the building. With Verizon the opposite is true; finding a good signal inside is an exercise in frustration. However, this had very little impact on my decision since I rarely use my phone at work for more than reading Kindle books and listening to music stored locally on the phone.
Member since:2006-04-10
Member since:2008-12-15
"So in summary... Google has pulled the plug on support on a protocol they've helped popularize, after years of promising interoperability, for reasons that are dubious at best, and in a way that leaves people who don't jump to the new Hangouts app unable to talk to their contacts without any feedback that their IMs aren't getting through... And they've done that with no warning to anyone. I imagine there's a bunch of people out there wondering where some of their buddies have gone, or why their messages aren't getting responses, because this isn't documented anywhere." Google really messed this up. Such a dick move.The Tizen Greek Community has some screenshots of a very recent build of Tizen running on a Samsung GT-i8800. It looks wholly unremarkable.Joint statement to The Next Web from Microsoft and Google: "Microsoft and YouTube are working together to update the new YouTube for Windows Phone app to enable compliance with YouTube's API terms of service, including enabling ads, in the coming weeks. Microsoft will replace the existing YouTube app in Windows Phone Store with the previous version during this time." Good to know these children stopped acting like little pricks. Can we have full Google support in Windows 8 now, please?
Yahoo is acquiring Tumblr, the microblogging and social networking website, for $1.1 billion USD. Tumblr offers little revenue but lots of eyeballs if Yahoo can monetarize them. Now Yahoo is bidding for Hulu, the streaming video service. After years of ineffective responses while Google, Facebook, and others took large chunks of the online advertising market, Yahoo is fighting back. Can Yahoo reignite the momentum it had at the turn of the century? What do you think?
"Sources have described iOS 7 as 'black, white, and flat all over'. This refers to the dropping of heavy textures and the addition of several new black and white user interface elements." I couldn't be happier.
"Ilja van Sprundel, a security researcher with IOActive, has discovered a large number of issues in the way various X client libraries handle the responses they receive from servers, and has worked with X.Org's security team to analyze, confirm, and fix these issues."
"Google is facing a new antitrust probe by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission into whether the company is using its leadership in the online display-advertising market to illegally curb competition, people familiar with the matter said." Sucks to be Google today, apparently."In the midst of the major press blitz surrounding its annual I/O Conference, Google dropped some unfortunate news about its instant messaging plans. In several places around the web, the company is replacing the existing 'Talk' platform with a new one called 'Hangouts' that sharply diminishes support for the open messaging protocol known as XMPP (or sometimes informally Jabber), and also removes the option to disable the archiving of all chat communications. These changes represent a switch from open protocols to proprietary ones, and a clear step backward for many users." That's why I always say: only suckers trust companies."The wave of departures is a sign of internal struggle, but amidst all the bad news, there is a glimmer of hope. According to an anonymous HTC executive cited by WSJ, the crucial HTC One is selling 'pretty good so far'. The executive revealed that HTC sold about five million One units since launch, a performance that is deemed encouraging. However, sales have been limited by the persisting supply issues that still plague the production of the HTC One." Finally some good news for HTC. Five million units amidst supply constraints is very impressive.
"Sony gave the PS4 50% more raw shader performance, plain and simple (768 SPs @ 800MHz vs. 1152 SPs & 800MHz). Unlike last generation, you don't need to be some sort of Jedi to extract the PS4's potential here. The Xbox One and PS4 architectures are quite similar, Sony just has more hardware under the hood. Weâll have to wait and see how this hardware delta gets exposed in games over time, but the gap is definitely there. The funny thing about game consoles is that itâs usually the lowest common denominator that determines the bulk of the experience across all platforms. On the plus side, the Xbox One should enjoy better power/thermal characteristics compared to the PlayStation 4. Even compared to the Xbox 360 we should see improvement in many use cases thanks to modern power management techniques." AnandTech does its usual in-depth thing.
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2008-12-15
Beginning of August, I got 4 - Samsung Galaxy Nexus Phones, 1 - Motorola Droid RAZR and plenty of addons/accessories with a total bill "pre-subsidy" of nearly $4,000.
Post subsidy: $159.62, including all fees and setup.
I'm also paying about $70 less per month than I was with 2 - Droid-X, 1 - LG Ultimate Java Phone, 2 - Nokia "Text and Phone" phones. And now is with a data plan that matches what I've used in the last 2 years with the DroidX and a USB Broadband Modem. Additional bandwidth in 2GB Chunks is only $10. I have no limit phone minutes and texts. My daughters (one married with 2 kids, other in 2nd year College) use about 14,000/month of texts. I get about 2000 pages from monitoring systems. My oldest daughter has her phone hermetically attached to her ear, when she isn't texting. My Wife in on the other end of many of the minutes and texts from both my Daughters. My Son-in-law uses about 700 minutes a month (mostly to my oldest daughter) and about 4 texts.
Other than that, I feel I got a pretty good plan and some really nice phones (for almost dirt). Once you wrangle the Battery usage issue on the Nexus Phone... it lasts about 3 days for me and about 35 hours for my wife. Which is longer than each of our previous phones. (Me DroidX and her the Java Phone)
So... I feel sorry for you peeps getting Subsidies dropped.