Samsung SHW-M120S to be first Android phone with Bluetooth 3.0?

Samsung's all about records: firsts, biggests, smallests, thinnests, you get the idea. Indeed, it was just a few weeks ago that the company managed to slip the very first Bluetooth 3.0 certified handset through -- but these guys never rest, and it looks like they're already prepping to follow up that feat by throwing Android into the mix. The Bluetooth SIG is showing certification for an SHW-M120S model that apparently features a 3.3-inch WVGA AMOLED display, 5 megapixel autofocus primary cam plus VGA secondary, WiFi, GPS, HSDPA, and -- yes, you guessed it -- a Bluetooth Core Version of 3.0, meaning you'll likely be able to fling files around to your house full of Bluetooth 3.0-capable devices with the greatest of ease. The presence of a T-DMB tuner means this sucker is targeted squarely at the South Korean market, but we've no doubt Sammy plans on taking 3.0 global so that it can... you know, have the world's most Bluetooth 3.0 devices. PuntoCellulare seems to have a pretty good shot of it, and it looks pretty much how you'd expect any self-respecting Samsung smartphone to look in 2010 -- in other words, there's nothing that screams "I can wirelessly transfer data short distances at heretofore-unknown speeds" just by looking at it, and that's totally fine by us. Rumor is we'll see this launch "in the next few weeks."

by Ljrit

Editorial: the American phone subsidy model is a RAZR way of thinking in an iPhone world

The concept is simple enough -- pay more, get more. So it has gone (historically, anyway) with phone subsidies in this part of the world, a system that has served us admirably for well over a decade. It made sense, and although it was never spelled out at the customer service counter quite as clearly as any of us would've liked, it was fairly straightforward to understand: you bought a phone on a multi-dimensional sliding scale of attractiveness, functionality, and novelty. By and large, there was a pricing scale that matched up with it one-to-one. You understood that if you wanted a color external display, a megapixel camera, or MP3 playback, you'd pay a few more dollars, and you also understood that you could knock a couple hundred dollars off of that number by signing up to a two-year contract. In exchange for a guaranteed revenue stream, your carrier's willing to throw you a few bucks off a handset -- a square deal, all things considered. So why's the FCC in a tizzy, and how can we make it better? The problem The year is 2010 -- and things have changed. A multitude of market forces have dramatically and fundamentally altered the phone pricing landscape over the last 18 to 24 months in particular; carriers that once had a well-stratified range of feature phones priced between free and $100 plus a lone smartphone or two at the $200 price point now have a confusing jumble of smartphones and feature phones alike spanning the entire range. What's more, the supply chain has matured and R&D costs have been paid down -- a high-end handset that manufacturers needed to retail for, say, $650 five years ago before subsidy might run just $500 today (after adjusting for advances in technology). Confusing matters further is a continued push for relatively high-end feature phones like the HTC Smart, Samsung Wave, and LG Mini that often cost more than their smartphone counterparts. The price pressure is enormous, and realistically, going above $99 on contract is now dangerous territory for anything short of a superphone. Knowing full well that $199 is an unspoken psychological ceiling for most consumers, carriers are left with impossibly little room to price this amazing spread of devices. But it gets worse: these days, it's impossible to ignore the reality of the $99 iPhone 3G, a device that continues to set the benchmark for the level of functionality and capability that a midrange smartphone should deliver a year and a half after its introduction. The price pressure is enormous, and realistically, going above $99 on contract is now dangerous territory for anything short of a superphone -- pretty amazing when you consider that Cingular charged a heart-stopping $499.99 on a new two-year agreement for the RAZR V3 when it launched a little over five years ago. In practice, what does this all mean? To put it bluntly, it means that customers who choose lower-end devices are getting screwed, because no amount of subsidy can make up for the fact that you're paying just $100 more upfront for an iPhone 3G than you are for a lowly Nokia 2230. Verizon has even plainly admitted this in its defense of the infamous $350 "advanced device" ETF to the FCC -- it simply costs more for a carrier to front you a good price on a smartphone than it does a dumbphone. Price pressure has excluded the consumer from feeling that difference, unless -- in the case of Verizon, anyway -- they opt to back out of a contract early, in which case they're met only with negative reinforcement. The solution I'm not advocating that good phones should cost more than they do today. Quite the contrary, actually -- the real problem is that American carriers have yet to fully acknowledge the new reality that high-performance smartphones are commodity items, even as they load their lineups with them, and you end up with a traffic jam of devices and no way to effectively price them. But I'm also not advocating that carriers thin out the herd (I'd never dream of suggesting such a thing). Instead, I'm arguing that carriers need to rethink everything about the way they incentivize commitments, and maybe even rethink the concept of a commitment altogether. Most American carriers partly recoup deeper subsidies on higher-end devices by requiring lucrative data plans, and as annoying as that is, I think that it's the closest we've come to nailing the real fix. The next step is to come to terms with the fact that, for all practical purposes, $0 and $100 are the same thing -- over the course of a two-year contract, the upfront sticker price you pay for a phone is trivial. Seriously, it's a drop in the bucket: total cost of ownership for a smartphone on any of the US nationals can run beyond $3,000 by the time your 24 months is up. European carriers -- operating in a more mature market than their American counterparts -- have long since figured this out, and have completely turned the subsidy model on its end. You can get virtually whatever phone you want for free, from the lowest of the low to the highest of the high -- the only difference is the required minimum monthly spend. It makes a lot of sense considering that carriers don't make money off your phone purchase, they make it off your plan -- it's not pure gravy for them, but it's close enough so that they're comfortable deeply subsidizing your hardware. Besides, higher-end phones have been proven to generate higher ARPU (average revenue per user), which only serves to validate the model further. So, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, that's really all there is to it: crib off your European cousins. There's never been a better time, what with the boys and girls in Washington bearing down. Stop trying to play the pricing game from the moment a potential customer walks into the store, because it's only going to get harder -- and rest assured, the days of selling $500 clamshells on contract are definitely over.

by Ljrit

Eternal optimist Verizon calls iPad launch 'an opportunity' to sell some data plans

That's the "glass is half full" attitude we like, Verizon -- always looking for a way to sign a few more of those lucrative data contracts, no matter the circumstances! Turns out Big Red is tipping off its staffers on how it can encourage customers to go with the WiFi-only version of the iPad and pair it up with a device like the MiFi rather than shelling out $130 more for integrated AT&T 3G and waiting a few extra weeks. As usual, Verizon's keen on playing up the anti-AT&T sentiment it's cultivated in its recent ad campaign by openly calling its biggest competitor's 3G network "overloaded," but we see one big hangup: 5GB of data on a Verizon MiFi is going to run you $60 a month, twice as much as AT&T will be charging for its dedicated, unlimited iPad plan. Then again, AT&T's own boss thinks WiFi's a bigger deal than 3G for this thing, so who knows -- maybe this is a zero-sum game for both of these guys.

by Ljrit

Mission Impossible Crew Steals $26,000 Worth of MacBooks From Bestbuy

Thieves cut a hole in the roof and rappelled down into a Best Buy, without touching the ground, to steal $26,000 worth of Apple notebook computers, reports NJ.com. Amazingly the bandits performed the whole heist without setting off alarms or being caught on tape. On top of the building, they used a saw to cut through several inches of rubber and insulation, then sliced a 3-foot-wide square in the metal roof. Once inside, the burglars dropped 16 feet to 10-foot-tall racks — avoiding contact with the floor, where motion sensors would have set off an alarm. They snatched the notebooks from the racks, then went back out through the roof. Avoiding store security cameras by choosing a spot where the cameras were obscured by advertising banners, the thieves managed to grab $26,000 in laptop computers and departed down a 3-inch gas pipe that runs from the roof to the ground outside the store. "High level of sophistication," said Detective James Ryan, a police department spokesman. "They never set off any motion sensors. They never touched the floor. They rappelled in and rappelled out." Employees discovered the missing laptops when they arrived to work this morning.

by Ljrit

iPhone Photo Makes UK Tabloids Look Foolish

It doesn't take much to make yourself look like a fool, but in the case of The UK's Sun and Daily Mail newspapers, they have to be feeling quite idiotic right about now. Perhaps not, as these tabloids have a history of running fabulous stories about celebrities, politicians, and the supernatural as a matter of daily business. John Ware, a 47-year old builder, sent the newspapers a photo he had taken with his iPhone that allegedly showed a ghostly little boy dressed in turn-of-the-20th-century clothing, balefully looking at the photographer. You can see the little boy at the right side of the photo, standing in the foreground. The papers dutifully ran the story, with the Sun's example shown at the top of this post. There's only one problem: as Macenstein pointed out, the same little boy haunts the US$0.99 iPhone app Ghost Capture. That's right — it's apparent that Mr. Ware snapped a shot of a demolition site with the app, and then submitted the photo. Our guess is that Ware was having a little fun with the papers, and that the "Got a story? We pay £££." tag line you see at the top of the page might have provided some motivation. Here's hoping that the developers of Ghost Capture add The King to the family of ghosts in the app, so the Sun and Daily Mail can report a rash of Elvis sightings to their readers.

by Ljrit

VeriFone Credit Card Reader To Be In Apple Stores

The Square credit card reader for the iPhone has gotten most of the buzz around here, especially after we saw that impressive demo at Macworld a few weeks ago. But VeriFone's competing reader has been given the green light by Apple itself: the unit has been granted a deal for shelf space. VeriFone will be selling its PAYware Mobile units inside Apple's retail stores coming up as soon as the end of March. I'm not quite sure what the reasoning is behind this one on Apple's side, as the PAYware service seems to be a little more clunky than the Square solution: you have to pay both an activation fee and a monthly fee on top of the per-payment charge that Square asks for, and the reader itself is much bigger, taking up the iPhone's dock rather than just using the headphone port like Square's. Whatever Apple saw in them, you'll be able to get VeriFone's system right along with an iPhone or iPod touch all at the same time.. No matter which system eventually prevails (if indeed anyone needs to prevail at all — there's certainly more than one credit card company, so there's no reason why there couldn't be more than one payment system on the iPhone), this does seems like a model that will change a lot of business transactions in all sorts of industries. It'll be interesting to see how the curve takes off once these things are up and running.

by Ljrit

Steve Jobs Says No Tethering Between iPad and iPhone

Steve Jobs appears to have fired off a tersely worded email reply to a user in Sweeden who asked whether the WiFi-only iPad could be tethered to the iPhone: "No." Jezper Söderlund of the Swedish website Slashat.se reports that he sent Apple's chief executive an email identifying himself as an Apple customer before adding, "I'm also awaiting the release of the iPad. However, I have one question: Will the wifi-only version somehow support tethering thru my iPhone?" The full email headers Söderlund forwarded to AppleInsider appear to indicate that Jobs sent his one word reply at 8:30 AM from his iPhone. Whether one can tether Apple currently supports Bluetooth and USB (but not WiFi) tethering to share an iPhone's 3G mobile signal with another computer in iPhone 3.x software. However, enabling the feature requires approval from the carrier. AT&T does not allow iPhone tethering in the US, nor do some other iPhone carriers in other regions. Well over a year ago in late 2008, AT&T executive Ralph De La Vega said that iPhone tethering was coming "soon." Apple introduced the technical capacity to tether with the iPhone 3.0 firmware in mid 2009, but AT&T failed to deliver any progress in approving an iPhone tethering plan for its subscribers throughout 2009, and has yet to even provide an update on when that will happen. Tethering the iPad to an iPhone In order to use iPhone tethering from a Mac or PC, the computer must be able to connect to the iPhone via USB or Bluetooth, and must support a network connection over that interface. While the iPad includes Bluetooth hardware, it is not yet known if it will support a network uplink connection over Bluetooth (known as a "Wireless iAP"). The iPhone OS does not currently enable this as a feature so it is doubtful the iPad will, particularly given Jobs flat out "no" answer to tethering. Bluetooth support in iPhone OS devices is also limited in many other respects. Being able to access an iAP within the iPhone OS (a "reverse tether") would allow iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad users to connect to and share an iPhone or computer's Internet access via Bluetooth, rather than only over a mobile EDGE/3G network or over WiFi hotspot. That's not currently possible. The iPhone OS also offers no support for "reverse tethering" over USB, shutting down the other avenue for connecting an iPad to an iPhone with tethering enabled. The iPhone OS also does not support acting as a gateway to share its mobile Internet access over WiFi to other computers, even though iPhone OS devices can all access any WiFi hotspot. Apple has made no comments about the iPad's ability to tether its 3G access (allowing a computer to share the iPad's mobile access data plan), likely because it is not intended to do so. The data plan on the iPad is priced so much lower than most general purpose 3G dongle plans that it appears clear that AT&T does not expect users to be sharing it for general use from other computers.

by Ljrit