Episode 20 – News, News and More News!
Posted by Michael | Posted in Show Notes | Posted on 09-06-2010
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WWDC 2010 Steve Jobs keynote liveblog
The keynote is set to start at 10am PDT on June 7 (see it in your local timezone) sharp and we’ll be keeping you informed with live transcription and photos from the event. You can also sign up below for an email reminder that will inform you shortly before we begin.
AT&T makes sweeping changes to data plans, iPhone tethering coming at OS 4 launch
DataPlus / DataPro
• The existing $30 fair-use “unlimited” smartphone data plan is being replaced by two new options: $15 per month for 200MB and $25 for 2GB (called “DataPlus” and “DataPro,” respectively). Customers currently on the $30 plan are welcome to stay on it, but they can switch at any time without extending their contract.
• AT&T’s new overage system is arguably the game changer: on the $15 plan, you’ll pay $15 for each additional 200MB, but on the $25 plan, you’ll pay $10 for each additional GB. It’s simple and straightforward — but most importantly, it won’t bankrupt you if you go over by a gig or three in a month. This compares to $50 per gigabyte of overage on AT&T’s 5GB DataConnect plan for laptops.
• The carrier’s going to be very flexible about changing between the DataPlus and DataPro plans — if you’re on DataPlus, for example, and you discover that you’re blowing past your allotment, you can choose either to start DataPro the following billing cycle, pro-rate it, or apply the higher plan retroactively to the beginning of your current billing cycle. That’s pretty wild.
Tethering
• Tethering will be offered as an add-on to the DataPro plan for an additional $20 per month, which means you’ll pay a total of $45 a month for 2GB of data shared between your phone and your tethered devices. If you’re light on the usage, it’s a sweet deal — but if you scale it up and you’re using the data almost exclusively on your laptop, it compares unfavorably to the traditional DataConnect plan: $60 versus $75 for 5GB (and in the unlikely even you’ve got a webOS device on Verizon, it compares even less favorably). If you’re striking a balance of data use between a smartphone and tethered gear, AT&T’s new setup is still pretty solid considering that you would’ve been paying $60 for the USB stick plus $30 for smartphone data before.
• Yes, it’s finally happening: AT&T’s iPhones will get access to the tethering option, too.
iPad
• iPad users are also affected by the change. The $30 iPad data plan — lauded for being labeled by AT&T as truly unlimited — goes away to be replaced by the same $25 / 2GB plan that smartphone users will see, though current subscribers to the $30 plan can continue unaffected.
Everything launches on June 7, except for iPhone tethering — it’ll launch when OS 4 does. In the meantime, we’re told users can sign up for the $30 plans both on their phones and iPads if they’d like to be grandfathered in. Follow the break for more details along with AT&T’s full press release.
iPhone Gains Free 3G Skype Calling Until 2011
Skype has introduced Skype for iPhone 2.0. The biggest new feature being offered by the application is VoIP-based calling over AT&T’s 3G network. There’s one big catch, however. Skype-to-Skype calls, which have historically been free, will incur fees beginning in 2011.
Alberta school to use iPhone, iPod Touch
A junior high school in St. Albert, Canada, plans to allow its students to stay plugged in when they start school in September.
Richard S. Fowler Catholic Junior High School will allow students to use their iPhones or iPod Touches in the classroom. It’s a dramatic change from the school’s current no cellphone policy. Sean Brown, vice-principal of the school, said the school has changed its policy because the school believes the Apple products can be used to teach students.
“It doesn’t make a lot of sense all the time to have them keep powering down,” he told CBC News. “We can use them for technological reasons in the education area.”
Students will not be allowed to use the phone or texting parts of their devices, Brown said. Instead they can use applications on the products, surf the internet through the school’s Wi-Fi network and interactively communicate with their teachers. The school’s network will restrict access to some internet sites, such as Facebook.
The school plans to buy about 30 iPod Touches for students who can’t afford the devices or whose parents choose not to buy one, Brown said.
Firefox Home ‘coming soon’ to iPhone, will sync with desktop browser
Continuous client functionality, you say? Sounds like Mozilla might be just what the doctor ordered. The company has announced that its upcoming Firefox Home app is coming soon to the iPhone. The program will sync up with your desktop client so that you can go mobile with all your browsing history, bookmarks and “the set of tabs from [your] most recent browser session” going along for the ride. Not only that, but there’s an “Awesome Bar” — Mozilla’s words, not ours — that’ll let you search through everything and predict options based on the available data. While not a “full” Firefox browser, according to the blog post (with the addendum, “either technically or due to policy”), the pages still load from within the app itself. No solidified release date yet — it’s still being polished for app store submission, but Opera’s luck give us hope for a smooth approval. In the meantime, you can get a quick preview in the video after the break.
AT&T: 40 percent of iPhone sales are enterprise
Basically, Spears says that he’s seeing extraordinary uptake on the business side with the iPhone since 2008 and the introduction of the platform’s first enterprise-focused features; in fact, he claims that “four out of every 10 sales” are to enterprise users these days and that it has all but caught up to BlackBerry for the kind of modern, tight, full-featured security that your average IT department needs. On a related note, Spears says that he hasn’t “seen the Android platform yet in the enterprise space,” but that he figures it’ll evolve over time to become “hard to ignore” to the enterprise segment. Of course, considering that AT&T has virtually no presence in the Android market at the moment, we’re not surprised that he’d take a lukewarm tack — so here’s hoping that changes fast. Follow the break for more highlights of Spears’ comments.
Netflix running on iPhone
We just received a tip from one of our readers going by the name Knisitruck who has successfully gotten Netflix to run on his iPhone 3G. Basically he copied the iPad Netflix app and iPad mediaplayer frameworks to his iPhone, made a few plist edits and changes and got it running!
Smokescreen makes Flash content visible on iPhone and iPad (video)
Mind you, it’s just a preview release, but Chris Smoak’s Smokescreen does exactly what it promises: enable Flash content to play on Apple’s iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad. Kind of. Here’s how Smokescreen gets around using a Flash plugin as described by Simon Willison:
“It runs entirely in the browser, reads in SWF binaries, unzips them (in native JS), extracts images and embedded audio and turns them in to base64 encoded data:uris, then stitches the vector graphics back together as animated SVG.”
While it works fine with simple animated banner ads (uh, huzzah!?), we found that Smokescreened Flash content like video and games was impossibly slow when tested on our iPhone 3G. Still, it’s a start for this soon to be open sourced Flash player written in JavaScript. Check the video after the break for a demonstration or give it a go for yourselves by browsing over to the appropriate source link below.
This Week’s Apps Picks
- Trism – $2.99
- Sonic the Hedgehog 2 – $5.99
- Scanner911 - $0.99 They just raised the price to $1.99
- Ranch Rush – $0.99
- 1,001 Ringtones Pro - $0.99 (50% off)
- Doodle Army – $0.99
- Peggle – $2.99
- Rat On The Run – $0.99
- Tap Fish – FREE
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