Let's Talk Tech
It’s the season of giving and HTC is playing Santa.
Every Tuesday starting now through December, HTC will be running crazy savings on a limited quantity of phones and tablets. If you’re ready to jump in at 12pm Eastern, you might be able to score a Nexus 9 for half price ($199), or take $350 off a no-contract M8. It looks like each deal will only stock around 200 units for the day, so you better be quick with your browser.
Happy hunting folks!
On the campaign trail, then candidate Obama campaigned on keeping the Internet free and fair. As President, he’s been quiet on the recent plans laid out by the FCC to allow for paid fast lane access to web services.
In a two minute video uploaded to Youtube this morning, President Obama laid out his plan for what a free Internet should look like. He submitted his proposed plan to the FCC, encouraging them to prevent gatekeepers from arbitrarily degrading services like Netflix, and that rules should be drafted which protect service regardless of how someone connects to the internet. That last point would also mark a large shift in how data access is managed as cell networks operate under different rules than traditional wired networks.
While it’s encouraging to finally see the White House comment publicly on the continuing battles over Net Neutrality, the FCC’s response threw some cold water on those happy feelings.
“As an independent regulatory agency we will incorporate the President’s submission into the record of the Open Internet proceeding,” chairman Wheeler says. “We welcome comment on it and how it proposes to use Title II of the Communications Act.”
Essentially saying that the President’s recommendation would largely end up on the same pile of comments that the public has been submitting.
You can see President Obama’s statement below.
The second largest carrier in the United States is making a move to acquire Mexico’s Grupo Iusacell SA for $2.5 Billion, expanding their customer network by 8 million subscribers and pushing farther into Latin America.
The deal will include covering $800 Million of Iusacell debt, and should make Mexico’s third largest more competitive, especially as Mexico is building out more middle class services for consumers.
“Our acquisition of Iusacell is a direct result of the reforms put in place by President Peña Nieto to encourage more competition and more investment in Mexico. Those reforms together with the country’s strong economic outlook, growing population and growing middle class make Mexico an attractive place to invest,” said Randall Stephenson, AT&T chairman and CEO. “Iusacell gives us a unique opportunity to create the first-ever North American Mobile Service area covering over 400 million consumers and businesses in Mexico and the United States. It won’t matter which country you’re in or which country you’re calling – it will all be one network, one customer experience.”
Full PR is below. Continue reading “AT&T to Acquire Wireless Provider Iusacell in Mexico”
The Internet Archive is a terrific resource for finding old media, from classic films in the Public Domain to old versions of web sites. Recently they branched out into archiving video games, and now they’re announcing a treasure trove of classic arcade games.
Over 900 old school coin-op games are now available to play through your browser for free! They join a growing collection of consoles like the Atari 2600, Colecovision, and Sega Genesis.
It’s an easy way to waste a little time this weekend. Enjoy!
comScore released their quarterly smartphone rankings for the period ending in September.
Android showed a modest increase to 52.1% of the overall market. Apple lost ground, and now represents 41.7% of the pie. Microsoft gained another .2%, and now sits at 3.6%, while Blackberry shrank a little more to hit 2.3%.
While Apple might have lost market share, overall the smartphone market is a growing market, and looking at individual manufacturers, Cupertino still reigns. Remember the iPhone owns 41.7% of the market, with the next closest competitor being Samsung who also saw growth to 29%. LG continued their growth trend hitting 6.9% of the market while Motorola was down to 5.4% and HTC dropped to 4.4%.
comScore also examined what apps were most popular, and while Google dominated the list, Facebook ran away with the top spot as the most used app on any phone. You can check out the full app list below.
Following on the heels of Microsoft delivering unlimited cloud storage for Office users, Amazon is getting in on the no-limits game.
Starting today, Prime subscribers get unlimited photo storage, even while uploading full resolution photos. Using Amazon’s Cloud Drive app, you can set up automatic back up and uploading on Android and iOS, but even pics manually uploaded through your browser will count.
The stock free file storage for non-photo uploads remains at 5GB.
Not a bad little perk for Amazon’s yearly subscription service.
Looks like we’re about to see a little mutual backscratching between former rivals.
Microsoft and DropBox are teaming up for a “strategic partnership”. Office integration will be opened up, so users will be able to view and edit any files saved online in DropBox. This means we should see updates to Office apps, hopefully with more Android compatibility.
Windows Phone users will also score in the deal as we’ll finally get an official DropBox app. Moving forward with Microsoft combining their apps for Windows 8 and Windows Phone, hopefully this DropBox app will also go cross platform.
App updates should drop “in the coming weeks” and online integration should happen early 2015.
I suppose a little cooperation between former cloud storage rivals never hurt anyone right?
Disney is bringing their streaming movie service to Google Play.
Starting today you can connect your Disney Movies Anywhere account to your Google account, and your films will be available through Play on any of your Android devices. This works for all Disney, Pixar, and Marvel films, and it works in both directions, so fret not if you purchased your films through Google Play, they’ll now also show up in your Anywhere account too.
To celebrate the new partnership Disney is giving away free copies of Wreck-It Ralph to people who sign up! So go get them folks!