hot new smartphone can be Incredible, Vibrant, Epic or just “eh,” but no matter how it stacks up, it’s a safe bet that it will start selling at $199.
On the four major wireless networks — Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ – News), AT&T (NYSE: T – News), Sprint (NYSE: S – News) and T-Mobile — there are 13 smartphones priced at $199 with a two-year contract. There are no phone models with a higher starting price (add-ons like more memory can increase the price tag), and there are more smartphones selling at $199 than at any other single price point.
But spending $199 doesn’t guarantee you a top-of-the-line phone. On AT&T’s network, $199 will buy an iPhone 4, the best-selling smartphone of all time. But you’ll need to fork over the same amount for a BlackBerry Bold 9700, a nine-month-old phone that lacks a touch screen. MORE
Someday, they’ll build wireless Internet into every building, just the way they build in running water, heat and electricity today. Someday, we won’t have to drive around town looking for a coffee shop when we need to check our e-mail.
If you want ubiquitous Internet today, though, you have several choices. They’re all compromised and all expensive.
You could get online using only a smartphone, but you’ll pay at least $80 a month and you’ll have to view the Internet through a shrunken keyhole of a screen. ou could equip your laptop with one of those cellular air cards or U.S.B. sticks, which cost $60 a month, but you’d be limited to 5 gigabytes of data transfer a month (and how are you supposed to gauge that?). You could use tethering, in which your laptop uses your cellphone as a glorified Internet antenna — but that adds $20 or $30 to your phone bill, has a fixed data limit and eats through your phone’s battery charge in an hour.
Last year, you could hear minds blowing coast to coast when Novatel introduced a new option: the MiFi. It creates a personal Wi-Fi bubble, a portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot that, because it’s the size of a porky credit card, can go with you everywhere. The MiFi gets its Internet signal from a 3G cellphone network and converts it into a Wi-Fi signal that up to five people can share. MORE
In a blow to Net neutrality advocates, who were hoping for sweeping new rules as early as this month, federal regulators suggested Wednesday that they’re delaying any action in the near future.
The Federal Communications Commission said it will be conducting a “further inquiry” into the details of broadband regulation, including whether wireless networks should be exempted from strict Net neutrality rules, a concept that Google and Verizon recently endorsed. (Here’s some background from last year on wireless regulation.)
Long before the iPhone, the iPod was the device that helped transform Apple from computer company into a consumer electronics company.
But today, the ubiquitous music player has become less relevant to the company that essentially owns that product category.
Apple still sells three-fourths of all MP3 players sold, but multifunction gadgets like the iPhone and iPad are getting the most attention from Apple customers, not to mention the rest of the electronics industry, and bringing in more revenue than iPods these days.
So when Apple convenes a special event in San Francisco to discuss music this Wednesday — as it has every September for the last five years — we think that Steve Jobs and Co. will touch on the iPod but also talk more broadly about media, including a more evolved iTunes and new ways to watch content in the living room. MORE
The facts: On August 27, 1891, a passenger train jumped the tracks on a tall bridge near Statesville, North Carolina, sending seven rail cars below and about 30 people to their deaths.
The legend: On the wreck’s anniversary, the sounds of screeching wheels, screaming passengers and a horrific crash might still be heard. You might also see a uniformed man with a gold watch.
Shortly before 3 a.m. Friday, on the 119th anniversary of the Bostian Bridge train tragedy and at about the same time, between 10 and 12 ghost hunters were on that approximately 300-foot long span.
They were hoping to hear the sounds of the crash, and perhaps see something.
Instead, a real Norfolk-Southern train — three engines and one car — turned the corner as it headed east to Statesville, about 35 miles north of Charlotte, authorities said. MORE
Who was the foremost member of the foremost group of all time? Was Paul McCartney or John Lennon the real driving force behind the Beatles? That question has ignited debates for decades. Rolling Stone’s new special issue, The Beatles’ 100 Greatest Songs, doesn’t answer the question (nothing ever will), but it sheds some light on it.
Of the 100 songs, which were ranked by the editors of Rolling Stone, 40 were written by Lennon, 35 by McCartney, 17 by the two men working together and eight by George Harrison, who came into his own as a songwriter on the Beatles’ final albums. MORE
There have been several reports of privacy scams on Facebook, and “Facebook ghosts” have surfaced as a new iteration of the trend.
Earlier this month, Yahoo! Sports created a ton of buzz when it reported one NFL team allegedly uses fake Facebook profiles to tempt recruits into unknowingly handing over their personal information.
One popular Facebook “ghost” was a blond female temptress, the site reports. VIEW MORE
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Philadelphia bloggers were abuzz this week about a citywide move to crack down on citizens running a business without a license — which includes any local bloggers running ads on their sites.
The weekly Philadelphia City Paper kicked off the kerfuffle with an article spotlighting several small-scale bloggers who were startled to receive letters from the city demanding that they shell out up to $300 for a license allowing them to operate a local business. One of the recipients had raked in a whopping profit of $11 over two years from his blog. MORE
FORTUNE — Sal Khan, you can count Bill Gates as your newest fan. Gates is a voracious consumer of online education. This past spring a colleague at his small think tank, bgC3, e-mailed him about the nonprofit khanacademy.org, a vast digital trove of free mini-lectures all narrated by Khan, an ebullient, articulate Harvard MBA and former hedge fund manager. Gates replied within minutes. “This guy is amazing,” he wrote. “It is awesome how much he has done with very little in the way of resources.” Gates and his 11-year-old son, Rory, began soaking up videos, from algebra to biology. Then, several weeks ago, at the Aspen Ideas Festival in front of 2,000 people, Gates gave the 33-year-old Khan a shout-out that any entrepreneur would kill for. Ruminating on what he called the “mind-blowing misallocation” of resources away from education, Gates touted the “unbelievable” 10- to 15-minute Khan Academy tutorials “I’ve been using with my kids.” With admiration and surprise, the world’s second-richest person noted that Khan “was a hedge fund guy making lots of money.” Now, Gates said, “I’d say we’ve moved about 160 IQ points from the hedge fund category to the teaching-many-people-in-a-leveraged-way category. It was a good day his wife let him quit his job.” Khan wasn’t even there — he learned of Gates’ praise through a YouTube video. “It was really cool,” Khan says.
