Project Dark is a Go

After all the speculating, “Project Dark” is officially a go. The pricing is up on the T-Mobile website and it is exactly what we hoped feared. At first glance I’m not seeing any changes whatsoever from all the leaks, which may be a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t know if anyone can really make that determination yet. Marketing is of course going to be the key factor here and we look forward to whatever T-Mobile brings to the table as they ramp up advertisements to the rumored tune of 40% this holiday season. Regardless of whatever marketing may come, we’re still super happy to see a new standard in the wireless industry with a no contract offering. It’s about time that the European style way of doing business made it over to US shores. Love it or hate it, it works quite well everywhere else in the world. So without further ado, we present to you, Project Dark. Time will tell today, as it’s just barely 9am in South Florida, if there are any more surprises in store–handsets, 3G, 4G or otherwise. We aren’t holding out hope for anything but we do love surprises!

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T-Mobile Project Dark

We've heard plenty about Project Dark lately, including new unlimited plans, 21Mbps HSPA, and new handsets. The newest rumors, courtesy of Boy Genius Report, are whispers of Rent-A-Center style, contract-free unsubsidized phone purchasing and tiered unlimited plans. Updated.

Obviously T-mobile is attempting to expand their customer base through Project Dark, and part of the approach is to entice customers who would normally be forced to prepay monthly dues as well as full retail for a device:

"Even More Plus" will give those who would otherwise qualify for FlexPay the option to finance a phone. [...] Our sources tell us that the phones will not be subsidized and so there won't be contracts for the devices, which means you pay the full retail price over the course of a set amount of time (up to 20 months is what we're told). Not bad - for a $500 device over that time is just $25/month, as an example.

The next step is offering the "Most Affordable Unlimited Rate Plans" in three flavors:

[U]nlimited voice, unlimited voice and text, and unlimited voice/text/data all priced at $40, $50 and $60, respectively.

All unconfirmed rumors, of course, but moves like this could definitely help T-mobile leap up from fourth place in the Great Battle of the Carriers.

Google Wave Update

9/29/2009 08:46:00 AM

Starting Wednesday, September 30 we'll be sending out more than 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave to:

• Developers who have been active in the developer preview we started back in June
• The first users who signed up and offered to give feedback on wave.google.com
• Select business and university customers of Google Apps

We'll ask some of these early users to nominate people they know also to receive early invitations — Google Wave is a lot more useful if your friends, family and colleagues have it too. This, of course, will just be the beginning. If all goes well we will soon be inviting many more to try out Google Wave.

Some of you have asked what we mean by preview. This just means that Google Wave isn't quite ready for prime time. Not yet, anyway. Since first unveiling the project back in May, we've focused almost exclusively on scalability, stability, speed and usability. Yet, you will still experience the occasional downtime, a crash every now and then, part of the system being a bit sluggish and some of the user interface being, well, quirky.

There are also still key features of Google Wave that we have yet to fully implement. For example, you can't yet remove a participant from a wave or define groups of users, draft mode is still missing and you can't configure the permissions of users on a wave. We'll be rolling out these and other features as soon as they are ready — over the next few months.

Despite all this, we believe you will find that Google Wave has the potential for making you more productive when communicating and collaborating. Even when you're just having fun! We use it ourselves everyday for everything from planning pub crawls to sharing photos, managing release processes and debating features to writing design documents. In fact, we collaborated on this very blog post with several colleagues in Google Wave.

Speaking of ways you could potentially use Google Wave, we're intrigued by the many detailed ones people have taken the time to describe. To mention just a few: journalist Andy Ihnatko on producing his Chicago Sun-Times column, filmmaker Jonathan Poritsky on streamlining the movie-making process, scientist Cameron Neylon on academic papers and lab work, Alexander Dreiling and his SAP research team on collaborative business process modelling, and ZDNet's Dion Hincliffe on a host of enterprise use cases.

The Wave team's most fun day since May? We invited a group of students to come spend a day with us at Google's Sydney office. Among other things, we asked them to collaboratively write stories in Google Wave about an imaginary trip around the world. They had a ball! As did we...

Finally, a big shoutout to the thousands of developers who have patiently taken part in our ongoing developer preview. It has been great fun to see the cool extensions already built or being planned and incredibly instructive to get their help planning the future of our APIs. To get a taste for what some of these creative developers have been working on, and to learn more about the ways we hope to make it even easier for developers to build new extensions, check out this post on our developer blog.

Happy waving!

Microsoft's Free Security Essentials Antivirus Goes Final

The free Security Essentials app from Microsoft just escaped beta, meaning they fixed all the showstopper bugs that would cause users to be irreparably pissed.

Lifehacker says there aren't a lot of new features since their first look at the software, but it is a free antivirus app, albeit one that might not be great enough to get you to switch from your current app. After all, AVG is still free for individuals, but for small businesses that need to install one on every machine, this might free up a good deal more budget for a fancy Xmas party. [Microsoft via Lifehacker]

Early Info Release on Pink Phone (Microsoft)

These phones are going to be made by Sharp, who'll get to share branding with Microsoft. Sharp produced the Sidekick hardware for Danger, who was bought by Microsoft almost two years ago. Pink will be primarily aimed at the same market as the Sidekick, and the branding and identity for it is highly developed, pointing toward a later stage in the development cycle.

The prior relationship between Danger and Sharp is the only reason we can think of why Microsoft stuck with Sharp for the new phones, and perhaps why they look so much like remixed Sidekicks. (Kind of yucky, that is.) The youth bent is somewhat surprising, if Pink is going to be their big consumer phone play, building off the expertise of Danger and members of the Zune team.

The hardware design has a definite younger feeling: Turtle looks like a chunky child's version of a Palm Pre, while Pure seems like a standard slider, and both are clearly plastic, with an overall sense of roundedness, thanks to lots of soft angles and circular keys.

It's been reported elsewhere that Pink phones will include Zune services, and have its own app store, making it as close to the Zune phone as we may get. We'll see if it's close enough in the coming months, though these are the only facts our source will let us safely publish for now.

Back to the Future with Phones

Imagine sharing one phone with up to 11 other students on your dorm floor. Penn State students who lived in the residence halls through 1977 don’t need to imagine it; they lived it. Now, with current students’ near-universal use of cell phones, Penn State’s residence halls will once again feature shared hallway phones. That’s just the latest change in campus phone service since the first telephone was installed in the 1880s.

The decision to pull “landlines” (the undoubtedly Gen X-coined term that refers to what those over age 30 tend to call “telephones”) from Penn State’s residence halls turned out to be a no-brainer. As Penn State Housing Director Conal Carr explained to The Daily Collegian in July, some quick research revealed nearly all students carry cell phones, and during the 2007-08 school year, almost three-quarters of them used their room landlines less than 20 times. That hardly justifies the $800,000 Housing was paying to keep the lines active in nearly 50 residence halls.

Replacing the individual room landlines will be courtesy phones in the hallways that will work for local calls and for calling 911 in case of an emergency. “In a way, it’s going back to the way our students’ parents had it,” Carr told The Collegian. The story of phones on campus and in the residence halls has many twists since the first telephone was installed in 1883.

“An Indispensable Nuisance”
A local newspaper, The Bellefonte Democrat Watchman, reported on June 23, 1883, “The State College (as Penn State was then know) now is connected by telephone to the outside world.” President George Atherton was responsible for Penn State’s first telephone, which was located in his office. But Atherton’s daughter, Helen Govier, recalled later that he considered the new form of communication “an indispensable nuisance.” It wasn’t long before the business office, Engineering Building, Agriculture Building, and registrar’s office also had telephones.

Those early telephones were connected to Bellefonte, then the population center of the county. Within five years, Penn State was also connected to Lemont. At the same time, eight of the houses in what would become the town of State College had telephones “from which one may have instant communication with any one of 166 other telephones of the Bellefonte exchange and with 1,800 others through the Central Pennsylvania Telephone Company.” A century before faxes and e-mails, ringing the operator, giving her a name or number, and waiting while she connected your call through her switchboard was considered “instant communication.”

Continue reading story here.

BlackBerry Desktop Manager - Built in Tethering

Good news for BlackBerry owners who tether their phones—RIM has made the process easier by including a bulit-in version in the leaked 5.0.1. Desktop Manager update.

The pre-release version is available now in English and multilingual versions for those anxious to give it a spin. As always, make sure you have a plan that supports tethering so you don't accidentally run up an outrageous data bill. [The BlackBerry Ninja via IntoMobile]

New iPods With Cameras, Microphones

Apple’s September events have traditionally revolved around iPods and iTunes, so it’s obvious this will be the theme of the event. But what, exactly, about the iPod? There’s a pile of evidence suggesting Apple will release new iPod Touch and iPod Nanos with cameras.

Wired.com in July received an inside tip from a well-connected source claiming Apple would soon add a camera and a microphone to the iPod Touch, which would bring it closer in line with the iPhone. Additionally, several other publications reported similar rumors about the Touch and the Nano getting cameras. And the latest iPod-related rumor comes from Taiwanese publication DigiTimes, which claims that not only will the Nano and Touch receive cameras, the iPod Classic will, too.

We’re confident the Nano and Touch will be upgraded with cameras (and, of course, increased storage). Cult of Mac’s Leander Kahney had us convinced when he published a gallery of third-party Touch and Nano cases, which feature holes presumably meant for cameras. (See photo above)

However, we’re doubting the iPod Classic will gain a camera. It’s unlikely Apple would want to invest much more in this product, because its sales have shrunk considerably, thanks to the success of the iPhone. Last quarter, the iPod accounted for 18 percent of Apple’s overall revenue, compared to 55.5 percent in 2006. Also, the iPod Classic is the only hard-drive-based iPod remaining in the iPod family, and flash-memory prices are plummeting. Would a camera really boost this device’s appeal and make it worth the investment? We don’t think so.

One more thing: Because the iPod Touch is basically a phoneless iPhone that many use as a gaming device, the next logical step would be for the iPod Touch to get a performance boost to bring it up to speed with the new iPhone 3GS. We’re so confident in this prediction that we’re willing to bet a Chevy Chevelle on it.

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BlackBerry's App World Webportal

You can now get BlackBerry's application storefront through a webportal. It lets you browse applications on your computer and then email yourself the link to purchase or download the app on your phone.

Definitely a nice shopping alternative to having to browse on your Berry, but I kinda wish you could purchase through the site and then sideload. [BlackBerry via CrackBerry]

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Vintage Culture on the Line: Novelty Phones Recall the Past

The saddest thing about the extinction of landlines and corded phones is the death of brilliant novelty phones: Here, Kermit, kicked back so he looks remiss without a cigarette dangling from his mouth, cradles the handset over his legs. (Courtesy of [Wired])

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More Pictures Here