Three of the nation’s four major wireless companies are betting big on the idea that we’ll use our cell phones instead of our credit cards. AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon have jointly announced “Isis,” and plan to roll the service out to merchants over the next year and a half.
Isis will use near-field communication (NFC) chips built into …
If your AT&T phone drops a call or connects to the web more slowly than normal, complaining about it on Twitter might actually help.
AT&T researcher Jia Wang has published a paper (PDF file) outlining how her company scours Twitter for certain “mobile related words such as phone, mobile, 3G, edge, etc.” paired with certain …
Get any interesting e-mails lately? If you’re a Gmail user, you should have gotten one directly from Google yesterday saying, “We’ve reached a settlement in a lawsuit regarding Google Buzz.”
“Everyone in the U.S. who uses Gmail is included in the settlement,” says the e-mail. We won! What do we get? “Just to be clear, this is not a …
You may recall a post earlier in the month concerning some 15 million Verizon customers being charged between $2 and $6 each for “data sessions on their phones that they did not initiate.”
After receiving hundreds of complaints, the FCC decided to investigate the “mystery fees” and today announced that Verizon would have to pay $25 …
When Apple unveiled the iPhone 4 in June, it was first available in black with the promise of a white version to follow in July. That ship date got pushed off until “later this year,” according to Apple. The company said, “White models of Apple’s new iPhone 4 have continued to be more challenging to manufacture than we originally …
Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal published a story concerning the inadvertent passing of Facebook users’ personal information between popular third-party Facebook applications and several outside marketing agencies and data-gathering firms.
Every Facebook user is assigned a unique, non-identifying, numeric “user ID” that’s …
The FCC is expected to propose rules that would require cellular companies to send text or voicemail messages to customers before they go over their minutes, according to Bloomberg. The rules would also provide for warnings to be sent to customers roaming on international networks outside the US, which can often result in expensive
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Just about every Verizon Wireless phone is capable of accessing web data but unless your monthly service plan has a special data package added to it, you’ll pay $2 per megabyte to get online.
According to a recent statement from Verizon, “over the past several years approximately 15 million customers who did not have data plans were …
Of all the Android-based tablets to hit the market later this year, Samsung’s 7-inch Galaxy Tab Is one of the more impressive iPad competitors. However, if the rumors that its price will be carrier-subsidized at somewhere between $200 and $400 turn out to be true, it’s in big, big trouble.
For most people, tablets are a third …
In light of Apple’s recent Apple TV announcement, Amazon has made the price of download-to-keep “hit shows from ABC and FOX” just 99 cents per episode. You’ll recall that Apple TV will offer streaming, per-episode rentals from ABC and FOX for 99 cents, but you don’t get to keep them.
It’ll be interesting to see if this is just a …
Here comes the digital wallet—to the New York area, at least. Reuters is reporting that Bank of America and Visa will be rolling out a pilot pay-by-phone program in the New York area next month that’ll run until year’s end.
The system will work with smartphones, but not quite as seamlessly as you’d think. Instead of installing a …
This whole Google/Verizon net neutrality debate has reached critical mass and is quickly entering the “beating a dead horse” territory, but AT&T threw a bit more gasoline on the fire last Friday with its “Wireless is Different” post on the company’s Public Policy Blog.
As the title suggests, the post asserts that wireless internet is …
