Twelve Black Code Monkeys

I guess it was too good to last. The Unlocked GSM Treo 650 has just been marked up by $100, after going on sale for $599 only two days ago. Perhaps Pa1mOne got so many orders in those first two days, they decided to play a little supply-and-demand-flexible-pricing, doh!

I’m not sure about this, but I can’t ever remember a situation where a company decided to increase the price of a released product just a couple days after it was released! Pa1mOne has really been making some major stumbles lately in terms of its PR. We had a bunch of leaks or initial releases of information before they pulled it back in, the memory debacle, and now this. Pa1mOne, really, you need to get your act together. Raising the price after releasing it just does not look good at all.

Luckily, I purchased my phone from Pa1mOne on Tuesday when the price was still $599, and that’s what I’ve been charged, but I do think it’s a bit unfair that others are going to suffer a $100 surcharge for not buying within the first couple of days. Hmmm, maybe I shouldn’t be that disappointed? Often it is the early adopters who have to pay through nose for the priveledge of playing with a new gadget before most people. Now for once this isn’t the case. Except of course that you could be an early adopter who just took a couple of days before ordering it and have to deal with this increase!

Gizmodo has some additional insight into this suggesting that Cingular may have convinced Pa1mOne to increase the price. Perhaps the differential was just not big enough and they felt they were losing too many people who would have rather bought an unlocked phone. If this is true, it really is a shame, but I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure, it’s just speculation. But if it is true, I think this shows the ridiculousness of the whole locking issue, and how the phone subsidy and contracts work. It all serves to give the consumer fewer choices and to lock them into contracts for long periods which they have to pay hefty penalties to break out of. Number portability can only go so far in promoting competition, but the mergers have provided a definite counter to this. Of course the fact that we can get an unlocked phone at any price is better than what CDMA offers with no such portability, but the U.S. still has a long way to go before getting to the competitive environment in the European mobile industry, and when was it that Europe became a more competition-friendly place for consumers?

Link: Treonauts (it’s also all over the forums at myTreo.net and TreoCentral)

There seems to be a whole lot of confusion out there about the various rates for data communications for cell phones. I know I’ve been confused whenever I’ve tried to tackle the issue of which providers offer what kinds of services for how much. They just don’t make it very easy to get a quick idea of what they offer. Part of the problem is that carriers actually separate data in different ways for different niche markets. You have one type of data that is geared towards their premier youth market that conentrates on text or multimedia messages, browsing WAP sites, and downloading ringtones. Then there is the corporate market that concerns itself primarily with email. Finally, there’s the market for the general internet geek power user where the data is about whatever the phone will let you do, be that instant message, browse the web, check email, stream audio or video, telnet into a shell account, whatever. This last market is the one I’m in and the one that I’ll gear this article towards. Of course I’m not as silly as the marketers are that believe that any of these market segments are at all concrete. There are people who aren’t necessarily “power users” but just want to be able to be “online” all the time to check email and instant message and browse the web. They aren’t necessarily geeks, and they could very well even be some of the youngest customers out there.

Personally, since I bought a T-Mobile Sidekick back in 2002, I have left the older more specifically mobile-phone related data service of ringtones and WAP behind. Viewing WAP sites or email on a 3-line display without images was just painful! Maybe back in 1983 it would have been nice great, but not in this century! Now, smartphones like the Sidekick, the Treo, and PocketPC phones make it possible to have a much more computer-like experience, albeit on a much smaller screen.

I myself am a T-Mobile customer, and have been for several years, but, while I think T-Mobile has some good deals in terms of rates, I always want to be knowledgeable about what the other carriers out there have to offer. I thought I’d make a real concerted effort at actually figuring out what the various U.S. carriers offer at least in terms of a full data service. It wasn’t easy! I don’t know if most of the carriers feel like their audience won’t understand anything technical so they don’t really share specifics about their data plans, or if they are incapable of describing the offerings in plain English instead of marketing-speak which requires clarification, or what. But I had to spend most of my day searching for the real information on various message boards about mobile phones and technology, and even then there seems to be a fair amount of confusion about what the real deal is.

So, anyway, here is an attempt to summarize the data plans for various carriers here in the U.S. A couple of quick notes first:

• I did not look at Nextel for a few reasons. One is that they will be merging with Sprint. Secondly, the only real data-oriented phone they carry is the Blackberry (no Treos, no PocketPC). Third, they are somewhat of a minor player compared to the other big carriers.
• I’m also not going to cover the menagerie of different data services that are not just plain old Internet connectivity (i.e. corporate email packages, video messaging, etc.).
• Finally, all of the prices I list are in addition to any voice plan. In a few instances one can just by the data service and then regular phone calls are charged on a per-minute basis, but most of the plans require you to buy a voice plan for $20 or more, which includes at least some free minutes.

U.S. Mobile Data Rates (c. May, 2005)
GSM Carriers
	Tmobile’s data offerings are initially pretty understandable. You have basically 3 types of offerings:“Unlimited T-Zones” at $5/month“Unlimited T-Zones Pro” at $10/month“T-Mobile Internet” at either $20 or $30 depending on whether you also subscribe to a voice plan or do not, respectively.T-Mobile Internet is what I currently have with my Treo 600. It offers full Internet connectivity. T-Zones, on the other hand, is less clear. It’s supposed to be T-Mobile’s plan for mobile, text-based, websites that use WAP, and the PRO version adds WAP access to a corporate email account. The trick is that these services also have allowed some people to have the equivelent of the $20 plan. However, T-Mobile has started to crack down on this usage by closing the tcpip ports that enable the web browsing, emailing, instant messaging, etc. that are available on the $20 plan. In some areas you may still be able to take advantage of this oversite, but it seems these are becoming fewer and fewer.
	Before they recently merged with Cingular, AT&T was offering an unlimited data plan called “Ulimited Mmode” for $25/month. Currently, AT&T customers are not being forced into Cingular voice or data plans, but are able to keep their existing plans. New customers, though, or even AT&T customers who want to change their plans, only get to choose from Cingular plans.
	Cingular, the other main GSM carrier in the U.S., has an even more confusing data plan offering - at least via the information on their website. They break data into three parts, one for Blackberries, one for PC’s and one for PDA’s. Their Blackberry plans include a 4MB plan for $39.99 and unlimited plan for $49.99. Their PC plans (used with a card that fits in your laptop) consist of the following: $19.99 for 5MB $29.99 for 10MB $39.99 for 20MB $49.99 for 40MB $59.99 for 60MB $79.99 for unlimited data Finally, the PDA plans consist of the following: $19.99 for 5MB $29.99 for 10MB $39.99 for 20MB $44.99 for unlimited data So where do phones come in? Well, in the case of a “PDA-phone” like the Treo 600 or 650, or the Siemens SX66, you can opt from one of the PDA plans above. But there is yet another type of plan that is only shown if you buy a non-PDA phone online. This additional set of data options are called “Media Basic,” “Media Works,” and “Media Net.” While these options are not shown online when buying a non-PDA phone (and perhaps not offered at Cingular stores as an option), they can be utilized whatever data-capable phone you get (with the possible exception of Blackberries since these have their own plans). Here’s a breakdown of these plans: Media Basic: 500KB of data plus 200 SMS messages and 40 MMS messages for $9.99 Media Works: 3MB of data plus 1000 SMS messages and unlimited MMS for $19.99 MediaNet: $4.99 for 500KB $9.99 for 3MB $19.99 for 8MB $24.99 for unlimited data Confused yet? So can you get an identical unlimited data plan from Cingular under the psuedonym “MediaNet” simply by asking for it at $15 less per month than the price that Cingular would otherwise have you pay on their PDA plan (if you have a PDA-like phone)? Well, yes and no. Apparently there is a real difference in that you cannot do VPN connections (secured connections used primarily to access corporate email that’s behind a company firewall) on the MediaNet plans, but you can do this with the PDA plans.
CDMA Carriers
	Verizon offers a $49/month data plan if you don’t get a voiceplan with it (you can still pay per-minute charges for the phone), or $45/month for the same unlimted if you subscribe to one of their voiceplans that come with free minutes (the cheapest being $39.99/month). Also there is a $29.99/month data plan for 5MB per month plan.
	Sprint rounds out the four major players in the U.S. market. It is, like Verizon, a CDMA provider. It seems that Sprint offers an unlimited data plan for only $15/month called the Sprint Vision Premium Pack.

Who’s the winner?

PRICE: in terms of price, T-Mobile wins for GSM (probably, now that Cingular’s $20 plan looks expired), Sprint wins for CDMA, and is also the cheapest overall if you don’t care what type of communications protocol the carrier uses.

OTHER: There are of course other factors that enter into the decision other than price. Coverage, quality of service, support, and speed are all factors that you should take into consideration. Support and Quality of service can be pretty subjective, though, based on individual experiences, individual stores or regions of the country that may have better support than others, etc. I can’t imagine making a suggestion in that regard without some seriously large studies to back me up! But speed and coverage a lot easier to look at.

But first a quick aside to explain the current and future protocols being used to send all this data back and forth:

• CDMA currently uses a Data protocol called “1xRTT” which supposedly can clock around 144kbps, or about 2.5 times that of a dial-up connection. The next version of CDMA Data will use a protocol with the moniker “EV-DO” which is capable of much faster average speeds of 300-500Kbps with bursts as high as 2.4Mbps. GSM carriers have been using
• GSM uses a protocol called GPRS, which is generally a lot slower at only 30-70Kbps, or approximately dial-up speeds. It’s follow-up technology is called “EDGE” and is 2-4 times faster than its predecessor at 100-200 Kbps, but still not nearly as fast as EV-DO.

Why even mention about these “next generation” protocols in a piece about the current state of things? Because some of these providers actually have next-generation networks at least partially in place and as well are starting to sell a few phones that can actually utilize these faster speeds (most importantly “PDA Phones” or “Smarphones” like the Treo 650). There are of course other protocols being developed and even implemented (UMTS and WCDMA) but these have yet to really be offered to customers in the U.S. although they have in other countries.

So, lets go over what the current state of things is regarding data speeds for the various carriers:

U.S. Mobile Data Speeds and Coverage (c. May, 2005)
GSM Carriers
	T-Mobile has said that they will be building out their EDGE network in 2005, starting to offer it in select metro areas. I have indeed tested my connection in the DC area and found that EDGE is available here, at least in some spots. I have also heard of reports that it is available in New York City and Atlanta. T-Mobile also has a new map that lets you get a graphical representation of their coverage down to the street level, although it says nothing about GPRS vs. EDGE.
	Cingular (this applies to AT&T customers as well) already has a national EDGE network built out with great coverage seen in this map.
CDMA Carriers
	Verizon has been working on building out it’s EV-DO network for a year or two and apparently has around 20 metro areas supported so far: http://www.evdo-coverage.com/evdo-umts-hsdpa-coverage-map.htmlHowever, at the moment, there seems to be some confusion as to whether EV-DO will work with any handset that supports it. This PC Magazine Article seems to indicate that only laptop cards and a few Verizon, EV-DO is not available on any phone that is supposed to support EV-DO out of the box, but rather only via their laptop card and a few select Verizon handsets that are not PDA-like phones and so are locked down in terms of what they can connect to and how. So until there’s some additional confirmation (say from folks who buy the Verizon version of the Treo 650 which is supposed to be out any day now), you might want to hold off if this speed issue is the main thing attracting you to Verizon.
	Sprint has announced they will be building out an EV-DO network in 2005, apparently starting with a number of unnamed metro areas. Sprint contends the roll-out will be fast due to working out an easy upgrade path from current equipment, although they only announced in December that a contract had been signed with equipment makers. Sprint’s EV-DO page currently says that the roll-out will begin mid-2005. Sprint has an interactive map of where its cell towers are, but doesn’t really distinguish between what kinds of service those towers provide. There is no word either whether Sprint’s version of EV-DO will work with any old EV-DO-capable PDA/Smartphone, so again we will have to wait and see…

So, who’s the winner now? Well, if speed is your main concern, than probably Verizon’s EV-DO would win at this moment if you happen to live in one of those metro areas. Of course Verizon’s unlimited data plan is the highest of all the carriers at $45 (or $50 without a voiceplan). If you are looking at only GSM carriers (and many users will only look at GSM phones due to their ability to work internationally and for the convenience of SIM cards), than it’s a tough call. On the one hand Cingular beats T-Mobile hands down in terms of its very built-out EDGE network. But when it comes to price, it’s a little less clear, due to Cingular’s mixed up data policy. It may cost you the same, but it also may cost you double of what T-Mobile costs (and maybe more if you can take advantage of the $5-10 T-Zones plans, although that’s become unlikely). However, Cingular’s $39.99 gets you an extensive higher-speed EDGE network, so some for whom speed is key, will gladly pay the premium of an additional $20 per month for a doubling to quadrupling of data speeds. This difference, though, will continue to erode as Tmobile adds more coverage for EDGE (which is already available in some areas).

As I wrote, these things are not simple and they aren’t cut and dry. As well they are a moving target. While T-Mobile may look like not the best bet right now, in six months who knows, maybe they’ll surprise everyone and build out a lot of their network very quickly and give Cingular a real run for their money. Likewise, maybe they will close the loophole of their T-Zones and Cingular will cut back their data rates and make them more comprehensible (one basic all-you-can-eat plan) and will become much more competitive with T-Mobile. At least for February of 2005, this is the best snapshot of the various choices one has for mobile data connectivity. It will definitely be interesting to see how this changes over the coming months and years! I will try to keep these charts updated as new information becomes available on new plans, new coverage, etc. Of course if you find any inaccuracies in what I’ve written, feel free to enlighten us!

UPDATE (April 28, 2005): Recently I discoverd that low and behold I had EDGE via my Tmobile account! So I felt that an update to this entry was in order. I went ahead and updated the data speed table above to reflect this and some additional information about Sprint’s EV-DO roll-out, and also provided links to a couple of new coverage maps. I’ve also reworked the last couple of paragraphs in the text to reflect some of this news as well.

UPDATE (May 3, 2005): There’s been some talk over at Treocentral about data rates and using some of the information, I did some more digging and was able to update the tables above, specifically the section on Cingular data rates as well as Verizon’s data speeds and coverage.

Pa1mOne has finally come through and made Treo 650’s available for “the rest of us.” Well, I guess except for Verizon and Nextel, although the Treo 600 was never released for Nextel. Basically, Cingular is now officially offering the Treo 650 on their websites at least, and you can order a 650 directly from Pa1mOne not only for use with Sprint and Cingular/AT&T, but also an unlocked version at a very reasonable $599 without any service agreement.

On the other hand, Amazon.com is also offering the 650, and if you are also signing up for new service, you can usually get a big discount from them. So for example they have the Sprint version of the Treo 650 for only $309.99 for new Sprint customers. A similar offer for other carriers is likely to become available soon, and I’ll post an update when they do, and until then you can now buy the Cingular version right off of Cingular’s website for only $399.99 (if you’re a new customer). Update - ok, you could, but somehow Cingular seems to be playing games with us and has taken the page down at least for the moment! Aside from the new customer offers, one can also get $100 for signing up with Audible.com. For those who haven’t heard me talk about this service before, it’s an audio book service where you download the audio books as files (like MP3’s, but with a copy-protection scheme or DRM) for prices that are considerably less than what you will ever find via retail. Most books are unabridged and you can play these files both on your computer but also on many portable devices like the iPod, the Treo 600, and now the Treo 650. It’s Definitely worth a look. If you are already an Audible.com member, as I am, you can also get the $100 discount if your contract is up = you will just need to sign up for a new year’s commitment to Audible’s subscription fees. I think the way you do this is you have to actually call Audible’s customer service.

So, if you were at all wondering whether I have taken the plunge myself, yes, I have. As soon as I got up this morning and found the news out, I immediately ordered an unlocked 650 from Pa1mOne with a Bluetooth headset. Apparently it will ship in “1 to 2 weeks” but as much as I’ve been longing for this, I opted not to take the express shipping and will simply put it out of my mind until March. Yeah, right! This also means that I will be selling my Treo 600 to defray the costs of the 650. In the past this has meant a trip to eBay. Unless of course one of my friends is interested in buying it from me cheap = I will have to cut you a really good break if I know you, since I was given a similar generosity by the friend I bought mine from.

The model I am buying is the unlocked GSM version of the phone. A quick factoid = there are some different protocols (communication languages) that cell phones use depending on carrier and on what part of the world you live in. The two major ones currently are GSM and CDMA. GSM is used in most of the world = maybe 95+%. CDMA is used in North America and a few countries in South America. But while CDMA used to be the primary protocol in the U.S., it is now becoming much less so = both Cingular/AT&T and T-Mobile use GSM, whereas Sprint and Verizon use CDMA. There’s lots of debate on the internet regarding which protocol is best, which is complicated by newer versions of these protocols, so called 2.5G or 3G (G for Generation). I can’t speak to the technical differences too much, but GSM does still have two undeniable advantages over CDMA. For one it is used throughout the world, so theoretically one can take one’s phone almost anywhere and it will work, although you might need to call your carrier to activate it for international use. Secondly, GSM phones use SIM modules, which are little postage-stamp cards that contain a tiny chip. This chip is represents your mobile phone account, and can be transferred from phone to phone fairly easily. Whereas CDMA the entire phone is representing your account, so if you want to switch phones, you have to go through your carrier, and if you want to have more than one phone you will probably have to pay more. But SIM cards aren’t always straightforward either. Mobile carriers often lock the phones they sell so that they can only be used with their network. If you want to take your T-Mobile phone and lend it to a friend who has a Cingular account and SIM, you can’t do it. You will have to get the phone “unlocked” first. Sometimes this is not an issue at all. T-Mobile does allow you to do this if your account is in good standing (perhaps also you need to be a customer of theirs for at least 3 months). I remember also hearing that Cingular in general did not lock their phones, however they are locking the Treo 650, so I’m not sure what their policy will be regarding unlocking it. The reason I ordered an unlocked version is primarily because I’ve heard that T-Mobile is not offering the 650 until at least May. Oh well! The added bonus, though, of having an unlocked 650, is, of course, that I could decide to move it over to a Cingular account, and I could do this without any problem with an unlocked device.

Now that I will be getting the 650, I should finally be able to write up my follow up to the Treo 600 vs. Color Sidekick Review I wrote last summer. This one will be about the 650 and the Sidekick II, which my wife currently has. What would be great is if I could also get my hands on one of the newer blackberries and/or even a PocketPC phone and throw those into the mix! But without any real recognition from these manufacturers, I would have to go out and buy these phones, something that my current budget won’t allow for! Heck even major sites that cover gadgets and consumer electronics don’t get a lot in the way of loaner units for review, so I’m not going to be presumptuous and expect this will ever happen for me, but it sure would be nice!

I’ve been playing with this program Replay Radio which allows me to audio streams that are playing through my computer. There are a bunch of programs that do similar things. I’m going to be posting a larger piece about this soon enough, but for now I thought I’d talk a little about NPR and how the new technologies are affecting them and will continue to in the future.

NPR is a great source of news, at least as far as I’m concerned. I know some people find it too liberal, too snobby, or whatever, but I think there’s some quality reporting and as long as you keep an ears open for bias, which exists to some extent in all reporting no matter the source (based on the questions that are asked or what is decided as relevant to a given piece), you can glean a lot from the various programming on NPR.

NPR is a special case when it comes to broadcasting of course because it does not get its revenue from advertising, the way all other radio does. It gets its money from a combination of the taxpayer through government funding and through voluntary means. It’s a bit contradictory in that sense because on the one hand you have people who are giving to NPR whether they want to or not simply by their paying taxes, and another group who not only gives through their taxes but gives again through voluntary donations.

NPR then will also charge people again if they want to obtain tapes or transcripts of recordings, or if they want to download digital versions (through Audible.com). I can understand that tapes and the writing of transcripts may mean using extra resources. Even making digital recordings can do this as well. However, one can also listen to various NPR programs via streaming audio for absolutely nothing. True, they are often in somewhat lower-quality audio (I see often 20kbps, or slightly less than what AM radio is rated at), and it is less convenient than a downloadable file, but it’s still a disparity. Then if you consider these new computer applications like Replay Radio that take that stream and convert it into a downloadable file, the disparity becomes even more of an issue.

Podcasting, of course, has made this issue all the more relevant as home-grown (and a few more professional) broadcasters have started putting out audio files that are downloaded. NPR itself is experimenting with this with podcasts of On The Media. On The Media, of course, is ahead of the curve a bit because its raison d’etre is thinking about media, media trends, new technologies, etc. I wonder if NPR is thinking about these various delivery mechanisms and how they make sense?

When Satellite Radio came on the scene a few years ago I was excited about being able to get an all-NPR channel or channels and have access to it no matter where I was roaming. But after talking to someone at XM (Sirius does carry a couple of NPR shows, but none of the bread and butter stuff), I was told that NPR didn’t want to use them because it might deplete revenue of affiliate stations.

This is where things get a little more complicated. NPR isn’t just one monolithic entity, but rather it’s a public broadcasting network and in an of itself does not do any broadcasting except over the Internet, and even with that has only been doing it for a few years. Traditionally, it’s relied on affiliate stations that pay for its content. Some of these stations actually create content themselves which is then syndicated on other affiliates, although I have no idea how this works in terms of revenue – does NPR play the middle man? Do these stations talk directly to themselves and work out compensation plans? In any case, as you can see, it’s not a simple and clear situation. Affiliates need to be able to pay for these programs, for the general NPR programs, for their facilities, for staff, etc. This is what voluntary funds are for. I wonder, though, whether any of those donations go to NPR itself and if so how much? What about government funding? Does that go solely to NPR proper or to any of the affiliates?

In any case, the issue again comes down to content and paying for that content without resorting to advertising. Certainly advertising could be resorted to, but this is what makes NPR listenable in many ways – you aren’t bombarded by ridiculous amounts of offensive ads every time you want to hear the news or some interesting stories. And anyone who listens to NPR will tell you how annoying pledge drives can get.

So, the question basically is how does NPR and all the affiliate stations make money? One answer is more government funding, but there are a lot of people who would balk at this either because they think NPR is biased and biased in a way that contradicts their own political leanings. Alternately some believe simply that people should not be forced to pay for this if they don’t listen to it. These are certainly understandable arguments, so then what’s next? Perhaps NPR really needs to be thinking about setting up a subscription-based service for “premium” listeners or members. So, basically, you would become a member through your local affiliate the way you do now, and that affiliate would get a cut of your donation, but you could apply directly to NPR as well. Instead of getting a tote bag, an umbrella, a coffee mug, or a CD, you would simply get a membership to download content from NPR or any of its affiliates. You could have graduated levels of membership that would give you access to a greater number of these files. They could package the various shows produced by affiliates, charge differently based on the sound quality (and thus file size) of the content, etc.

As a fan of NPR, and member of local affiliates, even I have difficulty sometimes justifying the fact that I’m paying extra for something that I’m already paying for via taxes. I understand why this is, but it’s still doesn’t always sit well with me. Then the fact that I can’t get the content the way I want (via a downloadable file) unless I pay yet more money, and it’s a bit frustrating. However, I’ve paid subscription fees to various other providers of content (Satellite Radio and TV, Internet Radio, etc.) and not felt it to be onerous. Subscription, I feel, is the most fair because it is opt-in. If NPR continues to receive public funding, that’s fine by me, and so taxpayers should still get access to the programming in some form, but let those who are willing to pay extra receive the content exactly the way they want. That means being able to download this content as individual files, but perhaps also as premium channels on both Satellite Radio providers. That’s my idea, anyway. Then again, as it should be clear from this entry, I’m not an expert on the internal revenue workings within NPR and its affiliates, so take this for what its worth, but I think that as radio of all kinds make a transition from the current AM/FM model of local affiliates to a more global internet-based or satellite-based model, that NPR will have to adapt just as many other traditional broadcasters will if they don’t want to be made irrelevant by the scores of independent broadcasters coming out of the woodwork that provide their content for small fees (or absolutely nothing) via podcasts or audio streaming.

Back in April when we were about to move into our new home, I started researching Voice Over IP (VOIP) services. There’s never a better time to do this when you are moving to a new location and will have to order a bunch of services like phone, internet, cable/satellite anew. At the time, after a lot of review reading at BroadbandReports.com, I came to the conclusion that a company called Broadvoice offered a service that offered what I wanted at the lowest cost.

For those who are unfamiliar with VOIP, it’s just a way to hook up a normal phone line and use it as you would a normal phone, but using a high-speed internet connection. Initially only smaller third-party companies were offering the service, but major telecom companies have gotten into the act since the service can save a serious amount of money for a lot of people, and I suppose they couldn’t bully the FCC into outlawing the technology.

Since then, I’ve been mostly perfectly happy with the service, although there have been glitches here and there. First off, until last month, our DSL service was a bit slow with a 128K upload speed, which doesn’t leave much after Broadvoice takes its 90Kbps. So it was hard to do much in the way of uploading during calls. Not a huge deal, but a bit annoying. Sometimes the voice quality cracks out a bit, but it’s kind of rare. In general the quality is pretty close to what a regular landline phone sounds like.

When I first subscribed, part of the reason I went with Broadvoice over some more expensive services was their promises that various features were coming in a week or two or a month or two. That and they had a very good rating for customer support. I figured it had most of what I needed, and it would soon have things that were available elsewhere that might be useful. I kept checking back with their site but never saw any changes. It wasn’t a huge deal as I wasn’t used to those features, but of course it would be cool to have some added functionality.

Today for some reason I decided to go to their site after a good couple of months since the last time and found lots of surprises. First of all, I can now, for the same $20 per month, call 21 countries and stay on for an unlimited amount of time without getting charged. I don’t know of any other VOIP provider that offers something like this, although most are pricier than Broadvoice! For an additional $5 per month you can call unlimited to an additional 14 countries. Now if only I had lots of international friends! I feel so provincial!

The other nice thing is that they finally revamped the “Account Portal” which is basically an web administrative interface to control all the features of the phone, like call forwarding, voicemail, etc. Speaking of voicemail, one of the most useful features that we have enabled is the feature that notifies us by email when someone has called our number. It doesn’t matter if they’ve left a voicemail or not, but if they do, we get another email that has an actual wav file of the voicemail attached, and can then listen to it on our office computers without having to call our voicemail system. Of course when you for some reason these waves are not playable on my Treo 600 via PocketTunes, but I am going to contact them to see if we can figure out why they are incompatible. Anyway, the new portal actually has something that Vonage and AT&T had when I was first researching this stuff and wanted badly – a full online system to view the current voicemails on your account, listen to them, and/or delete them. This allows for much easier management of this stuff than having to go through a convoluted phone menu. My only problem is that I can listen to the voicemail “inline” with Firefox. Instead I have to download them manually to my desktop and then click on them. Whereas in IE I can just just hit the little play icon. Firefox tells me that I don’t have a QuickTime plug-in installed, but when I try to install it, it tells me it’s been installed, but going back to the page produces the same “Click here to download plug-in.” This is on my work computer, so I’ll have to try it out at home. I also thought I might be able to access it on my phone’s browser but I guess that was too much to ask, as when I try it tells me my browser isn’t compatible…

So it seems like Broadvoice has been pretty hard at work, it just took them a while to get some of the big improvements out. There are also a few items in the portal marked as “coming soon” and I’m sure there will be additional ones in the future. I think VOIP is definitely the way things are heading in Telecom. The “calling adapters,” as they are called, that allow you to use normal telephones seem to be a necessary at the present since most people still use these and they are readily available and relatively cheap. But already we are seeing “soft phones” that only work with VOIP services, but are optimized for that kind of functionality. While I can’t bring my calling adapter with me anywhere like a cell phone, I can at least bring it to a place that has a fast internet connection - like a hotel or a friend’s house - and get the same unlimited calling that I can at home. I haven’t actually DONE this, but if we end up taking any extended trips in the future where we’ll have access to a high-speed connection, it would be useful. I’ve also heard that you can’t use them in Starbucks/Borders Hotspots (Wireless public internet access). This may have to do with the fact that Hotspots is set up by T-Mobile which is a cell-phone company, and enabling the use of VOIP could potentially hurt their business.

The way it could hurt is that when cellular data rates get fast enough (and they already have for some of the 3G networks that are starting to be laid out), VOIP will be available on cell phones. But count on the mobile telecom industry to do everything it can to prevent this step, including blocking the ports necessary. After all, if you can bypass the phone company’s voice network and just buy an “all-you-can-eat” data plan for $40/month, you never have to worry about peak times or minute rates again, since you will just be using the data plan to your VOIP service. What mobile Telecom companies should really do in order to compete with this is to just set up their VOIP services and integrate them, offering a “data/VOIP” service for a $75 flat fee for unlimited VOIP calls and unlimited data. This would also enable you to be talking on your phone and simultaneously accessing the data network (say to view a web page), something that currently is not possible, at least with GSM/GPRS phones. It should be interesting to see how things fall in the next year or two when this should go down. For now, though, I am very happy with Broadvoice’s service.

Hey, if you found this useful and end up subscribing to Broadvoice and don’t mind giving me credit as your referal, email me before you sign up so I can give you my referral fee.

Last week I wrote about the Treo 650 Memory Debacle and wanted to post some further thoughts. Andrew over at Treonaughts has been getting indignant about the issue, as have many of his readers and those on Treocentral and myTreo.net. Palm came out with a response later last week which basically said that they were offering those who needed it 128MB SD cards and would work on a fix that would be available as a system software update. Fair enough, right? Maybe.

Part of the curse of being a “power user” or “early adopter” is that you tend to be in a relatively small demographic. As such, you are usually a minority and so you are marginalized to some degree. We can make a lot of noise which can sometimes cause companies to sit up and take notice, since we can detect problems much sooner than the average user, but the responses from companies, when they come at all, are normally just damage control PR that tries to show they are being responsive and to sooth the worries of less-savvy users who learn about these issues.

PalmOne, as other companies before it, I’m sure, understands that the big stink that a lot of people have made about the Treo 650’s memory issues, is lost on the majority of its target market. What is it’s target market? It’s increasingly corporate users. I’m sure PalmOne is looking to supplant Blackberry with the 650, or at least eat up a chunk of its sizable corporate market share. While corporate users are also a savvy bunch, chances are they will be using the Treo primarily for contact management, phone calls, and scheduling, all of which are built into the Treo. Yes, the memory issue will mean that they won’t be able to store as many contacts, emails, etc., but these types of data generally don’t take up much room and they could easily and cheaply expand their capacity with an external memory card.

Meanwhile, us “power users” who want to use the Treo 650 to its fullest potential, like the Treo 600 – as a CONVERGENCE device - are out in the cold. The Treo 600 serves as my email reader, phone, contact manager, scheduler, but also GPS, audio player web browser, RSS reader, gameboy, nutrition tracker, and much more. What gets me is that at least in this area we will actually be getting LESS with an upgrade to the 650. Memory is such a core feature of any computer or PDA because it is what lets you run programs and store data, that it just is unbelievable to me why a company would want to keep it at the minimum that allows for just the basic applications to run. Some of suggested that PalmOne bought up Handspring (the company that originally made the Treo) because they couldn’t compete with it, and now that they own it, they are taking largely the work that Handspring did with the device and pushing it out without some needed upgrades. The lack of an upgraded camera was bad enough, but something I could live with, but the more I think about it, this memory issue just makes me mad.

Unfortunately, PalmOne probably knows that it’s really the only game in town when it comes to PalmOS-based smartphones. Sure there are PocketPC phones, but many of them are bulky, and the ones that aren’t either require a stylus to do everything or have other issues. Handspring didn’t cut corners when it came out with the Treo 600 last year. It was so far ahead of previous models and was just very well thought out and redesigned. The 650 seems much more like an enhanced 600, but probably one that has enhancements which add so much that it will be irresistible to most early adopters. So, in other words, PalmOne knows they have us over a barrel. We can whine and complain about how our expectations are not being met and how PalmOne has been a penny wise and a pound foolish and could have avoided all this commotion by simply putting an extra $5 worth of memory into the phone, but in the end, most will probably buy it regardless. And this issue probably won’t dissuade the less-savvy user who just wants to do basic things like calling, emailing, and a little web browsing.

The whole situation, ironically, reminds me a little of what I had to put up with when I had a T-Mobile Sidekick. Many users clamored for a true solution to synch their data with their MS Outlook or other PIM, but despite this actually being available, T-Mobile decided they just didn’t want to offer it. They knew some of its users wanted it, nay NEEDED it badly, but somehow the small cost of supporting those users was too much to bear the risk of losing them.

What it really comes down to is competition. Macs, for all their elegance, are pretty pricey. But they are not prohibitively more than PC’s and so this should mean a much greater market share than their mere 10%. But if PC’s weren’t around and Apple were the only game in town, you can guarantee that Macs would be even costlier. Cheap PC’s have driven the price down of Macs since Apple’s marketshare would be closer to 2% if you had to pay five times the amount for a Mac than a similarly priced PC. Design and usability is one thing, but relatively few people will buy a Jaguar when a Honda will get them where they need to go at a fraction of the price. PalmOne’s lock on the PalmOS smartphone is not so much based on price as it is on the history of the PalmOS. PocketPC devices, desite their abundance, haven’t risen to the promise that this competition implies. They are still priced pretty similarly to PalmOS devices and while they carry some benefits like more memory and faster processors and even Wifi, operationally they are not that much different. So these slight advantages don’t really make up for the similar cost. However, companies that base their thinking on their current place in the pecking order may fall victim to clever upstarts that are willing to take risks. It’s very conceivable that we could have a new smartphone (either a PalmOS device but more likely a PocketPC-based one) that ends up coming out of the blue next year and PalmOne will need to start playing catchup.

Update: Treonaughts has a piece about how Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal has commented about the 650’s memory issues. He specifically says that they should have included more memory to begin with, although it has enough memory for his needs. Perhaps such a prominant article in the periodical for corporate professionals (at least in the financial sector), will get PalmOne moving a little bit faster. Whether all of this will start snowballing to force PalmOne to actually retrofit the 650 with more memory is much more of a longshot, but we can dream.

Back in the wacky days of the dot com bubble, I had this idea which I’m sure at least a few (thousand?) other people did to create a website that was basically about wish lists. I had an Amazon.com wish list (which I still do), but part of the problem was at least at that time they were primarily about books, CD’’s. I had another wish list on buy.com for my electronics items, and probably a couple of others for yet more product categories. Lots of companies had their own wish lists for the products they sold, which was a horribly decentralized way of going about something like this. Why not, I thought, have a one-stop service where you could search for products among dozens if not hundreds of different merchants and the database of products you wanted would be kept on this third-party site rather than on all the individual ones. A central store, that is, for wish lists.

I feel a bit odd about finally “going public” with this idea, except for the fact that I’m sure it’s been attempted and the fact that I can’t think of an actual site that tried to do this means that it wasn’t very successful. Since those days, Amazon has expanded into many more product categories, so I no longer need to have a wish list at Buy.com. But it still is limited in many ways. For example, they simply don’t have certain brands of products when it comes to Audio/Video equipment which is easily attainable from Best Buy or Circuit City. So maybe there is a market for this somewhere and I’ll be kicking myself if it actually takes off. The problem, I think, is that companies don’t want to farm out their product database to third parties, at least not the big guys like Amazon.com.

Just today there’s a piece on J-Walk about another player stepping up, and their idea is pretty similar to mine! Google has had a feature called Froogle for a while now which allows users to check for the lowest prices for a given product among a database of many vendors. They have now attached wish-list functionality to Froogle, and called it Froogle Shopping List. I played around with it for just a little while and it works pretty much the way you would expect but it is still pretty bare-bones. You can add items to your list, delete them, and edit little notes attached to each item like with Amazon’s wish list. You can’t, however, specify how many you want of a given item, nor, more importantly, can you rate it from 1 to 5 in terms of how much you actually want it. That last one is actually a fairly recent feature of Amazon’s and one initially that seems a bit silly. I mean why would you put something on a wish list that you don’t want people to buy you? That brings me to another use for wish lists – wish lists as just bookmarks of sorts.

Ever since I had a wish list on Amazon, I would put stuff on it that I had no plans on buying myself, or expectation that others would. Some of these were just interesting books I’d heard about, but others were items that were well beyond my means and of course nothing that a friend or family would ever buy me. Up until recently, there was no way on Amazon to distinguish between things you just wanted to save for reference purposes in a database you thought you’d always have access to online, and those things you actually were considering buying or thought others might buy for you. Unfortunately, when you edit or more importantly view an Amazon wish list, you still cannot sort based on this important field. I’m not sure why since this would enable you to quickly see the things that the person in question is most interested in. Google has a slightly different approach so far. As I mentioned, there is no field to rate how much you want a product. However, there IS a field that Amazon does not have, a field for making an item public or not. So while you can’t specify if something is a “love to have” vs. a just “like to have” you can just make something visible or not. So in a way it is better because people don’t have to read the fine print about whether you want something to level 5 or level 4. If it’s on your list, they can just buy it. Or, if you really want to explain to people how much (or how little) you want something; you can always add an explanation in the notes field.

The other nice thing that Amazon has which Google still doesn’t is a mechanism for categorizing products so you can sort or filter stuff based on a product category. Say you’re only interested in getting a friend a book. Well, you just filter their wish list for only books. Amazon can do this easily because they already have all their merchandise categorized. Google, of course, is just pulling items from lots of different vendors’ databases, and I’m sure many of them don’t have category fields, and if they do, they probably aren’t consistent with other vendors, so Google can’t automatically assign a category to a product. However, what they could do fairly easily is to let you the customer assign categories. They could either create a standard set of categories or better yet let the customer create them. This way you wouldn’t just be limited to having a books and movies and electronics category, but you could actually have a category for yourself, a category for your kids, a category for a special event (Amazon has special baby and wedding registries which are completely separate from your standard wish list), etc.

The big thing that Google has going for it is that you can choose to buy from many different vendors, finding the cheapest vendor for a given product, or just the one you trust most. Amazon is primarily a one-price shop (although you can have different prices if you opt to pick it up at one of their partner retail stores like Circuit City). But while this is a big advantage for Google, it’s also not nearly as you might think it would be. For example, when you are picking something to put in your wishlist, you have to pick a product from a specific vendor. This may sound obvious, but what happens if another vendor kicks it’s price down $100 less than your chosen vendor after you pick them? All you or the person looking at your wish list will see is that product you picked which is no longer the cheapest price. You can, of course, pick multiple items, but this would just make the wishlist unwieldy, especially if you can’t filter it! Say you pick 10 different pieces of consumer electronics, 20 different movies, and 10 different books. If you just include 5 different vendors for each product, that’s already 200 entries in your wish list! I have over 300 items on my Amazon wish list, so if I wanted to recreate this, we’re talking about over 1000 items if I want just four vendors per item! Google needs a way of implementing wish list items that aren’t specific to a vendor, but rather are based on the title of an item. That way, I can give the model number and brand of a piece of hardware, or even be less specific and say “400GB Hard Drive” and Google will put this into my wish list and when people click on this it will bring them to a search results page where all such items are listed. The only problem with this is one that I’ve found inherent to their Froogle price-search engine. That it can’t distinguish between, say, a Treo 600 phone and just a hands-free headphone for Treo 600 when your search is “Treo 600.” You can filter your results if you play with it a little. For example, I was able to successfully filter out all but the actual Treo 600 phone by searching for “Treo 600 –GPS” and specifying a price range of $200 to $700. This looks for all instances of Treo 600 that don’t also have “GPS” in the title and range from $200 to $700 in price. I figured that price range would get rid of the vast majority of accessories for the Treo, and would probably never actually exclude the phone, since the lowest I’ve seen it for ever has been $399, or maybe it was $350. Obviously this is not the most user-friendly method of creating a listing, and maybe this is one reason it hasn’t been implemented yet, but the bottom line is that Google’s wish list is sitting on top of this incredibly powerful engine which is only being used once - to create the wishlist item for the first time.

Froogle also doesn’t seem to index anything from Amazon, which is a shame since there are certain things, the new Criterion Collection Holiday 2004 Gift Set being an example, that Amazon sells exclusively. I’m not even sure why this is the case since Google would theoretically be driving customers to Amazon, and Amazon does have an affiliate system. I can only suspect that Amazon has some corporate reason they want to keep people on their site using their wish list which I’m sure they’ve worked hard at developing and maintaining. And while centralization of some things is bad, I think in this case a central “authority” for wishlist creation would be helpful. What it might even develop into is some kind of open source xml-based standard like RSS that would allow for universal publication and distribution of your wishlist outside of Amazon and wish list creation tools which have nothing to do with a single proprietary company. But for now, Google’s wish list seems a step in the right direction, albeit one that needs work…

There’s been a bit more info regarding the Color Sidekick’s debut. The dust is beginning to settle and here’s what things are looking like:

On Friday the CSK as people are calling it was made available at some CompUSA’s and through Tmobile. The price: $300 for new customers who are also getting activation for a new Tmobile account. With no activation, CompUSA’s price seems to be about $480, but some have reported that they have been restricted from selling it unless the customer is also signing up for a new Tmobile account.

Current Tmobile customers: normally, Tmobile (as other carriers) has two basic prices for their phones. They have a price with new activation an a higher price with no such activation, which usually equates with the retail price of the phone. Because their emphasis is on gaining new customers, their current customers who wish to purchase a new phone kind of get the shaft. Tmobile uses the list price of the phone as a base, then they give a discout off this usually pretty hefty pricetag based on how long a person has subscribed to their service, the cost of their subscription plan, whether they’ve been timely with their bill, etc. But the discount rarely gets as low as the price at which they offer the phone to new customers (or at least the price that can be had if one looks at other sources for the phone which have additional rebates - like Amazon.com or CompUSA). For the Sidekick it seems to be a bit different. They are starting at the price they are offering the phone to new users at ($300), and discounting from that point. However, so far the largest discount I have heard any current customer getting is about $80. That seems to be a ceiling no matter how long a person has been with Tmobile.

So, while this “upgrade plan” is pretty good compared to other ones from Tmobile, it still means parting with a pretty penny in order to get something which differs from its predecessor mainly by its screen. Potentially there are other improvements such as reception and build quality, but it is too early to tell about these. I’m still waiting. I think the jury’s still out - hell, it just came out! - and until there’s solid feeback and not just the initial impression and wow factor from the new screen, it’s just too risky. Many of us have had so many problems with the black and white unit, it just doesn’t make any sense to upgrade - unless of course one can get it for cheap (or can afford to plop down $220+ on a lark), which it seems ain’t going to happen, at least not any time real soon…