March 29, 2024

T-Mobile Unveils Aggressive Phone Pricing With No Contracts

The company on Tuesday said the Apple iPhone 5 would be available starting April 12 for $100 up front, with customers paying an additional $20 a month for 24 months for the handset. Other new smartphones, like the Samsung Galaxy S IV and the BlackBerry Z10, will be available with similar payment plans.

Although there would be no contract binding customers to T-Mobile, the No. 4 American mobile carrier by market share, customers would have to pay off the balance they owe on their phone to end service before the two years are up.

Also Tuesday, T-Mobile formally replaced its old phone contracts with new plans that do not require signing a contract. For $50 a month, customers can get unlimited minutes, text messages and 500 megabytes of data; they can pay an extra $20 for unlimited data.

Over two years, the effective price for a smartphone and phone service would be hundreds of dollars less than it would on ATT or Verizon Wireless. At $580, it would also be cheaper than buying a $649 unlocked phone directly from Apple.

At those two carriers, the most popular phone plans cost upwards of $100 a month with a two-year contract for limited data. The iPhone 5 costs at least $199 on their networks with a two-year contract.

The simplified phone plans are part of T-Mobile’s new campaign to be the “un-carrier.” By moving to contract-free plans, it says it is doing away with charging customers fees for surpassing their data limits or terminating their service early.

John Legere, T-Mobile USA’s new chief executive, said that over two years, an iPhone on T-Mobile will cost $1,000 less than it would on ATT. He said moving toward contract-free plans would make the price that people pay more transparent and save them money over time.

“Do you have any idea what you’re paying?” Mr. Legere said at a press event in New York. “I’m going to explain how stupid we all are because once it becomes flat and transparent, there’s nowhere to hide. You pay so much for your phones, it’s incredible.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/27/technology/t-mobile-unveils-aggressive-phone-pricing-with-no-contracts.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

State of the Art: BlackBerry, Rebuilt, Lives to Fight Another Day

This apology is for the bespectacled student at my talk in Cleveland, and the lady in the red dress in Florida, and anyone else who’s recently asked me about the future of the BlackBerry. I told all of them the same thing: that it’s doomed.

That wasn’t an outrageous opinion. Once dominant, the BlackBerry has slipped to a single-digit percentage of the smartphone market. The company’s stock has crashed almost 90 percent from its 2008 peak. In the last two years, the BlackBerry’s maker, Research in Motion, released a disastrous tablet, laid off thousands of employees and fired its C.E.O.’s. The whole operation seemed to be one gnat-sneeze away from total collapse.

The company — which changed its name on Wednesday to simply BlackBerry — kept saying that it had a miraculous new BlackBerry in the wings with a new operating system called BlackBerry 10. But it was delayed and delayed and delayed. Nobody believed anything the company said anymore. Besides — even if there were some great phone, what prayer did BlackBerry have of catching up to the iPhone and Android phones now? Even Microsoft, with its slick, quick Windows Phone, hasn’t managed that trick.

Well, BlackBerry’s Hail Mary pass, its bet-the-farm phone, is finally here. It’s the BlackBerry Z10, and guess what? It’s lovely, fast and efficient, bristling with fresh, useful ideas.

And here’s the shocker — it’s complete. The iPhone, Android and Windows Phone all entered life missing important features. Not this one; BlackBerry couldn’t risk building a lifeboat with leaks. So it’s all here: a well-stocked app store, a music and movie store, Mac and Windows software for loading files, speech recognition, turn-by-turn navigation, parental controls, copy and paste, Find My Phone (with remote-control lock and erase) and on and on.

The hardware is all here, too. The BlackBerry’s 4.2-inch screen is even sharper than the iPhone’s vaunted Retina display (356 pixels per inch versus 326). Both front and back cameras can film in high definition (1080p back, 720p front).

The thin, sleek, black BlackBerry has 16 gigabytes of storage, plus a memory card slot for expansion. Its textured back panel pops off easily so that you can swap batteries. It will be available from all four major carriers — Verizon, ATT, Sprint and T-Mobile — and Verizon said it would charge $200 with a two-year contract.

Some of BlackBerry 10’s ideas are truly ingenious. A subtle light blinks above the screen to indicate that something — a text, an e-mail message, voice mail, a Facebook post — is waiting for you. Without even pressing a physical button, you swipe up the screen; the Lock screen lifts like a drape as you slide your thumb, revealing what’s underneath. It’s fast and cool.

There are no individual app icons for Messages or Mail. Instead, all communication channels (including Facebook, Twitter and phone calls) are listed in the Hub — a master in-box list that appears at the left edge when you swipe inward. Each reveals how many new messages await and offers a one-tap jump into the corresponding app. It’s a one-stop command center that makes eminent sense.

The BlackBerry’s big selling point has always been its physical keyboard. The company says it will, in fact, sell a model with physical keys (and a smaller screen) called the Q10.

But you might not need it. On the all-touch-screen model, BlackBerry has come up with a mind-bogglingly clever typing system. Stay with me here:

As you type a word, tiny, complete words appear over certain on-screen keys — guesses as to the word you’re most likely to want. If you’ve typed “made of sil,” for example, the word “silicone” appears over the letter I key, “silver” over the V, and “silk” over the K. You can fling one of these words into your text by flicking upward from the key — or ignore it and keep typing.

How well does it work? In this passage, the only letters I actually had to type are shown in bold. The BlackBerry proposed the rest: “I’m going to have to cancel for tonight. There is a really good episode of Dancing With the Stars on.”

I type 20 characters; it typed 61 for me.

But wait, there’s more. The more you use the BlackBerry, the more it learns your way of writing. When I tried that same passage later, I typed only one letter: the I in “I’m.” Thereafter, the phone predicted each successive word in those sentences, requiring no letter-key presses at all. Freaky and brilliant and very, very fast.

There’s speech recognition, too. Hold in the Play/Pause key to get the Z10’s Siri-like assistant. Siri-like in concept, that is — you can say “send an e-mail to Harvey Smith,” “schedule an appointment” and a few other things — but it’s slower, less accurate and far narrower in scope. You can also speak to type, but the accuracy is so bad, you won’t use it.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 30, 2013

An earlier version of this column reported incorrect information on the amount that cellphone carriers would charge for the new BlackBerry Z10. ATT, Sprint and T-Mobile said they would announce pricing information in the future; they have not announced they will charge $200 with a two-year contract (as Verizon has).    

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/31/technology/the-blackberry-refreshed-lives-to-fight-another-day.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

RIM Changes Name of New Operating System

OTTAWA — Less than two months after Research In Motion announced that its new operating system to revive the BlackBerry brand would be called BBX, the company has changed its mind. Now, it will be called BlackBerry 10.

The late change followed the granting of a restraining order on Tuesday by a federal court in New Mexico to a small Albuquerque-based software maker, Basis International, that has long used the name BBx.

In a statement on Wednesday about the name change, RIM did not address the trademark infringement action by Basis International. “The BlackBerry 10 name reflects the significance of the new platform and will leverage the global strength of the BlackBerry brand while also aligning perfectly with RIM’s device branding,” the statement said. RIM did not respond to questions about whether it has abandoned the BBX name.

The sudden rebranding is the latest in a series of setbacks, both small and large, for RIM recently, including having to restate its financial guidance for the current quarter because of steep discounts on its tablet computer as well as the firing of two executives whose drunken outbursts forced the return of a Toronto-to-Beijing flight and led to criminal charges. The new financial guidance further depressed RIM’s already battered stock price.

The new phone operating system was developed by QNX Software Systems, a company based in Ottawa that RIM acquired last year. The BBX name appeared to be an attempt to meld the BlackBerry and QNX names.

Basis has been using both the BBX and BBx names for several years on products that allow developers to create apps that can work on any operating system.

“Even the more cursory search for the BBX trademark would have shown that we hold it,” said Nico Spence, the chief executive of Basis.

After RIM announced the BBX name at a developers’ conference in San Francisco in October, Basis sought a permanent injunction under trademark laws. It also asked for the temporary order, which is valid for only 14 days, to prevent RIM from using the name at its developers conference in Singapore this week.

Mr. Spence said Wednesday that he had not heard anything from RIM or its lawyers about the company’s new brand. He said that Basis would continue to seek a permanent injunction as well as damages from RIM. “Their announcement is certainly encouraging in that it looks like they are abandoning it, but it may only be temporary,” he said.

The new name follows RIM’s traditional practice of naming operating systems using numbers. The operating system it will replace is called BlackBerry 7.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=f8e4ff258b87af807ea286d14030d2ee

Bucks Blog: Thursday Reading: Fewer Babies in a Weak Economy

October 13

Thursday Reading: Fewer Babies in a Weak Economy

Birth rates have fallen in the slow economy, BlackBerry glitches spread, picking the best iPhone 4S carrier and other consumer-focused news from The New York Times.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=3fd01d22055949b2c2d0db3a2b6642e7

Gadgetwise: Video: A Smartphone Showdown

In this video Sam Grobart, an iPhone user, and Andrew Ross Sorkin, who uses a BlackBerry, decide to swap phones. The change leads to a larger-than-expected transformation.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=c799a40b0edc81dd88a785df29c40caf

Blackberry Maker to Cut 2,000 Jobs

Opinion »

The Maze of Moral Relativism

Why rejecting the idea of right and wrong is more difficult than it seems.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=df51ac9cd824f70a71ca0909a0380f42