> Raney said that Verizon iPhone owners will be able to take advantage of the 3G wireless hotspot feature for an extra $20 per month on top of the iPhone’s required voice and data plans—that’s the same price that applies to current Verizon smartphone owners. Some wishful thinkers will no-doubt be disappointed by this, but I have to say, it’s not at all surprising. And compared to AT&T’s tethering plans, it’s a great deal. After all, for that extra $20 a month you at least get a separate pool of 2GB to use. AT&T charges you $20 just for the privilege of using tethering with no extra data allotment. (Which sort of reminds me of those times in college when I’d get charged for going to parties even when I wasn’t drinking. You want me to pay you just to walk into your dark, smelly living room and hang out with a bunch of drunk people? No thanks.)

The bottom line is that Verizon had NO GOOD FINANCIAL REASON to give this feature away. People who want to jump from AT&T will jump for the coverage issues alone. People who don’t care about the phone coverage aren’t going to pay the $325 to get out of their AT&T contracts just to get a free hotspot. It’s a niche feature. So all Verizon had to do was charge less than AT&T is charging for tethering, which is what we all assume AT&T will charge for the hotspot when iOS 4.3 is released next month.

Companies don’t leave money on the table unless they have to. Hotspots and tethering are expensive extras because few people use them. Right now, it’s in all carrier’s best interests to keep it that way, so they can keep the load on the network reasonable. Giving away free data on the 3G network is like inviting your users to prove AT&T’s network doesn’t suck so bad after all.

> Obviously, this isn’t the Android users’ faults. The problem is that the OEMs and carriers are holding these updates up for a wide variety of reasons, 99 percent of which are undoubtedly bullshit. [Here’s a perfect example](http://androidspin.com/2011/01/12/breaking-t-mobile-internals-confirm-samsung-is-holding-the-android-world-hostage/). Supposedly, the Android 2.2 update is all ready to go for Samsung Android phones on T-Mobile, but Samsung doesn’t want to push it out so that they can entice people to buy the newly announced Vibrant 4G+ instead. > > Lovely. > > Instead, many Samsung T-mobile Android users are struck with Android 2.1. An OS that while perhaps only a year old, is now two full revisions old in Android land. A dinosaur, in other words. And they’re hardly alone. Some 35.2 percent of *all* Android users are stuck on this same version of the OS. > > Imagine if 35 percent of all iOS users were stuck on iOS 2 (which is so old that it wasn’t even called ‘iOS” at the time), while a few of us had iOS 4 and the majority of us had iOS 3? Yeah… > > Even more humorous is the fact that over 12 percent of Android users are still stuck on Android 1.5 and 1.6. I mean, Android 1.5 is nearly two years old now. And again, more importantly, it’s *four* major revisions ago. iOS hasn’t even gone through four major revisions yet. This is one of the many fundamental flaws of the Android ecosystem. More importantly, it’s a stat that almost everyone fails to acknowledge when they talk about iOS vs. Android device market share. Most of the millions of users stuck on very early versions of Android are not exactly having the same experience as those using the latest and greatest 2.3. Some of the early versions of Android were barely better than feature phones. The same could be said for early versions of iOS, but there are very few iPhone users out there still using the early versions.

And EVEN MORE important is what this statistic suggests about Google’s level of concern for its users. People make jokes about the Apple “religion”, but that’s just an excuse created by companies who can’t compete. The bottom line is that Apple EARNS customer loyalty by paying attention to detail and actively encouraging long-term commitment. Jobs fought AT&T and every other carrier in order to improve the experience for the users. And users notice these things. They notice, and they remember. Google, on the other hand, caters to the carriers, because the carriers are the customer to them. Google probably hopes that you will blame the carrier or the handset maker when you don’t get your update, but I’m willing to bet a fair amount of users are going to resent Google for not sticking up for them, either.

> After it was revealed that the company’s $30-per-month unlimited data plan will be the only option for iPhone 4 users on Verizon, the carrier’s chief operating officer said that the company still intends to phase out its unlimited plan and moved to a tiered pricing structure in the future. I have to say, this is a smart move for Verizon. They clearly needed an incentive to get more people to jump now to the iPhone 4, as opposed to waiting until July for the iPhone 5 everyone knows is coming. They’ll never get everyone to jump now rather than later, but this little perk of getting grandfathered into an unlimited data plan is good enough to make some people do it.

It’s similar to how AT&T allowed people to hold on to their unlimited data when they made the switch last year to pricing tiers. The way I look at it, I never get anywhere near the 2 GB I get a month anyway. And no matter what, when the iPhone goes LTE next year or the year after that, we’re all going to lose our option for unlimited data, regardless. So for me personally, I’d still wait for the iPhone 5 if I were planning on going to Verizon. But your mileage may vary, as the saying goes.

> But Philip Baum, editor of Aviation Security International, cautioned against any knee-jerk reaction. > > “We need to have a commonsense approach to this,” he said. “There’s no point deploying huge extra layers of security and checkpoints for people to go through. > > “We have to recognize the fact that most airports are not only points of arrival and departure for passengers flying by air. They are also retail complexes, food courts, businesses that are trying to attract people in from the outside.” > > Baum argues that rather than installing more x-ray machines and metal detectors, airports need to introduce behavioral profiling. > > “Passenger profiling is the only proven method of countering the threat to aviation,” he said, calling on airports to be on the lookout “for people that don’t fit in, that seem to be out of place.” Horrible tragedy in Moscow. But here we have a security expert suggesting that adding layers of x-ray scanners might not be the best reaction to this event. Hard to believe. If this bombing had happened in the U.S., that guy would have been strung up by the media already for making such a suggestion.

Never mind that he’s right.

What this incident proves, once again, is that whatever you do to counter terrorism, the terrorists just work around it. They find another loophole and exploit it. You need to go after the root causes of this behavior, and the PEOPLE performing these acts, hopefully before they even get to the airport.

> Such a shame. Add this to the list of interesting places on the internet you can’t see on your device. Of course, if you had a Toshiba Tablet, you would enjoy the entire internet. Yep, Flash sites too,” the message reads. It’s all well and good that Toshiba has decided to poke a little fun at the iPad with this web site. But I have to wonder how the millions of people with disabilities feel about the fact that publishing this site in Flash blocks all of THEIR access to this information as well.

And then there are the people who simply don’t like Flash and would prefer to view information in other forms. Since when did it become cool to dictate to people how they get their information? That sounds like a walled garden approach to me. Doesn’t that usually freak out the “open” people?

So keep on insulting and excluding people while trying to get in a cheap shot, there, Toshiba. That’s a great way to build an audience. See, I thought the web was about making information available to EVERYONE, but maybe you see it differently.