Analyst Says T-Mobile USA is iPhone’s Next U.S. Home

Kaufman Brothers analyst Shaw Wu is made waves today by saying T-Mobile could be the next carrier in the U.S. to get the iPhone, saying that the changes to the iPhone necessary would be much less since it operates on the same technology (GSM) as current exclusive carrier AT&T.

The statement goes against the prevailing wisdom that Apple would turn to Verizon to continue expanding availability of the device. AT&T operates its 3G network in the 1900MHz band, whereas T-Mobile uses the 1700/2100MHz band. Both use the 850MHz band, meaning Apple would only need to add a single band (1700MHz) to make 3G work fully. iPhone 4 and the 3GS have already added the 2100MHz band.

With 34 million subscribers, T-Mobile would provide a significant new market for Apple. Add to this that the Cupertino company already offers the iPhone on T-Mobile’s European carriers and such a partnership is not too far fetched. Wu says that the phone could arrive as early as this fall.

Representatives with T-Mobile said that while they would love to carry the device, “ultimately it is Apple’s decision,” and refused to comment further on any speculation.

Personally, while I think it’s the logical thing to do, I don’t think its the best idea from a business sense. Verizon has some 93 million customers, which would obviously mean a much larger potential market for Apple. Spending money on development of a CDMA-capable device may not be such a bad idea.

Either way, we seem to go through this every so many months lately so I’m not expecting the iPhone to go anywhere until Apple says it will. And from all the statements — and its actions too- it appears Apple is still happy to be with AT&T.

[Hat tip: Associated Press]

Box.net Gets Syncing

Box.net–the collaborative, file-sharing service for business that likes to position itself as a scrappy, cloud-based alternative to Microsoft’s SharePoint–is adding a syncing feature. Rather than having to upload and download documents in a browser, users will be be able to run an applet called Box Sync that shuttles files back and forth in the background, a la services such as SugarSync:

For now, the feature is only available for Windows (a Mac version is in the works) and only for subscribers who have a Business account, which costs $15 a month. (Box also has a free version with 1GB of storage.) Box Sync complements existing Box features such as its nifty Web-based file viewer.

Google Adds Canned Home Page Backgrounds

You’ll like Google–it’s sort of like Bing…

AT&T’s iPad E-Mail Breach

The most fascinating thing about the case of a hacker group downloading 114,000 e-mail addresses of iPad 3G owners from AT&T’s servers–other than the confirmation that a lot of high-powered people bought iPads–is the fact that it’s a major security breach involving one of the most locked-down products on the planet. And there’s nothing iPad owners could have done to prevent it, since the data was swiped from AT&T, not individual iPads.

Phone.com Launches Advanced Calling Features for Android Phones and iPhones

Today is the official launch date for a pair of mobile software applications from Phone.com aimed at giving users of Android handsets, iPhones and other smartphones sophisticated telephone and VOiP calling features that might otherwise coat a boatload of money.

Already downloadable from Google’s Android Market, the new Phone.com Mobile Office provides users of cellular voice networks with features such as free (or relatively cheap) international calling, call histories, the ability to block calls from both unwanted and unidentified numbers, multiple call routing options, “professional” voices for messages, background music during hold times, and integration of voice calls with faxes and SMS text messages in a single mailbox.

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Oh Dear God, Here Comes FrontierVille

Those who have followed me on Facebook or on my Twitter account (@edoswald) know my near-visceral hatred for FarmVille. I cannot stand the game and what has become almost an unbearable stream of meaningless “I found a lost cow” statuses coming across my news feed.

Get ready for it to happen all over again: FarmVille creator Zynga has launched a new game called FrontierVille, and instead of tending to your crops and building your farm, the player gets the chance to build a bustling frontier town. Like FarmVille, much of the gameplay relies on the social side of things, so it’s still important to help out your neighbors.

There’s one difference however: Zynga takes gameplay to a whole new level in this title. In the words of game designer Brian Reynolds, it’s “Oregon Trail meets Little House on the Prairie meets FarmVille.”

Why yet another annoying (at least to me) title from this now high-profile social game maker? It could be traffic-related. AppData metrics indicate that FarmVille seems to slowly be losing steam, likely due to the fact that after awhile, there is only so much you can do.

Thus, the deeper social interaction with your “neighbors” in FrontierVille could be an attempt to keep people interested in the game much longer. With FarmVille, it pretty much was limited to tending crops. However in FrontierVille, this has been expanded to allow users to help in many more ways, even allowing the “hiring” of friends to complete tasks, which in turn you pay them for.

Also, without interaction, your frontier abode can actually deteriorate: for example weeds may grow rampant; wolves, bears, and other varmints may besiege your property; the weather will change, causing new problem; and there’s a host of other consequences may make you more than just a casual player of the game.

Essentially, this is much more like popular RPG’s like Sim City rather than FarmVille itself. All I have to say is god help us, here comes another game to clog our news feeds — and this one sounds a whole hell of a lot more involved. I know its just days, if not hours, before I have new “Hey Ed, please be my neighbor” requests!

The Operating System Deadpool

My post on the beginning of the end of the Mac has put me in a mood to contemplate the mortality of operating systems. If anybody out there thinks that, say, Windows will utterly cease to exist in the next decade or two–well, you’re wrong. But assuming that mankind makes it though a few more centuries, the day will come when every operating system currently in use suffers the same sad fate as Pontiac and Mercury, Woolworths, LIFE magazine, and other basic facts of life that eventually went away.

(I do predict, however, that Blondie, Log Cabin Syrup, and Larry King will be around for as long as humanity survives, and possibly longer.)

Anyhow, here’s a silly little poll:

Tweetie Lives!

Twitterific for iPad is nicely done, but I’m psyched by the prospect of Tweetie Twitter for iPad…

Maybe We Should Declare a Moratorium on Browser Speed Claims

Apple is touting its new Safari 5, is “the world’s fastest browser.” Over at Computerworld, Richi Jennnings has rounded up a bunch of blog posts that politely disagree. (Actually, one isn’t so polite: it calls Apple’s claim a “flat-out lie.”

Who’s right? Everybody and nobody, and that’s the problem. I don’t think Apple cooked its numbers, but the only ones it’s published are for tests performed on a Mac, so they won’t tell you anything about how Windows browsers compare. And even if you only care about Macs, the race is tight enough that different hardware setups will yield different winners.

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Western Digital’s New WD TV Does Netflix

There are a gazillion ways to watch movies and TV shows on the Internet, and I’m not sure if any of them are more fundamentally appealing than Netflix’s Watch Instantly: It’s reasonably priced, fun to use, and bursting at the seams with stuff worth watching. Small wonder that it’s among the most widely-supported services on gadgets that let you connect an HDTV to your home network–the latest of which is Western Digital’s $150  WD HD Live Plus HD. I tried a unit loaned to me by Western Digital.

Physically, the WD TV Live Plus HD looks like earlier incarnations of WD TV and reminds me of Roku’s player: It’s about the size of a thick sandwich, and plugs into your TV via component cables or HDMI (the latter cable isn’t included). Unlike Roku, it doesn’t have built-in Wi-Fi–you’ve got to connect it to your network via Ethernet or spring for an extra-cost Wi-Fi adapter. I used the former approach, and found that the box worked with minimal setup.

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Mac Forever?

“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed…PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around. They’re still going to have a lot of value. But they’re going to be used by one out of x people…this transformation is going to make some people uneasy.“–Steve Jobs, at the Wall Street Journal’s D8 conference last week

“Flash was created during the PC era…”–Steve Jobs, in “Thoughts on Flash”

“Maybe next year we will focus primarily on the Mac. Just the normal cycle of things. No hidden meaning here.”–Steve Jobs, reassuring a developer who was concerned about the iPhone-centric WWDC 2010

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Google Gets Caffeinated

Google has announced that it’s finished Caffeine, a new version of its search index that the company says finds new stuff on the Web fifty percent faster than its predecessor. The post doesn’t make clear whether Caffeine is now in action at Google.com–wonder how long it’ll take for it to find this post?

In vaguely related news: Google and Pixar have collaborated on a short. Sort of…

The New York Times vs. Pulse

At yesterday’s Apple WWDC keynote, Steve Jobs listed the cool Pulse newsreader first among the iPad apps he praised. I like it too.  But All Things Digital’s Kara Swisher is reporting that the New York Times (which recently published an upbeat story about Pulse) successfully lobbied Apple to yank Pulse from the App Store shortly after its keynote kudos. The Times contends that Pulse’s use of Times newsfeeds and framed NYTimes.com content violates their terms of service.

It’s unclear what damage is being done to the Times: Its RSS feeds provide summaries only, so you use Pulse to read the newspaper’s stories without visiting the Times site and being exposed to the advertising it carries. You gotta think that it’s Times lawyers, not Times journalists, who think that Pulse is a problem rather than a source of new readers.

Here’s hoping that the kerfuffle doesn’t keep Pulse out of the App Store for long. Yanking the Times from the default feeds would be one solution. The Times reconsidering its complaint would be a better one.

[UPDATE: It's back!]

[UPDATE: The Times is unhappy that it's back!]

Apple Posts WWDC Keynote

You weren’t in San Francisco yesterday for Apple’s iPhone 4 re-unveiling? Here’s the Webcast.

Rating Your Apple WWDC 2010 Predictions

Another Apple WWDC keynote has come and gone. (Here’s a transcript of our live coverage.) As usual, I cleverly avoided making any predictions of my own–if you don’t predict, you can’t be wrong–and instead invited you to participate in a survey which formed the basis of collective Technologizer predictions.

Hundreds of you took the bait. And you were right a lot more often than you were wrong–including on one point where I felt positive you’d be proven incorrect this morning.

After the jump, your predictions and today’s upshot.

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Windows 7 SP1 On Its Way

While Apple is hosting developers and IT types in San Franciso, Microsoft is doing the same at its Tech-Ed conference in New Orleans. And one of the pieces of news out of Microsoft’s event is that Windows 7 SP1, the first megapatch for the current version of the company’s operating system, will be available as a public beta next month and should be finalized by the end of this year.

SPI is nothing more than all the fixes that Microsoft has released for Win 7 so far rolled into one update–and if my experience so far is typical, even the initial version of the OS was surprisingly robust. But if you’re the type who likes to wait for a major update before upgrading your operating system, now’s the time to start thinking about Windows 7.