Report: 80% Chance of iPhone Coming to T-Mobile

Here we go again! This time it’s Cult of Mac, with a “highly placed source” saying T-Mobile is going to start selling the iPhone in the third quarter of this year. In English, that means the device would appear in the next two months or so. Talks are apparently in an “advanced stage,” and the source puts the odds at about 80 percent that it’s going to happen.

This would be a huge victory for the nation’s fourth largest carrier. Verizon has been long rumored to be the next US carrier to get the iPhone once the AT&T exclusivity ends (whenever that is). But certainly, Verizon’s marketing has turned markedly more anti-Apple in recent weeks. That’s certainly NOT the way to court the company that you are apparently trying to court.

Continue reading this story…

Here Come More Microsoft Stores

Microsoft is apparently pleased enough with its four existing retail shops to build dozens more Microsoft Stores in the future.

Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s chief operating officer, revealed the plans during last week’s Worldwide Partner Conference, and Softpedia just picked up on his remarks. Turner didn’t give specifics on when or where Microsoft will open its next batch of retail stores, but we do know that Bellvue, Wash. location is on the way.

From Turner’s comments, it seems like Microsoft values the experience of interacting with customers more than any direct profits gleaned. He noted that the stores have been “an incredible learning vehicle for us” and said “direct contact with consumers in the community is awesome and it’s an awesome thing for us to do.”

The existing stores — in Mission Viejo and San Diego, Calif., Scottsdale, Ariz., and Lone Tree, Colo. — are quite Apple-like, with big tables full of tech products, roving employees and a counter for tech support. (It seems that Microsoft’s failed efforts at cool remain intact.) They also have some unique features, like Microsoft Surface and the ability to order a PC game and have it printed on demand.

In the near future, Microsoft could really use more retail stores for two major product launches. One is Kinect for Xbox 360, a motion-sensing camera that goes on sale in November. Given that Kinect requires roughly six feet of room according to Amazon, I’m not sure how many other retailers will want to dedicate the floor space to hands-on demos. Microsoft, on the other hand, is already showing off the technology at its existing stores.

The other product is Windows Phone 7. At any other retailer, the guy behind the counter could recommend an iPhone, Android phone or Blackberry to customers. Microsoft’s going to want a place to pitch Windows Phone 7 face-to-face.

So when Turner says “we’re going to build dozens more stores,” that ought to be sooner rather than later.

Skype for iPhone Gets Multitasking

Skype for iPhone finally multitasks. I got a call while using Safari, and the phone vibrated while ringing very quietly. Sorry iPhone 4 owners: Still no video chat.

A Half a Billion Facebook Users

Facebook announced this morning that it has a half a billion active users–a fact that it’s celebrating with a new Facebook app called Facebook Stories.

(My favorite thing about Facebook by far: It’s helped me reconnect with dozens of people from my past who I probably would never have encountered again otherwise.)

A little context on the service’s membership milestone:

Population of earth: 6.9 billion

Number of people worldwide who live in poverty: over three billion

Internet users: 1.8 billion

Population of China 1.3 billion

Population of India: 1.1 billion

Active Facebook members: 500 million

Population of United States: 309 million

Twitter users per month: 190 million

McDonalds customers per day: 60 million

Population of New York City: 8.4 million

Sunday New York Times circulation: 1.4 million

Facebook users in December 2004: Almost a million

Unique Technologizer visitors in June: 310,000

Population of Palo Alto, where Facebook is headquartered: 63,000

Population of Monaco: 33,000

Webcast With 37signals’ Jason Fried

Brief reminder: Jason Fried of influential Web company 37signals is getting interviewed in a Webcast tomorrow at 11am PT–and I’ll be watching and tweeting some thoughts. If you have any questions for him, let us know right here.

ToneCheck Detects and Corrects Your E-Mail Tone of Voice

For all those times that an e-mail sounds better in your head than it does to the recipient, ToneCheck thinks it can help.

The plug-in, which is in a free-for-now beta for Microsoft Outlook and coming to web-based mail services in the future, reads over your e-mails for emotions such as elation, humiliation, excitement and fear. Users can set thresholds for how much emotion to allow in their e-mails, and ToneCheck essentially acts like a spell checker, flagging words and phrases that might be interpreted the wrong way.

ToneCheck’s website has a demo that shows how it works, but I don’t use Outlook, so I haven’t tried the plug-in myself. If anyone tries it, I’d love to hear how well it works. On that note, it would be wise for ToneCheck to offer a web app in which people could dump text from any source, and if they were sufficiently happy, they could pay for the plug-in on their service of choice.

In general, my feelings about ToneCheck are somewhat similar to my feelings about SarcMark and Open Sarcasm, both of which are intended to express sarcasm as punctuation. For someone with decent writing skills, none of these tools are really necessary. I could see a computerized emotion catcher being downright annoying.

But at least ToneCheck isn’t a substitute for the written word, like SarcMark. It’s just a teacher, designed to stop people from writing e-mails they’ll regret later. If that makes the world — or your inbox — a better place, I’m all for it.

Verizon Moving to Buckets?

Engadget has heard scuttlebutt that Verizon Wireless will announce on July 29th that it’s moving to tiered pricing plans for wireless data, akin to the “buckets” that AT&T introduced last month. Seems inevitable that it’ll happen sooner or later (and probably sooner), right?

No More Nexus Ones

Google has officially sold out of the Nexus One. Which means that for a brief (hopefully!) period, there won’t be any smartphones available that run the current version of Android, 2.2. Weird.

Verizon Confirms Droid X Display Defects

Screen of death? Verizon has confirmed that some Droid X units have defective screens–but says that it affects only one-tenth of one percent of units.

Your Take on iPhone 4 “Antennagate”

It’s always nice when a survey shows a clear consensus–hey, it sure makes things easier if you’re trying to draw conclusions about the results. But the survey we conducted on the controversy over the iPhone 4′s reception and Apple’s response to it defies easy analysis.

The results to nearly every question we asked are a split decision. We heard from lots of happy iPhone 4 owners, and lots of unhappy iPhone 4 owners. People who think Apple’s handling the situation well, and people who found last Friday’s press conference profoundly unsatisfying. If you think this whole affair represents a catastrophe for Apple, you may be surprised by the percentage of respondents who say it’s no big deal. Then again, if you believe it’s a non-issue, you may be surprised by the percentage who are still bothered by it all.

Here’s a telling snapshot of the survey’s conflicted results: About two-thirds of respondents who have iPhone 4s say they’ve noticed the grip of death themselves…and about two-thirds say they have no plans to return their phones. In other words, the majority seems to be saying that the problem is real, but outweighed by everything that’s right about this phone.

Almost five hundred people participated in this survey over the past two days, eighty-two percent of who live in the US. Two-thirds have already bought iPhones–a handful of who have already returned their phones–and ninety percent either watched Apple’s Webcast of its press conference or followed liveblogs and other reports closely.

The standard disclaimers apply: The results you’re about to read represent unnormalized data from a pool of respondents whose opinions don’t necessarily map to those of iPhone owners and iPhone watchers at large. As usual, I still find what you had to say interesting…

Continue reading this story…

Meet Flipboard, an Extremely Cool “Social Magazine” for the iPad

A new iPad app called Flipboard is launching tonight. It aims to put a fresh new interface on social content by giving it one of the most venerable interfaces of them all: that of a magazine–complete with a cover, sections, and pages full of stories you can flip through.

Flipboard gives you a section of photos and other items your friends have shared on Facebook and one based on your friends’ Twitter activity. You can also choose sections (based on Twitter lists) which pull in articles on topics such as politics, tech, and fashion–or plug in any Twitter account or Twitter list to create a custom section.

Continue reading this story…

Last Call for Our iPhone 4 Survey

Got an iPhone 4 and/or opinions about how Apple has handled the controversy? We’re conducting a survey which is closing soon. Click here to take it if you haven’t already–and thanks. [UPDATE: We have enough responses, so the survey has closed. Thanks again.]

Apple: Full Steam Ahead With Another Record Quarter

As expected, Apple reported its best quarter ever, posting $15.7 billion in revenue, up 61 percent year over year. This was well above the $14.62 billion that analysts polled by Reuters expected, and at least for the moment puts it in a position to possibly match or exceed Microsoft’s results when they report on Thursday.

A record quarter was seen for its Macintosh line of computers, which sold 3.47 million Macs during the quarter and was up 33 percent. 8.4 million iPhones were sold, representing a 61 percent growth over the year ago quarter. iPads which launched during the quarter sold some 3.27 million, essentially maintaining the million per month sales rate it has enjoyed since launch.

“High demand is never a problem,” chief operating officer Tim Cook said of the iPad during a conference call with analysts. “We’re increasing capacity as quickly as we can,” he added, noting that iPad shortages had nothing to do with any particular component shortages.

Continue reading this story…

Buy Movies Once, Watch Them Anywhere. Unless It’s a Disney Movie or You Own Any Apple Devices

The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem, a consortium of sixty Hollywood content owners, hardware makers, and software companies I wrote about back in January, has given a name to its  theoretically-universal copy protection scheme, which aims to let you pay for a piece of content once and then watch it on an array of gadgets. It’s called UltraViolet. It if works like it’s supposed to work, it could be neat–but it’ll have to overcome the tendency of ambitious copy-protection systems to be confusing, annoying, and/or unreliable. And there’s still one major gotcha standing in the way of its big dreams: Disney and Apple aren’t on board.

Facebook Users Are Unhappy With Facebook, Survey Says

What do Facebook, cable companies, airlines and online tax returns have in common? They’re all about as likely to displease their customers.

The American Customer Satisfaction Index, conducted by the University of Michigan’s business school, this year included social networks for the first time. Wikipedia and YouTube escaped with decent ratings — 77 points and 73 points out of 100, respectively — but Facebook fared poorly with 64 points. That puts the world’s most visited website in the bottom 5 percent of private sector companies in the survey.

Survey participants knocked Facebook’s endless interface tweaks, spam and the technology that controls news feeds, the Wall Street Journal reports. They were only somewhat concerned with privacy even though it was a hot topic a couple months ago, and they also named increased advertising as a source of dissatisfaction.

Interestingly enough, MySpace performed just about as poorly, with 63 points. MySpace has been losing unique monthly visitors for a couple of years, to the point that Facebook gets roughly double the traffic, according to comScore. I’d say that’s a cautionary tale for Facebook, except that MySpace’s rapid decay had as much to with competition from Facebook as general user dissatisfaction. At this point, Facebook’s worst enemy is itself.

There’s some evidence that the rate of Facebook sign-ups is slowing down, but only in the short-term. And an informal survey of Technologizer readers shows enough dissatisfaction that people are willing to pack up and leave the service. But where are those people going to go?  Facebook can be replaced to some degree with a mish-mash of other services, like Twitter, LinkedIn and Flickr. Even so, those services won’t be comparable unless you can convince everyone to come with you.

Without an all-encompassing service that provides more satisfaction, Facebook can rest easy while it figures out how to better please its users. As Facebook spokesman Jonny Thaw stated to the Wall Street Journal, “We look forward to the next survey.”

Google Images Improves Its Image

At a press event at its San Francisco offices this morning, Google unveiled a new version of Google Images, with the biggest revision the company has given the image search engine’s interface in a very long time. (Google Images launched in 2001 with an index of 250 million images; today it’s got 10 billion of ‘em.)

The new look is a lot more modern and, well…visual than the old one. Here are the highlights:

Bigger pictures, fewer words. Results pages are now all about the images–the thumbnails are bigger, and most of the textual information–such as the link to similar images–isn’t there. (If you hover over an image, you get the information which formerly appeared on the standard results page.)

Continue reading this story…