Verizon’s network has taken some sort of unidentified hit overnight, which has resulted in a service outage across the United States. Customers of the biggest US carrier are reporting a lack of 3G and 4G network connectivity from pretty much everywhere: California, Rhode Island, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New Jersey, and New York have all apparently been affected.
Well we knew it was in trouble. A couple of weeks ago, AT&T and the FCC got into a spat, which caused AT&T to withdraw its application for their proposed merger with T-Mobile USA. They were still optimistic that the Justice department would approve some variation on the deal. However today AT&T announced that it was officially killing the merger, and paying Deutsche Telekom a $4b breakup fee.
When you compare the newly released SkyDrive from Microsoft to Photo Stream, yes Microsoft is better than Apple.
HP decided the fate of webOS today, and it’s not what you thought it would be: the platform will be contributed to the open source community. The company says that it will be an “active participant and investor in the project,” and that its ultimate goal here is to accelerate development. There’s no word on what part of WebOS will remain in HP’s control, but it is rumored that the Patents will remain closed off.
HP also announced that it would continue the development of webOS hardware. Jump past the break for the breakdown of what might happen to webOS.
AT&T and Deutsche Telekom have announced that they are withdrawing their pending approval application for the sale of Deutsche Telekom to AT&T with the FCC. Though the companies still specifically assert that they’re “continuing to pursue the sale” of Deutsche Telekom’s US wireless assets, AT&T has taken another move that makes it really unlikely that the deal will succeed.
AT&T has decided to take a $4 billion pretax charge on its Q4 2011 accountancy sheet, in recognition of the risk of this deal not going through. That includes a $3 billion default payment that is due to Deutsche Telekom in the event of non-completion and an additional $1 billion in book value of spectrum that AT&T would have to give up. So it looks like, on paper at least, AT&T has given up the fight.
Most likely this will be billed as a win for consumers, not many people thought that the acquisition would be a good thing for wireless service. It will also make Sprint very happy as it will not be the one left standing after the acquisition. The companies are playing this as just another step toward approval, but it looks like approval may be the last thing they expect.
Adobe will no longer update its Flash plugin for mobile browsers, though it will continue to issue security updates and bug fixes for the phones that already run the flash plugin. The company issued a statement to developers conceding that “HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively,” adding “that makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.” Which of course is something that Apple has been preaching for since the iPhone came out in 2007. Flash runs like crap on a computer, so why would we expect it to run on a lesser device? Now that Adobe has stopped its development of Flash on the mobile side of things, maybe they can focus on making HTML 5 a true standard, and making it easy to develop for. After all it is the development tools that they are really good at.
Nokia World is happening now, and as we suspected they have introduced their first Windows Phone device. They are calling it the Lumia 800, which is powered by a 1.4GHz CPU, has a ClearBlack AMOLED display, with a Carl Zeiss optics-enhanced lens for the rear facing camera. It also packs 16GB of internal storage and 25GB of free SkyDrive space, and features Nokia Drive, Nokia Music and ESPN Sports Hub baked into its OS. It looks like it has 512MB of RAM.
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