Cubic Telecom's Maxroam data SIM card lets you roam the globe without breaking the bank
It's never easy to travel the globe on a tight budget, but Cubic Telecom is doing its best to ease the financial burden a bit, with its new Maxroam card -- a global data SIM card that allows American travelers to access the web for just 65 cents per MB. The card, available without any subscription or contract, works within a total of 43 countries, including India, Australia, South Africa and Europe. All you have to do is purchase the card, insert it in your unlocked handset and activate it online. From there, you'll be able to use Maxroam until you reach the data limit, without worrying about expiration dates or time constraints. It's available now at the source link below, though as Cubic Telecom points out, final data rates may vary with the euro/dollar exchange rate.
Show full PR text
Cubic Telecom Announces Lowest Cost Global Roaming at 65c per MB with New MAXROAM Global Data SIM Cards
With MAXROAM's new global data roaming bundles, the message to travellers is clear: 'Turn your data roaming back on!'
Mountain View, CA - December 5, 2011- Cubic Telecom (www.cubictelecom.com) today launched a new global data SIM card which allows users to travel the world without worrying about the high cost of data roaming or mobile Internet connectivity. The new MAXROAM (www.maxroam.com) card enables U.S. travellers to browse the web, tweet, use Facebook and Skype, or check email on their smart phones and tablets, like they do at home, for only 65 cents per MB with no monthly subscriptions or contract required.
The new cards work across 43 countries worldwide, including Europe as well as major global markets such as India, Australia, South Africa and South East Asia. The cards are good until the data limit has been reached; there are no time restrictions or expiration dates.
"The appetite amongst consumers for data services has been increasing significantly, particularly for business travellers. With this new product, travellers can connect to the Internet without worrying about bill-shock and enormous fees," said Pat Phelan, MAXROAM Director of Innovation. "When you compare this data rate with typical rate charges by other operators around the world which can be as high $20 per MB, you can really see how much more affordable and accessible we have made data roaming."
To use the MAXROAM service, customers can order the SIM card from MAXROAM's web site (www.maxroam.com), replace the SIM in their GSM (unlocked) phones, activate the card online and as soon as they arrive at their travel destination, start Tweeting, looking at Facebook, Skype or email and visiting favorite websites for one low data rate.
Cubic Telecom's new MAXROAM global data roaming card provides data coverage in more than 200 countries, providing up to 70 percent savings over standard roaming costs. Cards are available immediately from www.maxroam.com. US dollar rates will vary according to Euro/US dollar conversion.
LightsOut
So basically 1GB of INTL roaming data for $665. Calls and texts not included. Great deal.
E2EK1EL
Kindle Fire offers ‘disappointingly poor’ user experience, UI expert says
User interface expert Dr. Jakob Nielsen, who describes himself as an author, researcher and consultant on user interfaces, recently studied the user experience of the Kindle Fire and dubbed it “disappointingly poor.” Nielsen said the lack of physical buttons impeded the reading experience, the device was too heavy and was “unpleasant to hold for long periods of time,” and while there was potential for a good magazine reading experience, Nielsen said the result was “miserable.” Nielsen even proposes a bit of a conspiracy theory to why the web browsing experience on the Kindle Fire might be inferior to other devices. “If I were given to conspiracy theories, I’d say that Amazon deliberately designed a poor web browsing user experience to keep Fire users from shopping on competing sites,” he said. “Amazon’s own built-in shopping app has great usability, so they clearly know how to design for the tablet.”
GGM
quote:
Originally posted by E2EK1EL
Walkley’s checks also indicated that sales of BlackBerry smartphones in the U.S. slowed significantly in November, with the high-end Bold 9900 in particular showing slowed adoption. “Following early strength for the Bold 9900, our checks indicated BlackBerry sales slowed significantly during November due to high-end smartphone share losses combined with lower-priced Nokia feature-phones and sub-$200 Android smartphones adversely impacting BlackBerry sales in emerging markets,” Walkley said.
Yo Walkley, no idea who you are but if you're so pro do you not think BB s sold in Nov might have been affected by the worldwide outtage the month before? I'd say that would drop sales more than any advances made by the competition...
LightsOut
Apple Says Network Outages Are Possible
Image: Courtesy of VentureBeatApple's fancy new voice assistant for the iPhone 4S, Siri, went down Wednesday morning and didn't come back up until the evening--and even then, only for some users.
iPhone 4S users across the country discovered that Siri was no longer able to connect to the network--even though they had 3G or Wi-Fi connections--starting around 11 a.m. PDT Wednesday. According to Venture Beat, contacting Apple customer service resulted in the typical, "Have you tried restarting your device?"
When restarting devices did not fix the problem, Apple suggested that it was "entirely possible" that there was a network outage. Note that Apple, as usual, was careful to avoid admitting there was a problem.
Some users started reporting Siri back online around 4 p.m. PDT, but not everyone. When I dropped by the Apple store in Westfield Valley Fair in Silicon Valley, none of the iPhone 4S's was able to connect to the network.
To Siri's credit, I did at least get a variety of "unable to connect to the network" responses, including "Sorry, I'm having trouble connecting to the network," and "Sorry, I don't have a network connection." So…for what it's worth, at least we know Siri maintains her "personality," even when the network's down.
The good news is that users are now reporting that Siri is back to normal. The bad news is that Apple is yet to make an official statement about the outage.
Though Siri is built into the iPhone 4S, it is not really voice recognition technology so much as an advanced search engine. So while Siri is capable of interacting with a few apps sans a data connection (for example, basic voice recognition tasks on your phone), it does need to be able to connect to the network in order to answer users' questions, such as "What's the weather like in Toronto," "How many teaspoons are in a cup," and "Where can I bury this body?"
UPDATE [1:15 p.m.]: A reader reports that even basic Siri tasks, such as voice-to-text, are unavailable when the network is down. That just makes the whole situation even worse.
E2EK1EL
Apple Submits Revised Plans and Renderings for Apple's New Campus
As noted by iPhoneinCanada, Apple has submitted revised plans for their so-called "Spaceship" campus proposal. The massive new campus is expected to provide Apple with approximately 2.8 million square feet for up to 13,000 employees. Steve Jobs personally presented the original plans to the City of Cupertino in June. Jobs described it as follows:
It's a pretty amazing building. It's a little like a spaceship landed. It's got this gorgeous courtyard in the middle... It's a circle. It's curved all the way around. If you build things, this is not the cheapest way to build something. There is not a straight piece of glass in this building. It's all curved. We've used our experience making retail buildings all over the world now, and we know how to make the biggest pieces of glass in the world for architectural use. And, we want to make the glass specifically for this building here. We can make it curve all the way around the building... It's pretty cool.
With the exception of the rendering included above, many of the other renderings appear the same as the previous images released. The newly revised documents do include detailed floorplans of how the 4 story building will be laid out. If all goes as planned, the structure could be complete by 2015.
A court decision today indicates that Apple may not own the ‘iPad’ name in China
In October, Taiwanese company Proview Electronics accused Apple of trademark infringement regarding the “iPad” moniker, with the company’s chairman promising to sue Apple for damages in both the US and China. Apple quietly purchased the global rights to the trademark, but also launched a lawsuit to gain the rights in China, which weren’t included in the agreement. Shenzhen-based Intermediate People’s Court today rejected Apple’s lawsuit to gain ownership over the Chinese trademark, according to a report from Reuters.
According to Financial Times, Proview apparently had the iPad trademark registered in several regions including the EU, South Korea, Singapore, China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia. The report claims the company unsuccessfully tried to market a tablet computer known as I-PAD roughly ten years ago. Although courts are said to have not yet reached a final decision on ownership, Apple has reportedly already won preliminary injunctions for the trademark in Shenzhen and Hong Kong.
In 2006 Proview agreed to sell the global iPad trademark to US-based IP Application Development (IPAD) for £35,000 ($55,104), at which time Proview didn’t know had connections to Apple. The Chinese trademarks, filed as far back as 2000, were apparently not included in that agreement, leading Apple and IP Application Development to sue Proview.
In October, Proview chairman Yang Rongshan had this to say about the case:
It is arrogant of Apple to just ignore our rights and go ahead selling the iPad in this market, and we will oppose that,” Mr Yang said. “Besides that, we are in big financial trouble and the trademarks are a valuable asset that could help us sort out part of that trouble.
As of October, Proview was apparently seeking legal damages from Apple to the tune of 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion).
E2EK1EL
Siri servers were down on Oct 17 and Nov 4 for a few hours, old news.
E2EK1EL
Why Android’s UI Isn’t As “Smooth” As iOS
A few Google+ posts by a Google Engineer and by a former Google intern and soon-to-be Microsoft intern correct poor "facts" and shed some light on why Android's user interface isn't as smooth as iOS's. The reason may not be what you think it is.
Dianne Hackborn, an engineer at Google, hopped on Google Plus to set straight some of the misinformation that's been floating around about Android.
She says that some form of hardware acceleration has always been utilized by Android, since Android 1.0. This includes window compositing, menu transitions and pop-ups, the notification bar's animation, and some others.
However, prior to Android 3.0 - "Honeycomb," the tablet-targeted OS - drawing inside of a window was usually software based, and hardware acceleration wasn't needed to get 60fps frame rates. Honeycomb changed things to add more prevalent hardware acceleration options to developers. Android's newest version, 4.0 or "Ice Cream Sandwich," hasn't made drastic changes except that hardware acceleration is on by default now.
A key fact of the debate of Android performance has been the use of hardware acceleration. Hackborn describes why using it isn't really as ideal as people think it is:
Hardware accelerated drawing is not all full of win. For example on the PVR drivers of devices like the Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus, simply starting to use OpenGL in a process eats about 8MB of RAM. Given that our process overhead is about 2MB, this is pretty huge. That RAM takes away from other things, such as the number of background processes that can be kept running, potentially slowing down things like app switching.
Overall, Hackborn sets quite a few facts straight in her long post. Be sure to check it out.
Andrew Munn, a former Google intern and soon-to-be Microsoft intern, took Hackborn's facts and aimed to explain why Android doesn't provide as smooth of a user interface as iOS, WebOS, or even Windows Phone 7.
RedmondPie summarizes Munn pretty well:
UI rendering processes in iOS occur with dedicated threads with real-time priority whereas on Android, UI rendering processes occur along with the main thread with normal priority. Whenever an iOS devices detects touch, it stops other processes and focuses all attention to rendering the UI. Android devices don’t do this, instead general processing and UI rendering occurs concurrently which results in choppy UI.
Munn states in his disclaimer that he has tried to do as much research as he can, but he did not work on the Android framework, nor has he gone through Android's rendering source code.
If you're more interested, be sure to check out the original posts linked below. They contain quite a bit of valuable information, especially considering that Android's lack of smoothness is one of its biggest criticisms.
(I can validate this; I've tested many Android devices, no matter how many times i reboot and flush the memory ... the results are the same after a few mins.)
RIM loses BBX trademark battle, next OS is named BlackBerry 10
Die-hard fans of RIM's mobile efforts should put those BBX tattoo plans on hold, as the US Federal Court has blocked the company from using the BBX trademark, favoring the existing use by BASIS International for its software. As a result, the boys from Waterloo just announced at BlackBerry DevCon Asia that the new name for its next phone OS is BlackBerry 10 (and the Roman numeral for 10 is... ah, we see what you did there.) Let's hope RIM's plans for pulling its tablets and phones into a single unified platform are better executed than its naming process -- next time, they should probably just leave it up to the machines.
(Shouldn't it be BB8? The 9900 runs on BB7)
E2EK1EL
Unreleased BlackBerry "Milan" surfaces, slider QWERTY powered by "BlackBerry 10"
Over the weekend details of the upcoming BBX ¡°BlackBerry 10¡å powered devices leaked out. The code-names sound promising: London, Lisbon, Milan, Nevada, Black Forest. Today, an image of the BlackBerry Milan has found its way online ¨C specs have it being a slider BlackBerry with a physical full QWERTY keyboard. In addition, CrackBerry reports that the display will have a ¡°higher pixel density than the iPhone 4¡äs retina display¡±, plus the pic of the Milan shows a similar design to the London with edgier corners. Guess you could call this the next generation of the Torch 9810.
RIM's PlayBook root fix already hacked
RIM's trying to close the security hole on the BlackBerry PlayBook that allows root access, but the hackers who enabled it are staying one step ahead. Yesterday, RIM acknowledged the hack in a statement and quickly released an over-the-air software update to disable root access, but the team who initially cracked the PlayBook have already updated the Dingleberry jailbreaking tool, to get around this update. Developer Chris Wade noted on Twitter that "all firmware are currently jailbreakable," so it seems RIM was only able to disable root access for less than a day. We'll see if RIM can respond with a sturdier patch in the next few days,.
Cribby
quote:
Originally posted by E2EK1EL
Looks like a jedi enclave. Sick.
E2EK1EL
^^^
The black roof area is suppose to be solar power panels.
E2EK1EL
As Adobe Flash fades from mobile phones, HTML5 adoption already exploding
Adobe announced last month that it was finally putting an end to its efforts with Flash Player for mobile devices, deciding to instead focus on native smartphone applications utilizing Adobe AIR. The wide adoption of HTML5 is seen as one of the driving forces behind Adobe’s decision to discontinue Flash development with regard to the mobile space, and new projections from market research and consulting firm Strategy Analytics suggest that the adoption of HTML5-enabled mobile phones is set to skyrocket. Read on from more.
According to Strategy Analytics, 336 million phones with HTML5 capabilities will be sold globally in 2011. In 2013, the firm sees that number ballooning to 1 billion. “We forecast worldwide HTML5 phone sales to surge from 336 million units in 2011 to 1.0 billion in 2013,” Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Shah said in a statement. ”Growth for HTML5 phones is being driven by robust demand from multiple hardware vendors and software developers in North America, Europe and Asia who want to develop rich media services across multiple platforms, including companies like Adobe, Apple, Google and Microsoft. We define an HTML5 phone as a mobile handset with partial or full support for HTML5 technology in the browser, such as the Apple iPhone 4S.”
The firm sees HTML5 as a “pivotal technology” that will help enable growth across a variety of spaces including multi-screen applications and technology that makes use of cloud-based solutions. “HTML5 has quickly become a high-growth technology that will help smartphones, feature phones, tablets, notebooks, desktop PCs, televisions and vehicles to converge in the future,” Strategy Analytics’s Executive Director Neil Mawston added.
While HTML5 is still a relatively young technology, support from major technology companies like Apple and Google is no doubt bolstering its adoption among developers. Strategy Analytics’s full press release follows below.
Strategy Analytics: One Billion HTML5 Phones to be Sold Worldwide in 2013
Boston, MA – December 7, 2011 – According to the latest research from Strategy Analytics, worldwide HTML5 phone sales will surge from 336 million units in 2011 to 1 billion units in 2013. HTML5 has quickly become a high-growth technology that will help smartphones, feature phones, tablets, notebooks, desktop PCs, televisions and vehicles to converge through cloud services.
Neil Shah, Analyst at Strategy Analytics, said, “We forecast worldwide HTML5 phone sales to surge from 336 million units in 2011 to 1.0 billion in 2013. Growth for HTML5 phones is being driven by robust demand from multiple hardware vendors and software developers in North America, Europe and Asia who want to develop rich media services across multiple platforms, including companies like Adobe, Apple, Google and Microsoft. We define an HTML5 phone as a mobile handset with partial or full support for HTML5 technology in the browser, such as the Apple iPhone 4S.”
Neil Mawston, Executive Director at Strategy Analytics, added, “HTML5 has quickly become a high-growth technology that will help smartphones, feature phones, tablets, notebooks, desktop PCs, televisions and vehicles to converge in the future. HTML5 will be a pivotal technology in the growth of a multi-screen, 4G LTE cloud that is emerging for mobile operators, device makers, car manufacturers, component vendors and Web app developers. With its potential to transcend some of the barriers faced by native apps, such as cross-platform usability, HTML5 is a market that no mobile stakeholder can afford to ignore”
Thomas Kang, Director at Strategy Analytics, added, “Despite surging growth of HTML5 phone sales, we caution that HTML5 is still a relatively immature technology. HTML5 currently has limited APIs and feature-sets to include compared with native apps on platforms such as Android or Apple iOS. It will require several years of further development and standards-setting before HTML5 can fully mature to reach its potential as a unified, multi-platform content-enabler.”
The full report, Global HTML5 Handset Sales Forecast, is published by the Strategy Analytics Wireless Device Strategies (WDS) service, details of which can be found"
Wraps Come Down at Apple's Grand Central Terminal Store for Media Day [Updated: Apple Press Release]
