Read this Tech Crunch piece in its entirety.

I walked up the Verizon (NYSE: VZ) store no later than 6:20 AM, forty minutes before the 7:00 AM opening time (three hours earlier than usual in light of the big day). But no sooner had I arrived than I began to question my still-groggy mental state. The Verizon sign was directly above my head. There were five or six employees buzzing around the well-lit store, two of whom were decked out in bizarre Droid-branded outfits, complete with black leather vests. But the street could not have been more empty.

The door cracked open. One of the employees, perhaps concerned by my confused expression or excited that someone had actually shown up, had come to talk to me.

A few minutes later I was joined by two new Droid fans. Unfortunately, my excitement over my new friends was rather shortlived — the newcomers turned down my offer of free TechCrunch T-shirts, and informed me that they weren’t actually waiting in line, but had come to witness it for themselves too. As it turned out, they were members of the Android team, who were also apparently let down by the sad turn out.

Droid. Does. Fail.

Update: Some further clarification as to why I posted the above snippet from Tech Crunch. Remember the Palm (NSDQ: PALM) Pre? Remember how everyone fell in love with it in January, and we all eagerly waited for it to come out? First in the USA on Sprint (NYSE: S), then in Germany and the UK on O2 (NYSE: TEF). Look where the Palm Pre is now in November. Hell, look where Palm is right now. The amount of attention the Palm Pre received was outstanding, yet how many Palm Pres do you see out in the wild?

There is no doubt that the Droid is an awesome device. Everyone who has reviewed one has said that it’s the best version of Android to date. The camera sucks, but the polished UI, and let us not forget Google Maps Navigation, are compelling enough reasons to say that the Droid is better than the iPhone. But what actually happened? All the press, from hyper enthusiast gadget sites like us, Engadget and Gizmodo, to main stream coverage from places such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, all amounted to nothing.

No big lines, no big parade, nada, zip. Think we’re going to be talking about the Droid in 6 months? No. We’ll be up to our eye balls in Android 2.0 devices, and in 6 months we may even see a new, better, more hyped up version of Android from either HTC or Motorola (NYSE: MOT).

The reason I posted the snippet above was to point out, and make fun of, people who said the Droid was going to change the status quo. Android is still not awesome enough to be accepted by the masses, but it’s getting there.

Update 2: One more thing, how long do you think it will take for Motorola, or Verizon, to issue a press release saying 1 million units have been sold? How many do you think will be sold over the weekend?

Vint Cerf, who many herald as the father of the internet, it was either him or Al Gore, neither you or I really care, is one hell of a forward thinking individual. He developed Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) in the late 1990s because he knew that one day men and women would be flying all around space, and the ping between Earth and Mars, which can have a round trip time of up to 40 minutes, is not well suited to looking at LOLcats and all the terrible remixes of that scene in Der Untergang where Hitler is in the bunker freaking the fuck out. The Internet Protocol Suite, more commonly known as TCP/IP, which was invented in the 1960s, and further evolved in the 1970s, is what drives the series of tubes that you and I use on a daily basis. DTN is essentially a replacement of TCP/IP developed to deal with space communication. Why is Vint Cerf bothering to bring this to Android then?

Wireless Networks today are not very reliable, especially AT&T’s network, therefore implementing DTN here on Earth would enhance the mobile web experience and also optimize for congestion. But if we’re going to be honest here for a second, the internet has taught us that no one throws away what works, instead little additions are made over time to achieve a certain goal. How successful will DTN be on the consumer internet is anyone’s guess, but if I was a betting man I’d say it isn’t going to take off.

[Via: The Register]

Chalk this one up as a highly suspicious piece of information, but Einar Rosenberg, who is in charge of the Near Field Communications group on LinkedIn, a social network no one really uses anymore except those trying to find a higher paying job and to show off which fancy schools or companies they’ve worked for, is saying that a highly reputable source has told him that there are 4th generation iPhone prototypes floating around with a built in RFID reader:

Had to share this news. A highly reliable source has informed me that Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has built some prototypes of the next gen iPhone with an RFID reader built in and they have seen it in action. So its not full NFC but its a start for real service discovery and I’m told that the reaction was very positive that we can expect this in the next gen iPhone.

If Apple does it, expect every phone manufacturer and their sister to begin pumping out NFC enabled phones, at least for service discovery and sync.

This just reinforces what we knew based on the two separate patents Apple submitted that had the iPhone enabled to read RFID tags. I’m told that the touch project video and the BT SIG’s specs were all driving forces to push this forward as well as other factors.

Guess I’ll be touching my iPhone to my Mac to link them together to sync iTunes by next year.

This is ballsy, and if it does happen … well then you’re looking at the start of something big. Apple was the one who pushed the rest of the handset makers to start making touch screen devices en masse, so if the 4th generation iPhone due to come out some time in 2010 comes with RFID then you can expect everyone else to follow.

iPhone + RFID + all those devices connected to an iTunes account = wicked awesome.

[Via: Near Field Communications World]

[More information about the video]

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Best Buy have announced a partnership whereby Best Buy employees will offer to install the Google Mobile Application for customers purchasing mobile phones from a retail Best Buy store. It wasn’t mentioned how much money Best Buy would receive from Google, but rumored estimates range from “I’m going to leave my job and order a trophy wife from Russia” to “I’m rich, bitch”.

Press Release, with massive amounts of bullshit press lingo stripped out, after the jump.

Read the full article »

Few advertisements have the power to stop me in my tracks, make me think, and then smile. Dentyne, a manufacture of chewing gum, are running two advertisements in the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit that remind people that communicating with people digitally can never, and will never, reach the fidelity of “face time”. Since leaving Facebook over 3 months ago, and discussing the reasons why with several people in meat space, I’ve discovered that I’m not alone. Many have admitted that they share the same feelings of nostalgia, longing of the days before social networks, and frustration with the digital, you are my friend, you are not my friend, systems of today. The efficiency of which we can communicative with people today removes the effort that was once required to truly know someone.

Now there are people who will argue that online social networking, in moderation, is healthy. The same can be said about masturbation, and that’s all social networking has become. Make a profile, find people you know, say how you feel, read what they said about how they feel, comment on their feelings, give their feelings a thumbs up; it’s remarkably easy to fool oneself into believing that you’re interacting with someone on a meaningful level. “Face time”, exposing your thoughts and feelings in real time, changing the tone, pace, and subject of a conversation based on the area you’re sitting, who is around, and most importantly how the other person moves their body in their seat and the features of their face; the challenges of recognizing, interpreting, and then reacting to someone during “face time” are what you use to discover friendship, truth, and compassion.

A thumbs up doesn’t quite do it. Dentyne realizes this, and they know that many of you have these feelings, but you’re too comfortable in your online social network to take a risk. They’re pushing you to get back out into the world, to experience things without the safety of your laptop. They want you to be prepared for the people you’re going to meet, and to them that means having fresh breathe.

They sell gum, but in the process they try to remind you what life is all about.

[Images from Flickr user "acordova"]

America is so big that an iPhone application like Car Finder [iTunes link] had to be written. You haven’t experienced American capitalism at its most sinister until you’ve walked from one end of a Super Wal-mart to the other. Such large abominations stocking goods produced in South Asia have parking lots that go farther than the eye can see. A 5 minute walk from your car to the front entrance is not anything new, and the fattest of the fat fuck families usually drop off Brother Bacon and Sister Soda Pop at the front anyway, while the person with the lowest BMI has to trek on a journey across a sea of Ford F150 pick up trucks to rejoin their obese offspring near the seated disabled greeter making less than minimum wage. Car Finder uses the iPhone’s GPS, compass, and camera, to help you find your car once you’re done paying for your weekly purchase of what is equivalent to the monthly dietary requirements of a family of 5 in Africa.

[Via: Cult of Mac]

Many of you are surfing IntoMobile, downloading illegal torrents, and watching a YouTube video of a cat playing the keyboard, all at the same time thanks to broadband. I personally don’t know anyone who uses dialup, and I doubt you do as well. Have you ever stopped and thought to yourself why the business model for broadband delivery to your home isn’t the same as wireless data on your mobile device? All home broadband connections are offered with unlimited consumption, you simply pay for speed.

Take a look at AT&T’s plans for DSL:

And Comcasts’s plans for cable:

See how pricing plans are structured? You want more bits per second, you give us more dollars per month. Now why is it that mobile data is so analog in the USA and many other countries around the world? Usually there is only 1 package. You either have mobile internet on your device, or you don’t.

Check out how my Finnish operator, Saunalahti, charges for their mobile internet:

Notice how you pay more for speed, just like you do in America for broadband at home. What plan do you think I use? You’d be surprised to know I have the cheapest (slowest) package that only offers 384 KB/s. I use the living hell out of it thanks to Opera Mini, but at the same time I’m not hogging up all the bandwidth available at a cell tower. Why do you think AT&T’s network has been a steaming pile of shit after they launched the iPhone? There is no throttling, everyone gets the same big fat pipe.

If mobile data was priced in tiers based on speed, how many more people do you think would sign up? Some of us just do a lot of Twitter and email on the go, we don’t need 3G, and we don’t want to pay $30 a month just to tell our Facebook friends how we feel about a movie we just saw. Some of us like to surf full websites all day on our iPhone, and we want the snappiest experience possible, and we’re totally willing to pay for that.

More user choice (more packages) is all I’m asking for from operators. It helps move more people on to the internet, and it gives speed to the people who really want it, the people who want to pay, because all the cheapskates like me don’t use up all the bandwidth.

Discuss.

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Siemens Networks (NSN) disappointingly lost the auction for Nortel’s wireless unit. Those assets would have given them a strong upper hand in the LTE patent space, but more importantly it would have given them a chance to get some business on the other side of the pond. No use in crying over spilled milk however, what about buying another portion of Nortel? Bidding for Nortel’s optical networking unit is open for a few more days, until November 9th, and then an auction is set to take place on November 13th. Not only would this give NSN competencies in building next generation fiber networks, but it could turn them into a backhaul provider as well. Connecting a cell tower to the internet via microwaves works today, and is fairly cheap, but it isn’t going to handle the next generation of demand. Fiber to the cell tower however, now that’s something special. The bid may cost over $400 million, and it would be a slap in the face to the 5000 people that are going to be fired early next year.

[Via: Wall Street Journal]

The economy, which is experiencing either a recession, or depression depending on who you ask, is starting to look better, but make no mistake, a lot of people are still hurting and will continue to hurt for a few more years. It’s surprising then that in the midst of all this belt tightening and frugal spending that in Q3 2009 smartphone sales broke a record. IDC says that 43.3 million smartphones shipped last quarter, while Canalys says 41.4 million, either way, they both conclude that this has been the best quarter, ever, for converged devices. Here are the numbers:

Manufacturer – (IDC) – (Canalys):

• Nokia (NYSE: NOK) – (16.4 million) – (16.4 million)
• RIM – (8.2 million) – (8.5 million)
• Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) – (7.4 million) – (7.36 million)
• HTC – (2.4 million) – (2.18 million)
• Others (8.8 million) – (6.9 million)

In terms of growth as a percentage, IDC says RIM shot up 35.7% year on year, while Canalys reports 40.8%. Apple and Nokia are growing at roughly the same rate year on year, IDC says Nokia grew 6.6% while Apple achieved 7.1% growth, and Canalys is saying Nokia grew 6%, while Apple did marginally better at 6.7%. In terms of market share, Nokia is still number one: IDC is saying 37.9% and Canalys saying is 39.7%, both are higher than the 35% Nokia quoted themselves as having during their Q3 2009 financial conference call.

Mind share is another story all together, but to quote Steve Ballmer: “At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what the critics say, it matters what the customers say.”

Norway, home of browser vendor Opera, and delicious lutefisk, has a population of less than 5 million people and is roughly the size of the state of New Mexico. I’m sharing these facts with you to give some context to the next statement: Telenor, the number one operator in Norway, is going to rebuild their network from scratch. With Chinese infrastructure vendor Huawei building the wireless side, and Starnet, who was recently acquired by Cisco, responsible for the back-end, Telenor plans to rebuild their network over the next few years. Each new tower will support 2G, 3G and 4G, and all legacy circuit switched equipment will be thrown out and replaced in order to make their network 100% IP-based.

“This is the biggest upgrade of the mobile network in Norway we have ever carried out. It will create a solid and flexible base for further developing the services offered by the Telenor mobile network and the quality of those services. Our aim is to provide customers with better, more innovative services across the country. This means better in terms of capacity, speed and stability.” — Ragnar Kårhus, Head of Telenor Norway

In the midst of an economy that is no longer falling like a rock, but will likely be flat for years to come, Telenor has some pretty damn big balls. I blame it on the high protein diet of mainly seafood.

[Via: Cellular News]