remove the labels – Gadgets and Life

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The same week Dell announced their most recent netbook, Michael Dell “predicted” that the future would see subsidized netbooks, sold by wireless carriers on the cheap if users were willing to sign long-term contracts. It wasn’t much of a prediction, given Dell was already negotiating such a deal, and such offers are already commonplace in [...]

On the heels of broad hikes by Comcast, Mediacom, and select hikes by Cox — Cablevision dropped me a line this evening to say they’ll be joining the other cable operators in bumping the price of some TV packages next year. The company will be raising cable TV rates in 2009 by an average 3.5%, [...]

SD. RV0. SPA. ABC..DEF…ugh.
If you are like me, you probably want to pull your hair out when confronted by the alphabet soup of product names that today’s manufacturers cook-up. Well, before you go and stock up on Rogaine, let’s take a look at demystifying at least one manufacturer’s part numbers – Linksys.
Demystifying Linksys Part Numbers
The [...]

Survey: Unlimited Mobile Broadband a Trap for Operators cable360.net AT&T, Lenovo and Ericsson Break Down Barriers to Embedded Broadband Service in Notebook PCs zibb.com Verizon-Alltel Deal Wins Justice Department Approval; Verizon Must Sell Assets bloomberg.com Motorola cuts 3,000 jobs, delays spinoff of cell phone [...]

Qwest recently told us they were ahead of schedule on their 0 million ADSL2+ deployment plan, with their new 12Mbps/896kbps and 20Mbps/896kbps tiers available to 1.5 million customers. That number should reach 1.8 million by the end of this year, and may reach 5 million by the end of 2009, Qwest CEO Ed Mueller told [...]

As most of you who are reading this already know, a little less than two month’s ago we underwent a major upgrade of our ecommerce platform – the one that powers the world’s most popular VoIP store, VoIPSupply.com. Similar to what many other businesses experience when tearing out a piece of business infrastructure and replacing [...]

JD Power and Associates has released their 2008 ISP Residential Customer Satisfaction Study, which for eleven years has ranked both dial-up and broadband ISPs on five criteria: performance and reliability, cost of service, customer service, billing, and offerings and promotions. ISPs are also ranked geographically by four regions. According to the study, Cablevision took top [...]

Polycom recently announced the release of SIP Firmware version 3.1 for their popular SoundPoint IP Series telephones. Feature enhancements in this release include:
Enhanced Feature Keys
Configurable Telephony Soft Keys
Server driven message display to user
Enhanced ‘Dialog Package’ BLF
Electronic Hookswitch compatibility with Plantronics Headsets
Programmable Soft Keys
Telephony Control and Status API
Push Capability
XHTML browser link [...]

On the heels of rumored plans by both Comcast and Verizon to deploy femtocells, AT&T is poised to also offer the technology soon. According to Unstrung, AT&T is the last of the big three cellular operators in the U.S. to get on board the femto bandwagon, and will begin testing the technology late this year [...]

On the heels of hike announcements from Comcast, Cox, Mediacom and Cablevision, Time Warner Cable customers say they’re receiving notices saying they’ll be seeing rate hikes of their own. While hikes are determined on a market-by-market basis by Time Warner Cable (in part by competition or lack thereof), many users are being told they’ll be [...]

Sprint has been slacking at getting their new early termination fee (ETF) system in place after announcing it a year ago. Critics say it was because Sprint, already on shaky ground, is afraid of losing any more customers — but Sprint’s CEO recently claimed it was a billing integration issue. Whatever the case, Michael Stanclift [...]

Yesterday’s Comcast earning numbers showed that despite a tightening economy and increased competition from telcoTV, Comcast is weathering the storm — thanks in particular to the company’s rapid VoIP growth. Despite the faster speeds offered via FiOS, Comcast COO Stephen Burke this week stated that AT&T was the bigger threat.
“We are actually seeing more competition [...]

An anonymous reader writes in this morning: “Prior to 1987 there was a gentlemen’s agreement never to build a building taller than the statue of the city’s founding father William Penn. When Liberty Place was built in 1987, some believe this upset the sports gods and the city of Philadelphia was cursed with never [...]