ErixClix

It was reported today that AT&T added 2.4 MILLION IPHONE CONTRACTS IN Q2. 800,000 of them are NEW AT&T customers.

AT&T is gaining over a quarter million new mobile customers every month from Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile because of their iPhone exclusivity.

Meanwhile Verizon is begging Apple to allow them to sell SOMETHING! Have you read about that? Verizon’s not even ashamed to say they want to sell “a mobile Apple product” whatever that means.

Exclusivity contracts are ILLEGAL in Australia. That’s why my friend there got her brand new iPhone 3G, *FREE* with a 2 year contract, instead of $299. The $299 was a negotiation to get the customer.

AT&T Doesn’t have to negotiate since you can’t go to another carrier to get an iPhone.

Unfortunately, it only pays to limit a consumer’s choices.

Where are our anti-competitive laws? This is America!

For some number of years now one PC maker or another has made an attempt, if not many attempts, at developing what they believed was the ‘ideal’ tablet PC.  Usually smaller than a notebook computer, a little slimmer and lighter, most incorporating some type of touch sensitive display and utilizing a stylus or pen for input.

More creative tablet PC’s were simply sub-notebooks with a flip-around screen that would fold over the keyboard and lay flat.  Still they were bulky, lacked in power and features and the displays and battery life left much to be desired.  Ultimately these were impractical, over-priced gadgets at best.

Recently, at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference, there was much speculation that Apple has been working on, and would possibly announce a new tablet computing product.  Since then, the conference and the much hyped keynote address have come and gone.  We saw a new iPhone 3GS announced, the release of the new iPhone OS 3.0 and more details on the upcoming Snow Leopard Mac OS release.  Unfortunately, still no tablet from Apple.

Why bother with engineering ‘yet another tablet PC?’

Because most of the reasons tablet PCs were impractical in the past, most of the technical challenges that were unaddressable before can now be overcome… Continue Reading »