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Q: I am a satisfied Sprint “Simply Everything” customer, but I’m an iPhone fan as well. I’ve read about software that allows you to unlock your iPhone, however, I’m afraid that if I unlock an iPhone and use it on Sprint’s network, I’ll lose functionality. Do you have any experience with unlocked iPhones?
–Sharon

iPhone 3G

The original iPhone

(Credit:
Apple)

A: If you buy an
iPhone 3G, no one will stop you from canceling the service and paying an early termination fee to AT&T. Yet it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to take the same phone to another country and reactivate there. If you were successful in unlocking it from AT&T, it would certainly be possible to use it abroad, but good luck on finding an operator what would be willing to give you service. Personally, I’m not optimistic that a carrier in any iPhone 3G country would activate a former AT&T handset, particularly when they can sell you one of their own. Of course, you could buy a prepaid SIM card, but not all carriers may support prepaid iPhone service (for example, AT&T won’t). And don’t forget that while all iPhone 3Gs around the world will have the same specifications, handsets will be “branded” for their country of use. In short, you could make this work but you’ll spend a lot of time and money making it happen. Even if you buy a non-contract iPhone 3G from AT&T, you’ll be spending a lot of money up front. Why not just buy the iPhone in your chosen country?

Q: I have a cell phone with AT&T that is $40 per month plus an extra $10 per months for a second line for my son. Can I cancel my service and take over his second line? And if so, can I transfer my contacts and phone number to his phone? Can I just replace his SIM card with mine?
- Joan

A: The iPhone 3G won’t increase your chances of getting EDGE if you don’t get it already. Though cell phones do play a big part in your call quality reception, they won’t dramatically increase your data coverage. Also, while the new iPhone is offering 3G, it doesn’t offer an improved EDGE capability over the current model.

Kent German, CNET’s cell phones guru, answers your questions about cell phones, services, and accessories and reports on the state of the industry. Send him a question!. For past columns, check out the columns in the On Call archive

A: The beauty of GSM phones is that you can transfer your phone number and your contacts from one handset to another simply by switching your SIM card. So if you ever want to use your son’s phone as your own, you won’t have a problem. Yet you won’t be able to cancel your service without canceling his as well. Because his phone is a “second line,” it can exist only if your service is still in place. So don’t get any ideas about getting cell phone service for only $10 a month. Conversely, you could cancel his second line anytime you’d like but you you may be liable for an early termination fee for that second line.

(Credit: Apple)

A: If you unlock an iPhone and use it on another carrier like T-Mobile, you will lose the visual voice mail feature and the 3G support but the handset will operate just fine otherwise. The main caveat is any software updates from Apple will “lock” the phone again to AT&T, so you’ll have to download those at your discretion. But in your case, Sharon, I’m getting ahead of myself. Even if you unlock the iPhone it will not work on Sprint’s network because Sprint uses an incompatible technology.

For more iPhone 3G questions, see our FAQ. And by the way, have you heard how Rogers’ iPhone 3G plans don’t include unlimited data? That’s pretty outrageous, and I hope our Canadian friends get a better deal.

Q: If I buy an iPhone 3G in one country, can we then terminate the contract and reactivate in in another country with a local carrier?
–HSquared

Q: I have the old iPhone, but I don’t have a Wi-Fi connection and I can’t receive EDGE where I live. Will the iPhone 3G give me a better chance of receiving EDGE?
- Mik

In a 10-page complaint filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for Northern Alabama, Birmingham resident Jessica Alena Smith charged Apple with breach of express and implied warranty and with unjust enrichment. Smith, who refers to the phone she purchased throughout the complaint as “Defective iPhone 3G,” is seeking class action status.

(Credit:
Apple)

An Alabama woman has filed a lawsuit against Apple, claiming the
iPhone 3G’s network is slower than advertised.

But Monday’s update was labeled with the briefest of descriptions–”bug fixes”–making it difficult to know exactly what was addressed with the update.

After weeks of silence regarding the complaints, Apple finally acknowledged earlier this week that reception issues existed. An Apple representative told the Associated Press that the iPhone OS 2.0.2 software update, released Monday, is designed to provide “improved communication with 3G networks.”

“Defendant intended for customers to believe its statements and representations about the Defective iPhone 3Gs, and to trust that the device was ‘twice as fast at half the price’,” the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit claims that Apple’s iPhone 3G advertising campaign is misleading.

“Immediately after purchase, plaintiff soon noticed that her Internet connection, receipt and sending of e-mail, text messages and other data transfers were slower than expected and advertised,” the lawsuit states.

The charges in the lawsuit mirror widespread complaints about the iPhone 3G’s reception that have crisscrossed the Internet since Apple and AT&T released the successor to the original iPhone on July 11. Affected owners have said the iPhone 3G will switch between 3G networks and EDGE networks even when the device is sitting still and that they will lose reception in the middle of a call while in a 3G-rich environment.

Apple representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A newly filed lawsuit claims the iPhone 3G’s network is slower than promised.

The suit asks that Apple be ordered to repair or replace all defective devices and pay unspecified damages, interest, and attorney fees.

Dear Person Who Constantly Tweets About What He Or She Is Eating For Breakfast,

Twitter is not all about you anymore. Now go drown your sorrows in a bottle of delicious maple syrup that you’re about to pour on that giant stack of blueberry pancakes.

Indeed, the microblogging service unveiled Tuesday its revamped home page, which doesn’t change anything for people who are already using Twitter–it’s just a different look and feel for twitter.com if you haven’t logged in.

“Helping people access Twitter in more relevant and useful ways upon first introduction lowers the barrier to accessing the value Twitter has to offer and presents the service more consistently with how it has evolved,” co-founder Biz Stone wrote on the company blog. “Twitter began as a rudimentary social tool based on the concept of status messages but together with those who use it every day, the service has taught us what it wants to be.”

Deep.

So what’s new? Well, the interface is cleaned up and is a little more aesthetically pleasing, with Twitter’s bird mascot now fluttering around a Twitter logo vaguely set up to be a sunburst emerging from some fluffy clouds. (They sure do think highly of themselves over there!) There’s a big Twitter Search button to “see what people are saying about” a given topic, putting the service’s utility front and center. Then there is a roster of trending topics by the hour, day, and week.

Twitter’s mantra has changed from “What are you doing?” to “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.” Chances are, new visitors to Twitter.com are checking it out because they’ve heard about it in the news–or even integrated into news coverage, as the likes of CNN and MSNBC have started doing. The new language reflects that.

And when you click the “Sign up now” button? You’re invited to “join the conversation.” Yeah, that’s right. Now think about whether “the conversation” really wants to hear about that pint of Ben & Jerry’s you’re about to dig into.

“We’re eager to see if encouraging a sense of wonder and discovery leads to a better first impression of Twitter,” Stone concluded in his blog post. So let me get this straight: Twitter has evolved into a 140-character magical mystery tour with a pretty cartoon bird to lead the way. Insert your favorite Harold and Kumar joke here!

I’m a heavy e-mailer on my
iPhone, and one of the things that really bugs me about the built-in mail client is that it falls just short of being ready for business use. For instance, it lacks the option to flag messages, have different signatures for different accounts, or simply turn on and off an out-of-office auto-responder. But what really irks me on a daily basis is the search tool that got added in OS 3.0. Don’t get me wrong, this was a really important thing to add–but there’s a big problem with it: it’s limited to the subject line and who the sender or recipient was.

That level of search is certainly a good start, but it doesn’t compare to newly-released app ReMail (download), which can index an entire e-mail account and do full-text search within all your messages. You want to find a word or phrase in an e-mail body? It can do that, and it’s fast. Better yet, it doubles as its own e-mail app, so you can open up and read messages; copy parts to stick in new messages; or forward, reply, and delete–all without leaving the interface.

ReMail searches inside of mail messages. Here it's picking out the word "nice" from a handful of messages, including different ones from the same thread.

(Credit:
CNET)

Of course having the same account in both ReMail and the mail app means that it takes some extra storage on your phone, but what’s surprising is how little it uses. A 140MB Gmail in-box I sucked in for my test account squeezed down to just 25MB. It works like that for one main reason–the app doesn’t download attachments until you open them. Though the nice thing is that after it’s been opened, it stays cached on the device so you can open it again.

Former Gmail engineer Gabor Cselle, who makes the app, is pushing ReMail as a tool for commuters. One thing that makes ReMail especially well-suited for that is that you can access your entire in-box–even offline. That’s compared to the iPhone’s built-in Mail app, which has to hit the servers to continue a search if what you’re looking for falls outside of what it has recently saved on the device. This can also be a boon when traveling internationally, since you can access and search your account without being connected to, or having to sync up with any servers.

As fantastic as the app is, there are a few annoying bits that will keep it from fully replacing the Mail app, including the fact that it’s currently limited to one account at a time. You can go in and switch it with another account, but then your old index gets deleted. Another pain point is that it doesn’t work with Microsoft Exchange, just Gmail and IMAP. That’s fine for casual users, but business users won’t be able to get all that full-text search goodness on their work accounts, which for me, would have been one of the big draws. Cselle told me that Exchange and other account types, like POP, would be added later down the line, but for now he just wanted to get it out there.

Other small annoyances include no landscape view, and a slider you have to toggle every time you want to copy text from a message. I didn’t mind this at first, but it’s a real drag when you realize you want to copy something halfway down a message and have to go all the way back up to the top to turn that mode on.

For $4.99, this is a very, very solid way to search through e-mail. Though like many other innovative applications that have come along to try to improve on what Apple’s done, it runs the risk of being made obsolete by the very product it’s trying to fix. I wouldn’t put it past Apple to have full-text e-mail search as part of its next major OS update–if not sooner, considering it’s already such a big part of its desktop application counterpart. Though if you’re willing to invest in this app in the meantime, you’ll never have to trudge through e-mails again.

The good:
• Fast, highly-customizable search
• Autocompletion of search terms
• Saved search terms
• Built-in e-mail functions that let you create news messages right inside the app
• Local cache of data for offline reading

The bad:
• Limited support for e-mail services
• Possible obsolescence by an Apple software update
• No landscape view
• Copy and paste toggle is clunky
• Can take a very long time to do the first in-box download, and you have to leave the app running while it’s happening
• App can crash when doing long downloads or when opening up attachments

Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have scuttled an attempt to grant a temporary extension to a controversial wiretap law–that did not include retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.

By a 191-229 vote on Wednesday afternoon, the House failed to approve a bill to extend the Protect America Act for 21 days in its current form. The law–which Republicans say is necessary to allow interception of communications that transit the United States–is scheduled to expire on Saturday.

The vote, in which 34 Democrats joined the Republicans, comes hours after President Bush called for including retroactive immunity for any companies that may have violated federal privacy laws by opening their networks to the National Security Agency. Lawsuits against companies including AT&T are currently pending in federal court.

If the companies violated no laws, of course, they have nothing to worry about (even without retroactive immunity).

This leads to an unusual situation in which the House Democratic leadership, which has objected to retroactive immunity without learning more about what kinds of activities it would shield, has a few options:

1. Give Bush what he wants. This would mean admitting defeat and approving the immunity shield that the Senate already did on Tuesday.

2. Wait and try again. If the Republicans insist that this bill is necessary (which is hardly clear–we’ve survived for decades without it), the Democrats could hold another temporary renewal vote on Friday at 11 p.m. and dare the GOP to block this supposedly vital legislation a second time.

3. Let the Protect America Act expire. This is politically risky in an election year, of course, but the Bush administration’s arguments for passing the law in the first place were based on partial, calculated leaks of secret court rulings. If the Republicans want the Protect America Act so badly, force them to negotiate on that separately from retroactive immunity–the issues really aren’t linked.

And there are probably others that I haven’t thought of.

It’s a little unclear what’s going to happen next; as I write this, the House has moved on to a not-exactly-controversial measure congratulating the New York Giants for winning the Super Bowl. We have a call into the House Majority Leader’s office and will update you when we hear back.

Duck and cover. Wall Street ended in negative territory Friday, with the markets falling across the board for the fourth consecutive day. Although by the close, the drops were modest.

Investors held out hope at the beginning of the day, as stocks climbed higher in early morning trading. By mid-morning, the Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P 500 were all headed south. By the close however, the major indexes had fallen less than 1 percent. The Dow ended the day at 12,099.30, a drop of 59.91 points, while the Nasdaq closed at 2,340.02, down 6.88 points, and the S&P 500 receded to 1,325.19, or a loss of 8.06 points.

Wall Street apparently did not find comfort in an address by President Bush on his new stimulus package, according to a report on MarketWatch.

Some financial reports note that despite the roughly $145 billion in tax cuts, some investors had expected more, the Associated Press reported,

Chip giant Intel, which earlier in the week reported earnings that squeaked by its previous guidance to Wall Street, fell to $19.00 a share, down 33 cents, or nearly 2 percent, on Friday.

But one tech titan, IBM, managed to end the day up, as it got a boost from its bullish 2008 forecast. IBM closed at $103.40 a share, up $2.30, or about 2 percent, on Friday.

commentary

Hyperic has announced a series of customer wins and community traction in Europe. It’s good news for Hyperic, an open source systems management company, but not at all surprising for those of us whose companies started on that side of the Pond. Europe has long been an open-source proponent.

It’s perhaps a sign of things to come. In most software companies Europe takes a minority share of a vendor’s sales. But open source is shaking this up. I keep getting calls from friends at other open-source companies who are just starting to dip their toes into Europe, only to find out that the water is worth diving into right from the start.

Hyperic has “deployments in more than 80 countries, and 37% of community activity coming directly from Europe.” Watch it grow, Hyperic team. Why? Because European governments are driving IT spending toward open source (much more so than here in the US). Open source is Europe’s opportunity to exert significant influence over IT again.

Joongel (rate it!) is a new plug-in for
Firefox and IE7 that lets you search through various social media and news sites using the same query. Unlike a search aggregator that mixes up all the results, you have to view them on each service’s results page. It’s simply emulating the same effect of having each site’s custom search installed in your browser’s built-in search bar.

If you’re a search junkie, this is a whole lot faster than having to navigate to each site and then use the search tool. Essentially it’s saving you one click each time you want to look for something. At the same time it’s taking away some of the business your browser’s creators are getting by replacing the stock search engine modules with this one.

The Joongel plug-in comes in two flavors: one for social media sites like Digg, Reddit, and Delicious, and a “standard” one that includes reference tools like Wikipedia, Technorati, and Yahoo Answers. Those who don’t want to install the plug-in can give it a spin (in any browser) by clicking on the screenshot below.

Joongel's social media search toolbar gives you quick access to several social news and media sites and the search engines that go with them. To give it a spin, click on the graphic above.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Meet the MULE, short for Multifunctional Utility/Logistics and Equipment, a 2.5-ton unmanned ground vehicle that's just one component of the U.S. Army's Future Combat Systems. It's built to carry up to 2,400 pounds of gear.

(Credit:
U.S. Army)

The Pentagon is no stranger to overpriced equipment and cost overruns, but it may never have seen a program quite like the U.S. Army’s long-running and hugely ambitious Future Combat Systems initiative.

For this fiscal year alone, Congress has allocated some $3.5 billion in funding for FCS, en route to what is expected to be a total tab of $160 billion or so by the middle of the next decade. But $160 billion doesn’t buy what it used to: the Government Accountability Office has been lamenting recently that the overall estimated FCS tab remains at that level even as pieces have been lopped out of the program.

On top of that, the Army is apparently looking for an additional $251.8 million in funds for the current fiscal year to help speed delivery of some components. That money, according to a story this week in the Army Times, would allow the Army to “introduce some of the manned vehicles a year or two earlier, speed up delivery of networked sensors and UAVs, and field the first FCS brigade combat team in 2013, two years early.”

That new money, which would come out of some other research programs, is somewhat more than the $230 million that Congress cut out of the budget for fiscal 2008. Lest the congressional budget minders take issue with that, the Pentagon last week sent FCS representatives to Capitol Hill for another in a continuing series of dog-and-pony shows on the benefits of high-tech battlefield gear, including the FCS cousin known as Land Warrior. (The gear is on display there through this week.)

This is a tactical unmanned ground sensor (UGS) gateway node, on display in February at a symposium and exposition in Florida put on by the Association of the United States Army.

(Credit:
C. Todd Lopez/Army News Service)

FCS is the Army’s grand plan for becoming a 21st century fighting force in which superior information trumps mass of forces, and it comprises a wide array of systems, all of them still early in the R&D or prototyping stages. Key elements include artillery pieces, unmanned aerial vehicles, robots, software-based radios, battlefield sensors, and a high-speed wireless network to tie them–along with individual soldiers–all together.

The real challenge for FCS isn’t just in developing those individual pieces. Eventually, it will be getting them all to work in unison–no small feat for a system that will encompass voice, data, and video communications among ground, aerial, and satellite assets.

“This new way of fighting can be achieved only if the data can be made available in near real-time at sensor processors, at the battlefield command nodes, and at the lethal systems,” the GAO wrote in a March report (PDF).

But that real-world test remains quite a ways in the future. In the shorter term, the concern is much more about taming the R&D sprawl. “Today, the FCS program is about halfway through its development phase, yet it is, in many respects, a program closer to the beginning of development,” the GAO wrote in a report (PDF) issued last week. “This portends additional cost increases and delays as FCS begins what is traditionally the most expensive and problematic phase of development.”

Perhaps most significant is this statement from the April report: “It is not yet clear if or when the information network that is at the heart of the FCS concept can be developed, built, and demonstrated.”

How complex an undertaking is this? Consider the network configuration: “Current plans call for the network supporting a BCT (brigade combat team) to include more than 5,000 nodes on over 1,500 radio sets running at least four different advanced networking waveforms, supporting networks and sub-networks interconnected by gateways, and carrying 3 million identified, point-to-point information exchange requirements,” according to the March report. And all that would have to work over a wireless network in constantly shifting, unpredictable battlefield conditions.

A whole host of critical FCS technologies are also still “immature,” the GAO said, “(and) software development is in its early stages.” The estimate for the software code expected for full-fledged FCS now stands at 95.1 million lines, three times the estimate from five years ago and, the GAO wrote, “the largest software effort by far for any weapon system.” (By comparison, Windows XP is estimated to have roughly 40 million lines of code, and Vista, more than 50 million.)

The FCS program faces a congressionally mandated “go/no-go” milestone review in 2009 in order to justify continuation; critera for that decision are to be set by the end of July this year. If it clears that hurdle, a planned production decision is scheduled for 2013.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has been working on “low-rate spin-outs” of some FCS components, such as unattended ground sensors, to get that gear into the hands of soldiers today. It’s just an educated guess, but we’re likely to see a lot more of that in the next few years.

Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division, told the San Francisco Chronicle in an interview published Sunday that the company has no plans to put up a
Zune phone to compete with
iPhone.

Robbie Bach, president of Entertainment & Devices Division.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

On the eve of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, where a new iPhone is rumored to be unveiled, the man who is charge of developing
Xbox, Zune, and Windows Mobile began his question-and-answer session with the paper by touting the success of Windows Mobile.

“We will outsell the iPhone,” he told the newspaper.”We will outsell the BlackBerry.”

“We don’t make phones ourselves. We don’t have any plans to make phones ourselves,” the told the paper. “Our focus is on the belief that a phone is a very personal thing. Different people want different types of phones. We think that is going to continue, and we think Windows Mobile is in a great position to service all those different opportunities.”

He went on to say that the phone itself is just one component of smartphones’ success.

“It’s about browsing. It’s about music. It’s about video. It’s about e-mails, text messaging, and photos.”

On the topic of mobile browsing, Bach also addressed the issue of the lack of advertising success in mobile Web browsing, saying that it’s still a work in progress.

“The business model for browsing on a phone has not gotten itself completely clear yet,” he said. “In the PC space, the way people monetize the Internet is through advertising. Now in the phone space, we believe that advertising will be a part of that experience, but it’s a different form factor.”

Bach also touched on entertainment issues, including Microsoft’s backing of the now-largely extinct HD DVD format, pointing out that many consumers say they can’t see a substantial picture quality improvement with next-generation discs.

“You have to look at how fundamentally compelling the difference is between a progressive scan DVD player and the picture that it can produce and what you get on a high-definition player. The reality is there is some difference, but most people look at it and say, ‘I am not going to pay extra for that.’”

And can we expect to see the company embrace Blu-ray in the next version of its Xbox game console?

“There is nothing to even talk about right now with regard to the next generation. That is so far out that there isn’t anything to talk about.”

However, CrunchGear is reporting that a tipster with “close friend who works at Microsoft” said they were told that Microsoft will try to upstage Apple on Monday with the announcement that an Blu-ray Xbox 360 will be available by the Christmas holiday shopping season.