Verizon bowed to the inevitable today and officially embraced Skype on its smartphones, starting with Blackberry and Android devices. Verizon customers will now be able to bypass the outlandish international calling rates on their mobile phones and make free Skype-to-Skype calls or use their much cheaper Skype Out minutes instead. Skype’s text IM will also work on the phones.
VoIP applications like Skype’s have gone from facing resistance from the carriers to a reluctant acceptance. Skype already offers one of the most popular apps on the iPhone, and at least it encourages more data usage, which subscribers do pay for. Skype accounted for 12 percent of all international calling minutes last year, and that number will just keep going up. 
This morning, twenty four of the world’s largest telecom companies announced their plans to create the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC), a unified open platform that lets developers build an application once, and deploy it to work on any carrier, device, and OS. The roster of supporters include many of the biggest names in the business: AT&T, China Mobile, Orange, Verizon, Sprint, and many other operators around the globe, as well as device manufacturers LG, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson, all of whom are teaming up to take on Apple’s App Store dominance. In short, it sounds like a miracle for mobile developers.
If it sounds too good to be true, that’s because it probably is. Andy Rubin, Google VP of Engineering (and the man in charge of Android) has already shared his skepticism, saying, “There is always a dream that you could write [a program] once and [have it] run anywhere and history has proven that that dream has not been fully realised and I am sceptical that it ever will be“. To put it another way, this is a pipe dream from carriers looking to loosen Apple’s stranglehold over mobile applications and there’s very little chance that it’s going to work.
Back in October, Google changed the mobile navigation space when it launched Google Maps Navigation for Android. While the product itself is solid it also has one killer feature: it’s free. This has forced the makers of other non-free navigation tools to scramble to convince users their products are still worth paying for. Verizon is the latest to do so with its VZ Navigator 5, launching tomorrow.
So what would make it worth paying for? Verizon has a few new features in this latest update, but one of the ones they are touting the most is social media integration. Specifically, you can now update your Facebook status by way of VZ Navigator. This in and of itself isn’t that interesting, but you can also send out your location to Facebook with this feature, apparently.
Yesterday, we noted that $5 million had be raised in donations for Haiti though text messaging in the U.S. alone. Today, that number surpassed $10 million, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has announced. Perhaps more importantly, some of the big players involved in the donations are making moves to make sure the money gets to Haiti faster.
As some people noted in the comments yesterday, there had been talk of 90 day delays for this money donated via text to be released to the various organizations helping out in Haiti. Since then, a number of the companies have committed to giving the money immediately. Verizon, for example, is giving its share (of the then $9 million), $2.98 million, immediately to the American Red Cross. Sprint, meanwhile, is giving 80% of the $1.2 million it has raised so far immediately. AT&T has apparently raised the most so far with $4.2 million (of the larger $10 million) and is also thinking about ways to get the money to Haiti faster.
As you may have heard, Verizon made some headlines today by unveiling new, cheaper plans to its customers. Specifically, they cut the price of their unlimited voice plans by $29 down to $69.99. As some noted, this looked to be a way to undercut its biggest rival, AT&T. Not surprisingly, AT&T is now matching that offer.
AT&T customers with “feature phones” will now have the option to get unlimited voice minutes for $69.99 a month. Text message plans will remain $20 a month for unlimited usage, so they’re matching Verizon’s $89.99 unlimited voice + text offering too. But wait, before you get all excited, you should note that “feature phones” do not include the iPhone. That is apparently a “smartphone” which is different in AT&T’s eyes (and Verizon’s for that matter). Smartphone owners will have the option to get unlimited voice plus data for $99.99, which is still a nice discount over previous unlimited iPhone plans which ran $129.99.
Bad news, Droid owners. Android OS version 2.0.1, which all up-to-date Droids are running, has a bug that makes it fairly easy to bypass the phone’s screen-lock security mechanism. The security feature, when working, requires users to input a pattern using onscreen dots before they can access most of the phone’s features (the iPhone offers a similar option).
Exploiting the bug is fairly simple: while receiving an incoming call on a Droid that has its Lock screen activated, you can simply hit the dedicated ‘Back’ button to bypass the lock and jump to the homescreen. This, of course, gives access to the owner’s Email account, cookied web pages, phone directory, and everything else stored on the phone. You can take a tiny bit of solace in the fact that the thief would have to know your phone number or wait for someone to call your phone to exploit the bug, but that’s not particularly reassuring. The issue was first reported earlier today by The Assurer, which says that it is apparently only affecting Android version 2.0.1 on the Droid (which already represents a large chunk of Android’s userbase).
Apple and Verizon. Two star-crossed lovers.
A few years ago, when Apple originally set out with the idea of giving the iPhone to one carrier exclusively in the U.S., they first went to Verizon. But the network balked at some of Apple’s demands, which at the time of complete and utter carrier dominance in this country, must have seemed like a joke. So instead, Apple went with AT&T, and the rest is history.
And while Apple is getting a very sweet deal from AT&T in the form of huge payments for each iPhone sold, which is pulling in billions of dollars in revenues each quarter for the company, the relationship is also the subject of much discontent. Obviously, plenty of users are fed up with AT&T complete and utter failure at times to provide a network that will support the iPhone. But word is that Apple has also not been a happy camper for some time now, as what many perceive to be greatest source of weakness for the iPhone, AT&T’s network, is something that is completely out of their control. The big question for 2010 is: Is Apple finally ready to do something about it?
January 5. That’s the day we’ll learn all we want to know about the Nexus One. Google didn’t explicitly say anything about the device in its invites today for an “Android press gathering,” but we all know what is coming. And T-Mobile, which will be the initial carrier option for the Nexus One, does too. And while other Android devices such as the G1, the myTouch 3G, and most recently, the Droid have garnered a lot of buzz, the Nexus One could be different. And its unveiling should mark an interesting moment in the brief history of the Android platform.
Google is unveiling the Nexus One just two months (nearly to the day) after the Verizon Droid was released. The Droid, of course, was seen as the Android platform’s Messiah by some, and the one phone that could maybe hold a candle to the iPhone. Sales have been good, and the general consensus is that the phone is a winner. But now, just two months later, we have a new Android phone that by just about every account is better than it. In fact, the only real upsides for the Droid over the Nexus One is that it runs on Verizon’s network, and that it has a physical keyboard. The Verizon point is certainly a fair one — there’s a reason why everyone is clamoring for a Verizon iPhone. But the physical keyboard argument seems moot, as the consensus is that the Droid keyboard is a pretty poor one.
There are few things more terrifying to me than the idea of going anywhere near a shopping establishment on Black Friday. But if I lived in New York City, I think I would this year because Google, Verizon, Reuters, and R/GA are teaming up to take over the largest displays on Times Square to allow for a giant Google Search by voice experiment/Droid advertisement.
What does this mean? On Black Friday, anyone who calls 888-376-4336 and does a Google Search by voice, will see their results displayed on either the Reuters sign or the NASDAQ sign in Times Square. So, if you say something like “new Jonas Brothers CD,” the display will come up with a giant Google Map complete with signs showing you where you can find that. Also included is the embarrassment that everyone in Times Square has just seen what ridiculous thing you are searching for.
The problem: users have complained about the autofocus feature on the Droid since day one. As in, it didn’t work (video). Last night I wrote that some users found a fix – clean the lens. It turns out that probably didn’t do a darn thing.
But there were even better conspiracy theories out there, such as Engadget’s idea of a secret software update, which quickly spread around the Internet.
It turns out that wasn’t true, either. And we’ve confirmed that there’s no such thing as a secret software update on Android phones anyway, at least according to people at Google. Updates, even security updates, must be approved for installation by the user.
So what was the real reason for the problem, and the fix? Well, it fixed itself. The problem, as MobileCrunch duly noted, was an issue with the phone’s timestamp: “According to Google Engineer Dan Morrill, there is an unfortunate bug in the Droid’s autofocus routine. It improperly rounds a timestamp used in the calculations, which somehow throws the entire focusing process off. Today it works, and tomorrow it will work…but 24.5 days from now, the bug will be back.”
But by the time the problem cycles back again, Verizon will have pushed out a fix for the problem.
As we say around the office, Android is freedom from the iPhone. But sometimes that freedom feels a little bit like this: