So AT&T announced their plan purchase of T-Mobile. In the words of the great Ron Simmons… Damn. I am currently a T-Mobile customer, and I personally don’t want to be an AT&T customer.
Phone Spotlight: T-Mobile Shadow 2009
The HTC-made T-Mobile Shadow 2009 (branded as the T-Mobile Shadow) is a great smartphone for beginning smartphone users. It has a phone case design similar to many featurephones, lacking a touchscreen or trackball, and has a Microsoft built custom interface that makes Windows Mobile 6.1 much simpler to use. It features UMA, allowing you to use wifi to extend T-Mobile’s range (much simpler than the Femtocell products that other carriers provide), a 2.0MP camera (like most HTC products, there’s no flash), and all the standard Windows Mobile 6.1 standard features
Phone: T-Mobile Shadow 2009
Manufacturer: HTC (design by T-Mobile)
Operating System: Windows Mobile 6.1
UI: Shadow UI (custom built by Microsoft, HTC, and T-Mobile for the Shadow)
Carrier: T-Mobile (exclusive)
Processor: 260 MHz (trust me, this is enough for this phone)
Voice Network: GSM, UMA
Data Networks: GPRS, EDGE, WiFi
T-Mobile is Kicking Ass and Taking Names
T-Mobile USA, the 4th largest cellphone carrier in the United States, isn’t content with being number 4. They plan to become number 3 (overtaking Sprint PCS) with several initiatives, some of which have already started:
- Rapid Expansion of T-Mobile 3G (and since its using AWS instead of PCS, they don’t sacrifice 2G quality to go to 3G.. unlike certain other carriers)
- Upgrade to 21 Mbps HSPA+ with existing 3G rollouts
- Potential new $50 unlimited everything plan (similar in price to MetroPCS, etc.. and dramatically lower than their national competition)
- Significant phone upgrades (which they’ve already started to do — even TMO’s feature phones are pretty “advanced”)
I no longer trust Microsoft with my data
So Microsoft totally fucked over T-Mobile USA.. they botched an upgrade without backups, and thus losing all Sidekick owner’s data… For some reason I don’t trust Microsoft with my data anymore…
Facebook for Android
So.. Facebook and Google have finally released a Facebook application for Android. For this review, I’m testing on the following:
T-Mobile G1 (on the T-Mobile USA network in Atlanta, so full 3G)
OS: Android 1.6
It’s a very basic application, much more so than the Facebook application for Blackberry (which I used through several iterations, owning a Blackberry Pearl 8100, Blackberry Curve 8320, Blackberry Pearl Flip 8220, and using a Blackberry 8800 from work). It doesn’t let you see your Facebook inbox for one, but let’s hope Facebook (well, the Google engineer that is working at Facebook for this application) gets around to adding that feature soon. However, it is very quick at posting messages and loading your news feed (the page you see), and it does let you upload photos and videos (very well integrated with Android) and comment/like on posts. It even has a home screen widget that has a textfield for updating your status and showing recent status updates.