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FCC restarts review clock for AT&T’s spectrum purchase, gives itself 180 days

December 12th, 2011 No comments
Back in August, the FCC decided to freeze the 180-day review clock on AT&T's proposed acquisition of Qualcomm's 700 MHz spectrum, citing lingering concerns over the carrier's ongoing T-Mobile saga. Now that AT&T and Deutsche Telekom have withdrawn their merger application, however, the Commission has decided to re-open the review period for the Qualcomm acquisition, giving itself a fresh 180 days to make a decision. In a letter published Friday, Wireless Bureau chief Rick Kaplan announced that the timetable would be reset, with a retroactive start date of November 29th -- the very day that the FCC granted AT&T's pullout from the T-Mobile deal. No word yet on when we can expect a decision, but we'll be keeping an eye out for the latest developments. Read the letter in full at the source link below.

FCC restarts review clock for AT&T's spectrum purchase, gives itself 180 days originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Dec 2011 12:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Games galore on Day # 7 of the 10-cent Android app sale

December 12th, 2011 No comments
Android apps

It’s Day number seven and the Android 10-cent app sale is going strong. Today we have a list that is heavily dominated by games including the very popular Doodle Jump and Flight Control. Check out the list below:

The sale last today, December 12th, only so grab them while you can. Be sure to check tomorrow for another ten.

Games galore on Day # 7 of the 10-cent Android app sale originally appeared on IntoMobile.com on 2011-12-12T16:31:30Z. FV1gMYsz9b5j


Amazon’s Trojan Horse: Don’t Underestimate The Kindle Fire

December 12th, 2011 No comments
HolyGrail066

A number of prominent folks have been ripping into the Kindle Fire lately, claiming that it is slow, exhibits poor UX choices, and that consumers are returning them en masse. Heck, even the affable Marco Arment writes “If I didn’t need the Fire for Instapaper testing, I’d return it.”

Tough crowd.

But there’s another narrative that says this is a secret success. Analysts estimate that Amazon will sell 5 million of the devices this quarter, a little under half the iPads sold in Q4 2011 (although the Fire has been on sale for a shorter period). I have a feeling that Amazon will hit or just graze this mark once it tallies holiday sales but, Amazon being Amazon, they’ll never announce total sales. Marco Arment or no Marco Arment, the Fire will do just fine.

The Kindle Fire is Amazon’s Trojan Horse. It’s made for the mass of men and women who have been looking into this whole tablet business and like what they see. But it is, first and foremost, a reading device and to fault it for not playing Angry Birds well or offering a sub-par Netflix experience is to ignore its primary goal: to inject the concept of Amazon content downloads into a consumer base that is increasingly inundated with video, audio, and ebook sources.

The Kindle Fire isn’t for the Marco Arment’s of the world. It’s for the folks who have priced the competition – the $529 Xyboard, the $499 iPad – and refused to take the plunge. Aside from a few mid-range sources (Vizio comes to mind, as does Viewsonic) there has been little support for the lower end by major manufacturers. When Amazon put their might behind something that may, at best, be frustrating to power users, the general consumer will scoop it up. In short, Kindle Fire, like the Nook Color before it, was the tablet I was waiting to buy for my mom.

The Kindle Fire clearly has some issues. The power button is horrible, for example. However, if you stay in Amazon’s walled garden of books and content, straying only occasionally to download a game or app, your experience is going to be more than acceptable. What frustrates the Android and iPad power user is the sense that the Fire should be so much better. It can’t and won’t be. Amazon isn’t selling to the power user. In a tech market obsessed with Tegra chips and Ice Cream Sandwich, the Fire is a device alone, designed from the ground up to be Amazon incarnate, from now unto eternity. Honeycomb? They don’t need no stinking Honeycomb.

In the end Amazon will cry all way to the bank as the Fire sells out over the holiday and is updated next year to faster and potentially slimmer hardware. It’s hard to accept, but Amazon doesn’t need the hardware geeks salivating over its specs. All it needs to do is serve up copies of The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest.



Fileboard Manages All Of Your Attachments And Files On The iPad

December 12th, 2011 No comments
Fileboard_c2

Fileboard is launching today as a service which allows people to manage their attachments and files on the iPad. The startup says that today’s professionals have hundreds of files scattered over dozens of local and cloud-based platforms including Dropbox, gMail and others.

Fileboard allows iPad users to manage email attachments and files in a single, unified view. Via a free iPad app, users can add and manage multiple file streams and accounts such as email for attachments, Office 365, Dropbox and Box.net. The app will then show you all of your recently updated files and share files.

The virtue of using the service, says co-founder Khuram Hussein, is that you are able to see all of your attachments. Hussein previously co-founded message management startup Inbox2.

Fileboard plans to continue to add additional security, data loss protection, and role-based control features. The company has raised funding from 500 Startups, Christopher Grey and Klaus Fürst von Sayn Wittgenstein.



Lightbox App Debuts New Photo Journal: It’s A Lazy Man’s Tumblr

December 12th, 2011 No comments
Lightbox Photo Journal Screenshot

Lightbox, the beautifully designed social photo app for Android backed by $1.2 million in seed funding from Index, Accel, SV Angel, 500 Startups, and others, is today launching a revamped web interface that’s like a lazy man’s Tumblr. As with the hot blogging startup Tumblr, the idea with Lightbox’s new photo journal feature is to provide a stream of updates others can follow, share, like and comment on.

For all its simplicity, Tumblr still involves the set up of a blog and mostly manual updates. Automatic posting of content requires additional configuration or the use of third-party tools. But with today’s Lightbox update, all users get their own Tumblr-esque photo blog, no extra effort required.

Previously, Lightbox users were given a page for their public photos at a custom URL (format: your-username.lightbox.com), but the layout involved pages of thumbnails to click through. Today, that URL will now become a photo blog, where photos are automatically organized into albums for you. To accomplish this, Lightbox looks at the timestamp associated with the photos taken, enabling the service to group photos together appropriately. The end result is an automatically created photo blog with an attractive layout which ends up feeling very much like Tumblr. Here’s an example. And here’s another.

Users are given a “follow” button next to which their social stats display, including the number of photos posted, number of followers and the number of people they’re following in return. When you hover over one of the photos, you can quickly click a heart button to “like” it. You can view these favorites later on from your profile section. On an individual photo’s page, you can comment, tweet, share to Facebook or Google+. The entire post itself can be socially shared as well.

Lightbox has been an interesting company to watch, given its focus on building for Android first. Despite the mobile platform’s large market share, it’s still rare to see companies choosing Android over iOS for their debut. But that’s where Lightbox’s creators, Thai Tran and Nilesh Patel, see a market opportunity.

So far, the company seems to be proving there is a case for well-designed apps on Android (And it’s not the only one). Lightbox has now reached nearly 1 million downloads in less than six months. Going forward, the focus will be on both Android and HTML5. For example, the new Lightbox website and photo blogs are optimized for HTML5 web browsers, including Safari on the iPhone and iPad.

Lightbox’s update was submitted to the Android Market this morning, and the rollout to all of Google’s servers should complete by 9 AM PST today. You can download the Android app here.