Carterfone | Rob Pegoraro

This was an unusual week: For a change, it was my wife out of town on business and me doing the solo-parent thing at home. If you were wondering why I seemed absent from Twitter in the evenings, there’s your answer.

11/18/2013: Tech Exceptionalism with a Dose of Reality, Disruptive Competition Project

This was the essay about the Techonomy conference that I mentioned in last week’s recap. I hope the repeated rewrites paid off, but you can be the judge of that. Also unclear: Whether my skeptical take will get me uninvited from the conference next year.

11/19/2013: How to Ensure Top-Notch Mobile User Experiences, Enterprise Mobile Hub

After a few weeks off, I rejoined IDG’s Twitter chat series. In this week’s installment, we talked about ways organizations can make their mobile apps less awful, which at one point led to me using the phrase “reeducation camp.”

11/22/2013: Promising Signs For Smarter Wireless: Better Cheap Phones, Smoother WiFi Substitution, Disruptive Competition Project

This post came to mind after noting the arrival of a couple of cheap-but-good unlocked phones, then spending a couple of weeks trying out Republic Wireless’s new version of the Moto X… and then failing to sell a review of the latter item to an outlet that I was sure would be interested in it. Sigh.

11/24/2013: How to bring your own phone to another carrier, USA Today

A reader query about bringing a paid-up, out-of-contract Sprint iPhone to a prepaid carrier gave me an excuse to talk about phone-unlocking policy issues–and possibly get one Sprint reseller in trouble.

On Sulia, I called out a phone-unfriendly invitation from Amazon, said that mobile-malware metrics mean little without breaking out how many bad programs make it into default app stores, questioned the value of smaller, discount-priced 4K TVs, scoffed at the idea of Comcast buying Time Warner Cable, and shared some disturbingly inconsistent results from a Verizon Wireless mobile-broadband hot spot.

Work finds me in Austin this weekend for the SXSW Interactive festival. I’ll have more about that over the next few days; for now, here’s what I have to show for myself, professionally speaking.

3/5/2013: Unlock And Load: White House Picks Phone Policy Fight, Disruptive Competition Project

The White House surprised many people with its favorable response to a petition seeking the legalization of unlocking cell phones without carrier permission–it said “yes” and then endorsed the idea that carriers shouldn’t be denying service to unlocked phones from other operators. The latter is a somewhat novel idea in wireless but has been been the law in wired since the FCC’s underappreciated “Carterfone” ruling of 1968. But there are important caveats to the White House’s statement, and noting them helped push this post past 1,000 words.

3/9/2013: Work around video playback issues on your mobile device, USA Today

Like many of my USAT columns, this one started with a question from one of my relatives–my mother-in-law couldn’t watch a video of her grandson in her Yahoo Mail account on our iPad’s copy of Safari. The piece also has a tip updating advice I gave in November about sychronizing Google Calendar with an iOS device.

3/9/2013: Tim Berners-Lee: The Web needs to stay open, and Gopher’s still not cool., Boing Boing

The inventor of the Web had some interesting things to say in his talk at SXSW; after tweeting out highlights of the keynote, I pitched my editor at Boing Boing via Twitter direct message (making this my fastest salesmanship ever) and wrote up this recap later that afternoon.

On Sulia, you could have read me noting the White House’s phone-unlocking petition response (and, in retrospect, reading a little too much out of it) drawing a lesson for tech journalists from the outrage over EA’s botched SimCity launch, called out two still-absent features in Google’s updated Maps apps for iOS, and applaud the seemingly-impossible success of the free WiFi at SXSW.