Weekly output: iPhone leases, smartphone-car connectivity, cable-box alternatives

Posted on January 31, 2016 by robpegoraro

I didn’t set out to vanish from Twitter this week, but I became all but invisible anyway. First I decided that free-but-slow T-Mobile roaming in Israel was good enough, then I had a round of meetings and visits in places with little to no cell signal and no free WiFi, then my phone spent a couple of days not getting a signal at all until I gave in and rebooted it. Meanwhile, the seven-hour time gap between Israel and the East Coast left a minimal audience for anything tweeted before mid afternoon, which further discouraged me from jumping into Twitter.

1/25/2016: Sprint and T-Mobile Backtrack on Crazy iPhone Lease Deals — and Why That’s Good for You, Yahoo Tech

This story came out of fact-checking for an imminent revision to my Wirecutter guide to the wireless carriers. My “huh” realization that Sprint and T-Mobile’s lease options no longer saved any significant money compared to buying a phone outright was followed by my surprise at seeing that nobody had covered this shift in the market.

1/28/2016: When It Comes to Car Tech, the Cars Are Having a Hard Time Keeping Up With the Tech, Yahoo Tech

This sequel to last year’s assessment of car-smartphone connectivity doesn’t find me much more optimistic about where the auto industry’s heading. If you’d like to cheer yourself up by looking at a picture of a crash-test dummy or a Toyota Mirai fuel-cell vehicle paying homage to Back to the Future, see my Flickr album from the Washington Auto Show.

1/31/2016: Ways to ditch some — but not all — of your cable boxes, USA Today

A reader’s question about whether she really had to rent a cable box for every TV in her home arrived only hours after Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler pledged action to open up the cable-box market. My answer to this reader: You do have fee-free options for your secondary TVs at home, but they depend on your cable or satellite provider and are often not that good.

Weekly output: Sling TV, car connectivity, 2014 in review, 2015 in preview, broken TV apps

Posted on February 1, 2015 by robpegoraro

Was there some sort of televised sports event tonight? I kind of lost track while I was tweeting about commercials.

1/26/2015: Review: Sling TV Delivers ESPN for $20 a Month, No Cable Required, Yahoo Tech

The odds of me paying for this $20/month online-only TV package once my review account runs out are high. To judge from reader feedback about Sling TV (yes, I need to answer your e-mails), I’m not alone in that interest. In the comments, you can see me executing a suggestion I heard at the Online News Association conference last September: Start the comments with one of your own that invites a reasoned discussion.

1/27/2015: Your Car and Your Smartphone’s Coming Communication Breakdown, Yahoo Tech

Walking the floor at the Washington Auto Show reminded me of how the state of automotive engineering–not just in the area of smartphone connectivity–has advanced since we bought our Prius in 2005.

1/27/2015: Panel: A Year in Review, Tech In Motion

I talked about last year’s tech trends at 1776 with Mike Chan, Patrick Merfert, Mike Leurdijk, David Young, and Lauren Maffeo.

1/29/2015: Outlook 2015: Interoperation, Mobility, Privacy and Security, The Hub

This panel with John Heitmann, Andres Jordan, Mark Walsh, and Don MacNeil was different from my prior appearances at the organization formerly known as the Telecom Hub: I took Metro to Tysons. For everyone’s future reference: 8000 Towers Crescent Drive may not look too close to the Tysons Corner stop, but it’s an easy, 10-to-15-minute walk through the mall and across the top of parking deck C.

2/1/2015: The messy deals behind unwatchable streaming apps, USA Today

Dumb luck had a friend complain to me about a broken ESPN app on his Roku TV only days before the biggest televised sports event of the year, and on a week when I was starting to get nervous about not having a column topic.

Weekly output: car connectivity, business models, virtual voting, LTE fragmentation, Google Keyboard

Posted on July 8, 2013 by robpegoraro

I hope you all enjoyed your more-or-less four-day weekend. I did–and managed to spend enough time away from my various keyboards that I’m now posting this after midnight Sunday. Oh well…

7/1/2013: Car Connectivity Nears A Fork In The Road, Discovery News

My last report from CE Week covered the philosophical split I saw between companies vying to make car dashboards smarter by essentially turning them into smartphones, and those looking to provide easier and more powerful phone-to-dashboard links. I’m hoping the second contingent wins out, but I see a lot of ways they might not.

7/3/2013: Transparency About Your Business Model Ought To Be A Competitive Advantage, Disruptive Competition Project

First I saw the popular Google Reader replacement Feedly get criticized for not having a business model (it does but has been weirdly quiet about it). Then I read blogger Andrew Sullivan’s impressive transparency about his venture into reader-supported publishing. Then I decided it was time to call out dot-commers who don’t think they need to tell their users how they plan to make money.

7/3/2013: Bill would allow virtual voting in Congress, Cox Media Group

A House resolution would let representatives attend committee hearings via videconferencing and even cast some non-controversial votes remotely, so it seemed appropriate to have Cox correspondent Jacqueline Fell interview me about the bill via Skype. And so viewers in such places as Atlanta, the Bay Area (linked above), Palm Beach, Pittsburgh and Reno could have seen me briefly identified as a “Technology Expert.”

7/7/2013: Carriers have different ways to spell ‘LTE’, USA Today

A reader asked Sprint customer support a simple question–can your LTE phones roam on Verizon–and got a wrong answer, and things got more complicated from there as I dove into the tangled universe of LTE bands here and overseas. The tip part of the column is a lot simpler: If you hate your (new-ish) Android phone’s keyboard, install Google Keyboard today.

On Sulia, I poured one out for the now-officially-defunct Nextel, noted a documentary profiling five D.C. tech startups I’ve covered, griped about TiVo’s dismissive, “sorry”-free response to a friend’s perfectly reasonable query, and called out glib, alarmist rewriting of a mobile-security company’s report of a partially-addressed Android vulnerability.