Tag Archives: unlocked phones

Weekly output: headphone jack, 5G wireless, unlocked smartphones, broadband maps, wireless plans, MWC’s weirdest gadgets, Twitter spam

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I had a terrific but exhausting week in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress and looked forward to a relaxing weekend at home–until Friday’s windstorm toppled the tree in our front yard and deprived our home of power until Sunday afternoon. As a result, most of the pictures in my Flickr MWC album haven’t seen any editing yet. And they may not until next week, since I have another short week: Friday, I head out of town again as SXSW brings me to Austin.

2/26/2018: The headphone jack isn’t dead yet, Yahoo Finance

I revisited a theme of last year’s MWC coverage to note that most phone vendors are not following Apple and Google’s foolish removal of the headphone jack. But with Sony, Huawei and Nokia introducing at least some models without that old but perfectly functional audio output, I’m not feeling too confident about the industry’s direction.

2/28/2018: How 5G wireless will soon supercharge the internet, Yahoo Finance

After years of hype about 5G, the next wireless standard is starting to look less vaporous–and some key industry figures are dialing back that hype.

2/28/2018: Don’t buy these smartphones through your carrier, Yahoo Finance

I’ve been arguing for years that you shouldn’t buy your phone from your wireless carrier, but at MWC three of the big four made that point for me by pricing the Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus at least $70 over what you’d pay–with interest-free installment payments available–at Samsung’s own site.

CityLab broadband-map post2/28/2018: The Problem With America’s New National Broadband Map, CityLab

The Federal Communications Commission relaunched its broadband map, but the much better-looking version suffers from the same information gaps as ever. So does a privately-run site that draws on the same FCC filings as the map.

2/28/2018: The best cell phone plans, Wirecutter

I updated this guide to reflect more generous plans at many prepaid and resold services. But within a day of the revised guide’s publication, AT&T reworked its pricing for unlimited data, so we’ll have to update the guide yet again to account for that.

3/2/2018: The 6 strangest gadgets from Mobile World Congress 2018, Yahoo Finance

I had fun writing this look at the weirder hardware I saw at MWC–the last piece I filed from the show, shortly before they shut down the press room Wednesday night.

3/3/2018: Twitter spam, Al Jazeera

The news network’s Arabic-language channel had me on (overdubbed live into Arabic) to talk about an outbreak of Twitter spam in Saudi Arabia. The point I made: Going back to Usenet, every popular social platform has inevitably been abused by spammers and con artists.

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Weekly output: unlocked phones, headphone jack, foreign phones, Android security, smartphone trends (x2)

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I had a busy week in Barcelona at my fifth Mobile World Congress smartphone show, and in just a few days I head to Austin for SXSW. So I may need a little more time to flesh out my Flickr album from MWC.

2/27/2017: 3 ‘unlocked’ phones that might make your carrier unhappy, Yahoo Finance

My first file from MWC focused on a few phones that manufacturers will sell direct to consumers, not locked to any one carrier–a trend I applaud.

yahoo-mwc-2017-posts 2/28/2017: Sorry, Apple, the headphone jack isn’t going anywhere, Yahoo Finance

This post must have fetched the biggest audience of anything I did from MWC. The Verge’s Vlad Savov gave me a shout-out, and a Reddit thread on my story racked up more than 2,000 comments–about 70 times as many as people left after the piece itself.

2/28/2017: 4 new smartphones you can’t get in the US, Yahoo Finance

You’d think “is this phone coming to the U.S.?” would be a question any MWC show-floor rep could answer. You would be wrong.

3/1/2017: What you should and shouldn’t worry about in Android security, Yahoo Finance

Some enlightening conversations with security professionals led to this report. Key lesson: While you’re far safer sticking with Google’s Play Store, malware can sneak into it. And as a visit to the MWC exhibit of an Iranian app store reminded me, some parts of the world don’t get the Play Store at all.

cr-mwc-2017-recap3/2/2017: Best Smartphone Tech of 2017, Consumer Reports

I fired off an e-mail to my editor at CR in the middle of packing two Fridays ago, asking if he needed any sort of a wrap-up post from MWC. This wound up being the last thing I filed from the show floor, then the next morning I sent in a revision from my Airbnb addressing my editor’s comments before I headed to the airport.

3/4/2017: 4 changes coming to Android phones, USA Today

This shorter look at Android-phone trends went through two changes after posting: We corrected the headline so it no longer referred to five changes, then we fixed an errant reference to a Galaxy S3 on the show floor (it was a Galaxy S7 Edge). As is my practice, I called out those alterations in a comment.

Weekly output: buffer rage, Trump and tech titans, Glass Room, Facebook vs. fake news, unlocked phones

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With no swank holiday parties hosted by trade groups or PR shops to clog my schedule  (I’m sure my invitations only got lost in the mail…), my one big work night out this week was a screening of the movie Hidden Figures at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. As a card-carrying space geek, I enjoyed the flick immensely but also had to wonder why the thousands of pages I’ve read about NASA had not enlightened me about this chapter of the space agency’s history. It wasn’t just me: In remarks before the screening, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said he had no idea as he watched Apollo 11’s landing that an African-American mathematician, Katherine Johnson, had calculated the mission’s trajectory.

fierce-buffer-rage-post12/13/2016: There’s No One Fix For Buffer Rage, FierceBroadcasting

I finished this post about how video services try to ensure reliable, buffering-free playback on Election Day, which now feels like a horrendously long time ago. You have to provide an e-mail address and some basic job info to download the PDF of this e-book from the address above; my contribution starts on page 9.

12/14/2016: What tech titans should say to Trump — and vice versa, Yahoo Finance

I could tell this got a lot of attention because about a thousand people clicked the link to this blog at the very end of the post–and click-through ratios are generally terrible even for links at the top of a story, much less the very last line of the piece. Two subjects I should have included in this post: the tech industry’s reliance on skilled immigrants and the possible inclusion of broadband in Trump’s infrastructure ambitions.

12/16/2016: The Glass Room shows how little privacy we really have, Yahoo Finance

I held off on writing up last week’s visit to this temporary gallery in Lower Manhattan  because I’d thought a colleague was going to cover the place first. Fortunately, I got a go-ahead before I had the chance to sell a report to another site at a lower rate.

12/17/2016: Facebook’s plan to fight fake news, Al Jazeera

The Arabic-language news channel had me on the air Saturday afternoon to talk about Facebook’s new initiative to undercut fake news. They asked me if this would amount to censorship; I said my worry was that too many people would dismiss the verdicts of third-party fact checkers as the product of bias.

12/18/2016: Is it worth it? Buying an unlocked phone, USA Today

I departed from my usual Q&A format to write this story, pegged to an NPD Group report that unlocked phones now make up 12 percent of the U.S. market. It looks like the forecast I wrote four years ago on the eve of T-Mobile’s move to dump handset subsidies wasn’t that crazy.

Weekly output: Internet governance, Kojo Nnamdi Show, old camcorders

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For once, the combined universe of smartphones and tablets did not constitute the majority of my coverage over a week.

3/18/2014: No, the U.S. Isn’t Really Giving Up the Internet—It Doesn’t Own It Anyway, Yahoo Tech

This story was not the easiest one to write, courtesy of Monday being a snow day in which most of my queries went unanswered while my wife and I had to keep our daughter entertained. DNS root-zone supervision is an exceedingly wonky topic; did I keep my explanation of it out of the weeds, or is mine too far above the ground to provide enough understanding of the topic?

Kojo Nnamdi Show on wireless service

3/18/2014: Choosing A Cell Phone And Mobile Data Plan, The Kojo Nnamdi Show

WAMU host Kojo Nnamdi, CNET columnist Maggie Reardon and I discussed the changing shape of the wireless market–in particular, T-Mobile’s hanging up on subsidized handset pricing. T-Mo marketing v.p. Andrew Sherrard joined us via phone for part of the show and provided a number I hadn’t seen before: From 10 to 20 percent of its customers now bring their own devices to the carrier.

3/23/2014: How to rescue vintage camcorder footage, USA Today

As it has before, my neighborhood’s mailing list proved to be a fruitful source of Q&A column material–and this time around, my research into a neighbor’s problems getting video off an old MiniDV camcorder involved a house call.