Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Time to Cut AT&T Some Slack, iPhone Users?
Since 2008, AT&T’s network in and around San Francisco has experienced an increase in 3G data traffic of 2,000 percent. If you find this metric as astonishing as I do, consider this: The increase in Bay Area data traffic is actually below the national average–significantly below. According to AT&T CTO John Donovan, 3G data traffic on the company’s wireless network has risen nearly 5,000 percent nationally in the past 12 quarters.
Bay Area iPhone users, relief is on the way. AT&T has almost completed a $65 million upgrade to its network in the region. The carrier has upgraded close to 850 cell sites in an effort to better handle the massive surge in data traffic it has seen in and around San Francisco since the debut of iPhone. And make no mistake: The surge has been massive. 
Development for Palm’s new webOS platform will begin in earnest come winter with the official opening of the company’s developer program. At a small gathering in San Francisco Monday night, Palm said its developer program will open in December and when it does, it will be a different beast entirely from rival programs by Apple, Google et al.
“It’s clear that the quality of iPhone games is eclipsing its console counterparts, and that’s even more acute when you compare it against the prior generation.” That’s what ngmoco co-founder and Electronic Arts alum Neil Young said of Apple’s iconic handset at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco earlier this year, and it’s worth reflecting on a bit in light of a new report from Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi that claims the iPhone OS will soon create pricing and customer migration pressure for traditional gaming platforms.
Hoping to further differentiate its new Bing search engine from market leader Google, Microsoft is moving away from the proverbial “10 blue links” we so often associate with the search experience. During a presentation at the TechCrunch 50 event in San Francisco, the company announced Bing Visual Search, a Silverlight-based feature that replaces those links with images.
Motorola has finally announced its bet-the-company Android handset. At GigaOM’s Mobilize 09 event in San Francisco this morning, Sanjay Jha, Motorola’s co-CEO and CEO of the company’s handset division, uncrated the CLIQ, a device it describes unremarkably as the “first phone with social skills.”
At 10 am PDT, Apple’s music-centric September event kicks off in San Francisco. All bets are off as to what the focus will be, but the faces and personalities–as well as the show from the stage–will be chronicled LIVE, right here. Stay tuned!
Apple is indeed hosting a music-related event next Wednesday, Sept. 9, as first reported by Digital Daily. This morning, the company broadcast invitations to a product launch gathering to be held on that day at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.
When Motorola announces its new Android handsets at a scheduled Sept. 10 event in San Francisco, AT&T isn’t likely to be among their carriers. Sources close to the company tell MKM Partners analyst Tero Kuittinen that AT&T balked at Motorola’s Sawgrass and Heron handsets, allegedly because of their dated display technology.
Looks like Motorola is poised to make good on co-CEO Sanjay Jha’s promise to bring some Android devices to market by the holidays. The company just distributed invitations to an Android-related event in San Francisco.
