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Tech News & Commentary
Russ in North Carolina listens to the podcast and is calling via the App asked us: “T-Mobile – Deutsche Telekom seems real interested in selling and reducing their stake in it. Sprint seemed real interested in buying it. And Carlos Slim has expressed an interest. From a consumer standpoint, do you think it makes more sense for the entity to consolidate and combine with Sprint, or does it make more sense to shore up T-Mobile’s financials with money from Carlos Slim. Would like to get your input on how you see that impacting the consumer and the cellular industry as a whole.”
Russ, In any industry, it’s always good for someone to challenge the status quo, to shake up the complacency of the market leaders. In case you hadn’t noticed, Verizon Wireless and AT&T Wireless are like twins that have been separated at birth. One or the other will make a move that differentiates them, but eventually their policy and prices settle down to be mirror images of one another
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Sprint was in the role of upstart for a time. They spent a lot of money advertising their “true unlimited” data plans. But they were unable to steal enough market share from the top two companies to be as profitable as they wanted, so their focus changed. Now they heavily advertise this “Framily” system, where you recruit friends and family to get a volume discount on your bill, effectively turning you into a Sprint salesman. Because when members of your Framily walk away, you lose that discount, so you’ll work to replace them.
And so we have T-Mobile, whose role for the past while has been to be a thorn in the side of Verizon and AT&T. They dispensed with contracts, then offered to pay your early termination fees if you wanted to move, and now they have a program under which streaming music from approved services does not count against your data cap. If T-Mobile merges with another company, your guess is as good as ours whether they can retain this upstart mentality.
The issue is bandwidth. There’s a limited amount of this precious resource and wireless networks can’t keep adding customers and expanding if they don’t have the frequencies to add additional bandwidth. And that’s why these companies are always in the merger market, especially if their name isn’t Verizon or AT&T. They don’t care about the smaller companies customers nearly as much as they care about how much of the wireless spectrum they own.
All that being said, do we favor T-Mobile merging or taking money from an investor? Russ, we’re not financial experts. We just can’t tell you which would be better for T-Mobile stockholders. But we WILL say this much. In the consumer electronics sector, we have never seen anything bad come out of competition. Having plenty of choices in your products and services always gives the consumer the most leverage when trying to get the best deal, or just get support for the deal they already have.
For more information tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.
“This Week in Tech History” Weekly Feature with Chris Graveline
Roberta in San Jose, California listens on KLIV 1590 asked us: “I am a user, not a techie or gadget person. My current PC is a Gateway running Windows 7. I bought it from TigerDirect last year and they sold me Total Defense software with it. It is up for renewal for $80.00 and I would like to switch, as it constantly blocks things without telling me what or why or giving me the option to allow it. I want a simple program that will always give me the option of what to view (don’t particularly like Norton or McAfee, however-I used to run ZoneAlarm on my old PC). What would be the best cheap and easy anti-virus software for me to run? Using this computer mostly for email, web searching, games (on POGO), and some business applications using Open Office and music-notation software.”
Roberta, Microsoft’s own Security Essentials might be a good choice, it’s free so you can save those $80, rated highly on benchmarks and it doesn’t seem to have a bad effect on the computer’s overall performance.
Depending on your security settings, you can set it to pretty much block anything that it feels should be blocked, or to give you the power to decide what needs and does not need to run.
You mentioned ZoneAlarm, and that’s still an option. They provide free antivirus and firewalls software so, if you like them, by all means you can still go ahead and use them.
The same is true for others like AVG, which will also save you the $80 fee and should give you adequate protection.
Both AVG and ZoneAlarm do offer paid versions, so be ready to either be bugged to buy them at some point, or to be made to sift through their websites to try to find the hidden link to the free version.
For more information tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.
Gloria in Detroit listens on CKLW 800 asked us: “I had a disagreement with my son, he wants me to get this type of thing where you can lock your house, car remotely from anywhere, and it seems to to me that if I could do it, sooner or later someone will be able to do it, and I’ll get home sometime and there will be someone in my house and that wouldn’t be something that will make me happy. I like to know whether or not these things are safe to do, he always want to do the newest thing and I’m kind of like “wait a minute”. If you say it’s safe, I’ll go ahead and do it but I just want to hear what you have to say.”
Gloria, As long as everything has been properly encrypted from end to end, and as long as all the information is properly stored, you should be safe enough… but here’s the thing, what would be the benefit?
Do you need to let people into your house when you’re not home? And people you wouldn’t trust with a key, at that. Do you often forget to lock up before you leave and want to be able to do it remotely?
The truth is that over the last few thousand years keys haven’t changed all that much, have a look atRomanLocks.com if you don’t believe us, and that’s because, they’re not perfect, but they’re reasonably secure and reasonably convenient.
Now, if you want to be able to unlock your house or car remotely, these systems should be reasonably secure too, but if you’re going to be wondering if you’re house is safe every time you walk over to the grocery store to buy a potato, and if you won’t get any benefit from this then, what’s the point?
Ask your son how you would personally benefit from installing a system like this and why it would be worth your money, if he makes a good point and you think it’s worth it, go for it. If not, use that money as a cake fund for a few months.
And if we’ve learned anything at all from the recent furor over the “Heartbleed” bug in secure web connections, it’s that you can’t always trust what you think you can. We wouldn’t be surprised at all if, sometime down the road, we stumble across the news that some clever hacker has figured a way to unlock houses with his iPhone.
Years ago, it was garage door openers. They were adjusted to a code specific for your house, but it wasn’t random. So you would drive around and press the button on your opener, just for the laughs you’d get when some random garage door started going up. They now use random codes and they even change the codes, but you can’t anticipate everything you don’t know.
For more information tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.
Guest Segment:
Stephen Stokols, CEO – FreedomPop
Product Spotlight: Fitbit vs Fitbug
Samantha discusses the latest fitness trackers and dicusses their upsides and downsides.
Gary in Santamaria, California calling in via the App asked us: “I’d like to find more about the iPhone 6 that’s coming out. Could you guys research it for me?”
Gary,Everyone wants to know more about the mysterious iPhone 6, unfortunately Apple does a really good job in keeping things a secret. Anything you see online regarding the phone is rumors and shouldn’t be entirely trusted. Apple should be releasing the phone around Fall, so keep an eye out.
According to most rumors though, there should be a bigger screen, an A8 chip, from there on the rumors get a little less reliable: a barometer, an NFC chip, and just about anything else you can think of.
We can probably expect some minor updates, like faster 802.11AC WiFi and some generally improved electronics, but we won’t know anything for sure for a little bit longer.
On the software side, iOS 8 has been introduced already and we know we will see home automation integration, health app integration, predictive typing and third party keyboards, better syncing between devices, a more powerful spotlight that can search the web, voice messages and location sharing that are more integrated to the texting app, and some user interface design changes. For more details on iOS 8 have a look at Apple’s own site.
For more information tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.
This Week’s Prizes for Our Listeners
Other World Computing (OWC): NUGUARD KX – Kinectic Energy X-Orbing Case for Samsung Galaxy S4
Joos: Portable Solar Chargers – gives you power anywhere there is sun.
Tylt: ENERGI Travel Chargers with USB ports and built-in cables for iPhones and Micro USB devices
“Into Tomorrow”: Microfiber Screen Cleaning Cloths with Dave’s cartoon on them, for all your smartphones, tablets, TVs, camera lenses and computer screens!