Verizon posts

Google's Public DNS has been up and running for a few days now, and the reviews and benchmarks are slowly starting to trickle in. Initial results seem to suggest that it works well, but may not be a blanket solution for all, or even many, Internet users.

It seems to depend wildly from ISP to ISP. If you're fortunate enough to have an Internet provider like Verizon's FiOS that runs a finely-tuned, well-oiled network, Google Public DNS is simply not for you. If you're one of the (many) that has poorly-maintained DNS servers, the Google service might help considerably. But we're skirting the real issue here: does Google's Public DNS outperform the current 'industry standard' provisions from OpenDNS? Yes, it does. Just.

Either way, we're talking about a few milliseconds -- milliseconds that add up over days or weeks. It's well known that fractions of a second can change the outcome of someone looking to buy from an e-commerce website. I don't know about you, but I actually find myself drumming my fingers impatiently when a site takes more than a second or two to load -- crazy, when you consider just how quickly things are actually happening, compared to the online world a decade ago.

Let's not forget that Google just launched this service. OpenDNS have been around for years. Let's also not forget that their services are functionally different -- Google just want to speed up the 'net, while OpenDNS is an enterprise offering that can provide adult-content filtering and more.

[via Jon Radoff]

Released by AT&T themselves, Mark the Spot is an iPhone app that very simply lets you report outages in your mobile connectivity. Have a look at the screenshot -- what you see is what you get. An honest, earnest piece of troubleshooting software!

Kudos must be given to AT&T for a truly humble app. Network admins have limited contact with the end-users during the best of times -- there's a smoke-screen of customer support FUD in between -- but with an app like this, AT&T can get direct, useful feedback.

But humble applications like these are double-edged blades. Imagine if you had an app that let you report, directly to Microsoft, every time Mr Clippy bugged you in a banal, bothersome fashion? I'm sure AT&T have released Mark the Spot with honorable intentions but I can foresee nefarious uses in its immediate future.

Being a British citizen I don't know if there are such things as 'Verizon Warriors' or some kind of 'V' zealotry (this is classic blue vs. red mentality isn't it?), but is it too crazy to imagine Verizon grabbing a bunch of iPhones, installing Mark the Spot, and sending its staff all over America to submit false feedback?

Relying on the customer for reliable feedback is risky at the best of times. Assuming app users will be trustworthy at the height of this polarized and bitter war between AT&T and Verizon is just plain stupid.

[via Just Another iPhone Blog -- Mark the Spot on iTunes (free)]

Motorola's Droid is a sweet piece of hardware that's hyped to give the iPhone a run for its money, especially since it's running the new Android 2.0 OS, and works on the Verizon network in the US. We care about software here at Download Squad though, and there's some dismaying news about the Droid on that front: it has only 256MB for app storage. Seriously.

The Droid reportedly only packs a 512MB ROM (that's the built-in memory), of which only half is allocated for apps. There are some iPhone games that couldn't even fit in that teeny-weeny storage space! But at least it's expandable, right? Um, nope. Google doesn't support installing apps to the SD cards that Motorola relies on, so developers are pretty limited in terms of file sizes for their Android 2.0 software.

The Droid may have a solid CPU and GPU for gaming, but games that take full advantage of that hardware are likely to need 100 megabytes or more of storage space. That's going to make things pretty tough until Android 2.0 comes to a device with a lot more pre-installed flash memory.

[via Daring Fireball]

UPDATE: While it's true that the Droid only has 256MB for apps, commenters have pointed out that various resources for the apps (graphics, etc.) CAN be stored on the device's SD cards. It looks like the situation isn't as bad as the numbers seem to indicate at first.

When you hear that there's a new iPhone-killing Google Android phone that's coming to Verizon and has a name straight out of Star Wars - the Droid - it's easy to get so excited that you forget about the software side of things. Yes indeed, Android 2.0 is coming, and it has a spate of hot new features that might legitimately make iPhone users jealous. Gadget-blog Boy Genius Report ended up with a pre-release copy of Android 2.0 and posted a walkthrough of the OS's new features, including Facebook support in the address book, and a Car Home mode for drivers.

Facebook contact syncing is a pretty sweet feature on its own, but combine that with Android 2.0's new unified inbox – which collects messages from multiple email addresses (including Exchange accounts) and Facebook messages - and you've got a pretty sweet address book system. BGR says that Gmail accounts are handled in a separate app, which is presumably better able to support Gmail's many features. Car Home is a dashboard for using your phone in the car. It provides voice access to the apps you need when you're driving, so you can dial numbers or search for something on Google Maps without taking your hands off the wheel.

We won't know how cool the Droid is until we can actually touch one, but BGR reports that Android 2.0's software keyboard offers a nice haptic response – that slight vibration that lets you know when you're pressing keys. That puts it well ahead of other non-iPhone touchscreen smartphones (I'm looking at you, BlackBerry Storm), and I can't wait to give a Droid a try for myself.

It's all over the place; Verizon is embracing Android. Google loving apologist geeks everywhere are heralding the 85 million new customers -- who are obviously ready to try Android, if only Verizon would let them -- as the beginning of a new era in mobile phone competition. The cries of panacea are all I've heard all day:

"It's going to be a floodgate of new users! "

"Death to the iPhone!"

And, as one particularly difficult to satisfy commenter on another blog wrote:

"Get over yourselves apple and make a new product."

I'll have to admit, as a current G2, and previous G1 owner, I was a little excited myself. Then I read one thing from the joint Verizon/Google press call which made me crestfallen.

"Verizon also has no plans to make any changes to the Android Market."

And with that, all my dreams of an Android controlled world ran away like so much sand through my fingers. This is an enormous mistake, Verizon. Care to know why? The Android Market is terrible. It's worse than terrible, it's horrible.

Horrible, and just a little bit dangerous.

I've got a list of five things Verizon must do to the Android Market if they're to have any hope of even modest success.

It seems like every day a new company is launching a new way to stream movies online or download them to your computer. Today, there's one less. Vongo, a service provided by Starz Entertainment, was one of the first major players in the online movie space. But it looks like Starz has decided to pull the plug on Vongo.

Starz will now focus on Starz Play, a service the company recently launched for Verizon. Starz Play looks and feels a lot like Vongo -- but it has Verizon branding all over it. Starz is pursuing similar partnerships with other companies.

Current Vongo customers can continue using the service through September 30th. There's some good news in the announcement. Vongo customers paid $9.99 a month for unlimited movie downloads. Starz Play charges just $5.99 for access to the same content library.

[via NewTeeVee]

It's been a busy week here at Download Squad HQ. We produced our first ever Squadcast, spent way too much time playing with our new Eee PC, and drafted a plan for fixing our parents' broken computer over the Thanksgiving Holiday.

Here's what you might have missed if you weren't paying attention this week. And shame on you for that, by the way.

The Squadcast: Episode #01

Download Squad's Grant Robertson and Christina Warren got together to talk shop. On the menu this week, first impressions and problems with OS X Leopard, the Eee PC, and using IMAP with Gmail. As you can probably guess from the title, this is the first episode of the Squadcat, but it will not be the last.

Eee PC tips: A crash course in Linux

Last week we gave you a first look at the new $400, Linux-based Eee PC from Asus. This week we started digging into the software and figuring out how to configure the Eee PC to make it act a bit less like a toy and more like a computer. If you're new to Linux, this tutorial is a must read.

It appears that Google and Yahoo aren't the only game in town when it comes to search, though they may be the only ones not benefiting from an arguably underhanded tactic called searchjacking. When you key in a typo on Google, you're often given a suggestion, a la "did you mean to say" followed by what Google thinks is the actual keyword you fat-fingered.

But, if you're a Verizon FIOS customer, you may have ended up at a Verizon-branded search page without even trying, because the big telco sometimes takes a different approach with your typos. That is, if you mistype a URL into your browser on the high-speed fiber service, there's a decent chance you'll end up at Verizon's search page instead of the familiar 'Page Cannot be Displayed' message.

The term searchjacking was first used to describe Internet Explorer's tendency to redirect user's to a Microsoft-branded search page when they've mis-typed a URL or experience a DNS name lookup failure. Well, it looks like Verizon has decided to take the low road as well. The objective, of course, is to sell ads on Verizon's customer portal. But one wonders just how large the accidental content delivery market really is.

If you want more Internet access speed, your options are getting more and more. Thanks to services like AT&T's UVERSE Elite offering, next-generation broadband over copper cables is beginning to show up as a legit service (as opposed to the do-it-yourself approach), giving its users effective speeds of up to 6 mbits/second downloading and 1 mbit uploading, or about double what most users can expect out of a standard residential DSL service.

But for the true bandwidth junky, there's nothing (yet) that can come close to Verizon's symmetrical FiOS service, which doesn't place a speed limit on uploading. This is a big shift of attitude for a telco-based ISP like Verizon. Even better, FiOS users will enjoy 20 mbits/sec of unadulterated speed delivered using fiber, not copper. The only catch is that Verizon's FiOS network footprint is still tiny. Only pockets of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut are able to jump on board at this point.

In the meantime, those of us in flyover country will just keep shleppin' it with our 1.5 mbit DSL.

As Google and Verizon are locked in a tiff over the way 700 MHz radio spectrum is licensed by the Federal Communications Commission, it looks less and less likely that we're going to see the forthcoming Google Phone at wireless retail stores when it finally hits the market. Google contends that the licensee of the radio spectrum should be forced to sell "unlocked" devices, therefore permitting open applications on their network, a move which would certainly benefit Google and other powers whose bread and butter is mainly software.

Verizon, on the other hand, argues that they don't need to make unlocked phones available, since it's possible to get unlocked phones from other sources. Google's response? Big carrier retail sells 95% of the phones in North America, so arguably less than 5% of available phones are unlocked and open. Google, of course, isn't accustomed to having access to just 5% of the market these days. Nevertheless, the spectrum license reads as follows (quoted from Google's public policy blog):

"[Licensee] shall not deny, limit, or restrict the ability of their customers to use the devices and applications of their choice."

It's a clash of business models. Verizon makes money by selling applications they control. Google makes money by giving applications away and monetizing the mindshare they gain by doing so. Wireless is a wild frontier for somebody like Google, because the power brokers in the cellular industry don't want to compete with new players from other spaces, like a search engine company.

Bottom line, it doesn't look like the Google Phone is going to be on Verizon's store shelves, and something tells me Google isn't about to start a retail chain of its own.

For those of you who don't regularly keep tabs on your Software Update notifications, Apple released its WWAN support update 1.0 via software update, offering improved wireless broadband support for AT&T/Cingular, Sprint, and Verizon networks. The update was actually released in February, but it flew under my radar as, being a Macbook user with no PCMCIA slot, I didn't realize there was a Mac-compatible USB WWAN adapter. So if you've been looking to get your Apple laptop onto wireless broadband, now would be the time. No guarantees that the retail clerk won't run in terror when you tote your scary Apple-logo-carrying laptop into the wireless store, though.

So you can successfully convince Mac-wary retailers that their wireless cards will indeed work with your "weird computer", here's the info you need. The update includes drivers for Novatel EVDO and HSDPA cards--which are chief among those being sold at wireless retail. They've also added support for Novatel's Ovation USB adapter--handy for all us Macbook users who don't have a PCMCIA slot. Just make sure your Mac laptop is an Intel-based one. This update won't work with PowerPC-based Macs.

Verizon Wireless customers can now shoot and record videos on a cellphone and then upload them to YouTube by dialing 98823, which happens to spell YTUBE.

You'll need to add your cellphone number to your YouTube account by visiting www.youtube.com/mobile. You don't need Verizon's V CAST service to upload movies, but the $3/day or $15/month service will let you watch videos. Or you can just eat into your data minutes by visiting YouTube's mobile site.

So let's see. You can upload videos from your phone, you can update your blog from your phone, and you can make phone calls from your computer. What's this world coming to?

[via SolSie]

The New York Times published an opinion piece by Timothy B. Lee yesterday that compares the current patent conflict between Vonage and Verizon to the software patent landscape of the early 1990's. Back then, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates published a memo to Microsoft's senior management extolling the evils of software patents, claiming that they could lead to a complete stall in technological advancement.

Of course, today Microsoft owns a massive number of patents, and actively uses them to protect their position in the market. And the Vonage / Verizon patent dispute is a shining example of how patents can be used to attempt to kill technological advancement.

So, here's your chance to sound off and spout your opinion. We want to know if the ability to acquire a patent for a software process is good, or evil. For the purposes of this discussion, "good" is defined as supporting technological advancement, whereas "evil" refers to technological stagnation. As much as the example given here clearly shows a bias, there are probably good arguments from both sides of this debate; let's hear them.

Last month Vonage officials said they weren't sure they could find a way to continue offering VoIP telephone service without using technology that a jury said infringed on patents held by Verizon. But it seems like things are looking up for the troubled company.

During a quarterly earnings call, Vonage CEO Jeffrey Citron said the company would be ready to roll out a workaround for two of the patents its said to be violating soon. They're still working on a way to get around a third patent which applies to wireless transmission of phone calls.

There's no word on exactly what these workarounds will entail. Vonage is seeking an appeal in its case against Verizon, but a federal judge had already ordered the company to stop signing up new customers. That order has been stayed, but it seems like a generally good idea for Vonage to explore alternative technologies whether they're successful on appeal or not.

Well, you got to hand it to them for trying. On Wednesday Vonage requested a new trial in their patent infringement case. Verizon claims that Vonage's internet telephony technology is based on patents held by the phone company. But Thursday, the appeals court denied the request for a retrial.

Vonage had hoped that a recent Supreme Court ruling would give reason for a new trial. The Supreme Court basically said too many patents have been given out for obvious technologies. The appeals court said Vonage can cite that ruling in its appeal, but that there weren't sufficient grounds for trying the case over again.

If you're getting whiplash from the back and forth, here's the score: Vonage can still continue business as usual while the appeal is pending. If it loses the appeal, there's a good chance the company will be put out of business.