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No Bundled Texts with iPhone 3g? AT&T prepares to rake customers over coals for new phone.

According to an article from GigaOM the CEO of AT&T Mobility snuck into an interview with Om Malik, that there would no longer be bundled text messages included with iPhone 3g minute plans:

OM: Has there been a change in the cost of data plans?

RDLV: The data plans are different on the 3G iPhone vs. the 2G iPhone. Consumers will pay $30 a month every month, while enterprises will pay $45 a month. This is what you pay us on other PDA devices such as BlackBerry Curve. The SMS messages are not bundled anymore, and you pay for what you want. Again, the prices are based on what you buy.

So let me get this straight AT&T. Not only are you charging me $30 for unlimited data now instead of $20, but you’re taking away the 200 SMS messages that were available previously. Talk about raking your new customers over the coals. I mean I’m aware that 3g data costs more, and that you’re now giving a subsidy on the phone, but when your lowest minute plan comes to around $39.95 and you are adding another $30 for data, adding up to a $70 bill, WITHOUT any texts, it’s a little on the ridiculous side.

Now I’m going to give AT&T the benefit of the doubt on this one. My estimate was based on the current minute plans that we’re for iPhone version 1, just adding $10 for the additional 3g data. No official iPhone 3g minute plans have been released yet. But seriously, if anything, the prices are only going to go up. This unfortunately, will put off a lot of the people that the $199 price point of the iPhone attracted in the first place!

What are you thinking AT&T!? If anything, you should be giving a better deal to attract more customers!

I am seriously considering buying a new iPhone when they are released. The $199 price point is fantastic. So lets say I sign this 2 year contract for 900 minutes and 1000 texts a month (around the amount I usually use) That would probably be a $69.99 minute plan, plus $29.99 for the data, and another $14.99 for the texts. That’s a bill of WELL over $130 after taxes and fees. That makes me very much NOT want to purchase an iPhone, and I think the prospect of that will make a lot of people feel the same way. Especially considering that my similar plan on T-Mobile for my Windows Mobile phone costs me less than $100 per month.

I can only hope that AT&T will see the error of it’s ways, and put together a $99.99 totally unlimited iPhone plan, including unlimited minutes, unlimited texts, and unlimited data. Because, that’s about the only way I’ll be getting one now.

Good job on screwing the pooch after all AT&T. Good job.

Skyfire mobile browser recieves $13 million in funding

For those of you who don’t yet have an iPhone (like me), and are using a phone running Windows Mobile 6 (also like me) Skyfire is currently your best bet as a mobile browser. Much like the iPhone’s Safari browser, it renders websites like you would see them on your PC. You can zoom in to a page with a double tap and navigate around in a similar method to Mobile Safari. Instead of relying on your phone’s processor to render the pages, Skyfire uses a novel idea. The skyfire uses server-based rendering of the page, which is rendered to what I’d imagine is a basic Jpeg image of a page with hotspots that you can click on. This allows for faster and better quality page rendering than you’d get with something like pocket Internet Explorer.

Unfortunately, on my T-Mobile Shadow, the beta version is slow, and takes a long time to load a page, but it does support flash. I’d imagine that on a 3g phone performance would be far better. Even with these speed problems, it has absolutely become the default browser that I use on a daily basis, as the quality of the page rendering is far superior to that of anything else on the platform.

So, when Techmeme referenced a GigaOM article that Skyfire had recieved $13 million in venture funding, I was really happy for the little browser that could. I’m hopeful that Skyfire could solve some of it’s speed issues with more and faster servers, as well as optimizing the code so that it runs faster on some of the slower Windows Mobile phones, and you could see Skyfire becoming the dominant browser on the Windows Mobile side of things. The beta versions have been getting faster as the updates come, so I’m hopeful about this.

I had also heard rumors that Skyfire would be the default browser in the non-carrier specific version of HTC’s super-sexy Touch Diamond. That phone is 3g, and has a superfast processor as well as a GPU. I’d imagine that a tailor made version for that phone would be 100% the equivalent of Apple’s Mobile Safari. Possibly even better seeing that Skyfire does support Flash and Flash Video.

If you have a Windows Mobile 6 phone, I definetly urge you to sign up for the Skyfire beta. You won’t regret it.

Twitter raises $15 million despite service outages

Congratulations to Twitter for raising another round of venture funding to the tune of $15 million dollars on a valuation on $80 million. This extra money should hopefully be able to be reinvested into making the service more stable and reliable.

According to an article from GigaOM, it appears that both Union Square Ventures, and Spark Capital are both involved in the deal. This brings the total amount of money that Twitter has made from VC’s to around $20 million.

It’s becoming clearer and clearer that Twitter is being groomed by investors as the next possible Myspace, so as we go along, expect to see those valuations shoot through the roof, as long as the stability problems are taken care of.

Unfortunately, According to the official Twitter Blog, they have absolutely no idea what is causing the instability. Quoting their blog:

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

I have this graph up on my screen all the time. It should be flat. This week has been rough.

We’ve gone through our various databases, caches, web servers, daemons, and despite some increased traffic activity across the board, all systems are running nominally. The truth is we’re not sure what’s happening. It seems to be occurring in-between these parts.

We’re busy working on instrumenting and adding meters to provide visibility into what’s slowing Twitter down. We’ll use this data both to alleviate the current woes and to help inform our long-term architecture work to make Twitter a utility service people can count on. We’ve definitely failed that aim this week.

Thanks for your patience during these current frustrations (and those to come) as we figure out how to work the kinks out. Thanks also for speaking up: we’re listening. In addition to providing visibility into our systems, we’re working to give everyone greater visibility into our roadmap to solve these ongoing problems. More to come.

posted by jack at 7:31 PM