Category: News (Page 81 of 130)

      Verizon will cut 13,000 land-line jobs

      January 26, 2010 /

      Verizon building.Verizon said it would cut 13,000 jobs from its landline unit in a conference call today. The company missed sales estimates by less than one percent, which prompted it to axe approximately 11 percent of the land-line division’s workforce.

      The company cuts are really to hedge losses in other divisions. Though the landline division was up almost 10% in sales over last year, enterprise and FiOS TV and Internet sales were down in the face of the poor economy. Most analysts predict that things will improve little in 2010. Verizon’s CFO is optimistic about the Apple tablet, though. “It will attract more and more data customers, more and more usage over the network,” he said. “Devices like that will be, long term, very positive for the wireless industry.”

      Guess we’ll know more about whether Verizon is a part of Apple’s plan tomorrow.

      Source: Bloomberg

      Mobile, News

      More quotes on the tablet with Apple’s latest earnings

      January 26, 2010 /

      Cult of mac Apple tablet.We’re just a day away from getting a look at Apple’s tablet and the brass is as excited as anyone. More quotes from Jobs and his cronies have surfaced, which serve only to build the hype around still rumored device.

      The quotes come from the press release regarding Apple’s Q1 earnings, a whopping $3.38b in profits. In the press release, Jobs was quoted for the following: “The new products we are planning to release this year are very strong, starting this week with a major new product that we’re really excited about.” It’s an odd thing to say about a quarter’s earnings in which the rumored device played no role. Obviously this thing is going to be big.

      Apple COO Tim Cook was asked directly about the product unveiling during the earnings conference call, to which he said, “I wouldn’t want to take away your joy of surprise on Wednesday when you see our latest creation.”

      The thing to take away from all of this is that Apple is excited, seriously excited from the top down, so much so that they can’t even keep from talking about it when it hasn’t been released.

      Apple, Computers, News

      Tablet week begins

      January 25, 2010 /

      Steve Jobs with his Apple.With all the fervor surrounding this week’s Apple announcement, I thought it would be appropriate to begin the week with a quote rumored to come from one Steve Jobs himself. It goes something like this:

      “This will be the most important thing I’ve ever done”

      Now, that’s not confirmed, but it’s being reported on several sites today that claim Jobs is as excited about the tablet as he has ever been about an Apple product. And let’s consider what he’s saying. For Jobs this is more important than changing the face of the smartphone market. More important than pioneering the App Store model for the cellular world. He’s essentially relegated the iPhone to amuse-bouche status, a preparatory device for what we’ll get to see this Wednesday.

      I’m excited.

      Apple, Computers, News

      Nexus One bleeps your ####ing curse words

      January 25, 2010 /

      Nexus One.I’m always a little put off by profanity filters. They are increasingly built into video games and seem to find their ways into all sorts of other applications. What I didn’t expect was a filter on a cell phone, and then Google did it.

      Yes, the Nexus One has a profanity filter as a part of its speech-to-text engine. At first I was pretty surprised. It seems mighty presbyterian of Google to pull something like that without talking about it. The real reason, though, makes a lot of sense.

      We filter potentially offensive or inappropriate results because we want to avoid situations whereby we might misrecognize a spoken query and return profanity when, in fact, the user said something completely innocent.

      So instead of something nasty when your four-year-old says ‘duck,’ all he’ll see is ‘####.’ Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to disable the feature, so you’ll have to write out that drunken text instead of just yelling it into your phone.

      Mobile, News

      $500 and $3,500 Blu-ray player: can you spot the difference?

      January 23, 2010 /

      Oppo's overpriced Blu-ray player.You’re probably thinking, “of course I can – they look completely different.” They do, you’re right. But they’re the exact same player. That Lexicon on top costs $3,500, whereas the Oppo is only $500.

      It’s a strange story, one Wired picked up the other day. From what anyone can tell, Lexicon seemingly bought up a bunch of Oppo BDP-83s and packed the units into a new case. Yes, the whole player, chassis and all. Here’s Audioholics’ Clint DeBoer:

      When we received the player the first thing we did was open it up to get a look at the inside. Imagine my surprise when I found that not only did the Lexicon share the same boards and transport as the Oppo – it was in fact AN OPPO BDP-83 PLAYER, CHASSIS AND ALL, SHOVED INSIDE AN ALUMINUM LEXICON WRAPPER.

      There is one small difference – the Lexicon has a THX certification. The Oppo does not. How’s that for three grand?

      Source: Wired

      News, Video

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