Pro leak-a-holic Boy Genius has leaked a Verizon document that reveals more details about the highly anticipated Blackberry 9530 Storm. Said document shows a pre-launch on November 20th with the official, nationwide launch going down on November 24th. Less than two weeks until you can get a precious Storm! There is a God! Hit the jump for more crisp details:
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Over on Howard Forums, a cellphone forum I stopped going to years ago, some kind stranger was nice enough to leak a screenshot of some placeholder pages on Verizon Wireless‘ website. The Blackberry 9530 Storm is going to cost $219 with a two-year contract and a killer $519 if you decide to pay month-to-month. A one-year contract upgrade will net you the Storm for $289. If you want the Storm, I’d say this is your best bet.
Don’t get me wrong. These screens could very well be doctored or ’shopped, but for now, it’s nice to have a little more information on Verizon’s upcoming iPhone killer.
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Verizon is digging deep in to the pockets of its corporate users by charging an additional three cents per text message sent to its customers. This won’t affect you when you’re texting your friends, however it will affect standard-rate and premium programs of mobile terminated messages.
That includes text alerts, interactive voting notifications, SMS search responses and pretty much anything else that would’ve charged you anyway. Those Jamster commercials on late night television? Yup, those will cost them $0.03 every time they send you a message about Ne-Yo. Now, you’ll just have to add 3 cents on to your EZ Flirt bill, thanks to Verizon. Geez, can’t a guy get a lucky break?
Despite the shitty economy, Verizon is still pushing ahead with it’s deal to purchase the nation’s fifth-largest wireless telecom provider, Alltel Corp. Verizon is still meeting with the Justice department in an attempt to keep everything kosher, especially considering the size of the deal. You can bet it won’t give up though: if the deal goes through, Verizon will regain the title of “largest wireless provider” in the country. Right now the deal is still stalled but anything could happen in such turbulent times.
Oh and the cost for Alltel? A sweet 28.1 billion dollars.
While we’re not going to dive into the details of the much anticipated Blackberry Storm (Verizon’s iPhone rival), we definitely wanted to share these pics with you. For once, it appears Verizon will have an awesome phone to offer customers, a first for the company. With an touchscreen interface like the Storm’s, I think Apple has a serious competitor to the iPhone on its hands. If you want complete details on the Storm, hit this Verizon website up for details.
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If you’re one of the few that hasn’t already switched to Verizon because Comcast kept throttling your Internet connection while you were trying to torrent, get this: Come October 1st, Comcast will be implementing a 250GB monthly cap as part of their shift toward “protocol agnostic” network management.
Comcast is still making plans on how they want to screw their customers over, like having the notion to consider charging $15 per 10GB over the monthly cap or banning your internet access entirely for emailing too frequently. Yet, who knows what they’ll do?
Comcast defends their monthly cap:
Discovered on someone’s Tumblr yesterday, I found this link to Wonkette that explains how you can send a fake VP announcement to your friends. Why is this a riot? If you follow politics, you’d know that Barack Obama is announcing his vice president via SMS. Text message. Phone rants. So with a little Verizon Wireless trickery, you too can tell your friends that Obama has picked Ryan Ash as his VP, a choice sure to please the nation. Now go fuck with your friends and don’t rat me out.
Verizon customers may have great reception, but they usually get the shaft when it comes to the latest and greatest cellphones and features. Finally, Verizon is offering something that the iPhone can give users: visual voicemail. For $3 extra a month, you’ll be able to browse through your voicemail with a GUI and see who left you a message. Users can navigate with a touchscreen or d-pad, depending on the phone they own.
Right now, only the LG Voyager supports visual voicemail. Don’t fret, though. Plenty of other phones will pop up throughout the year. Is it worth it? Depends how many voice mails you get a day and whether or not you screen your calls.
If you decided not to shell out the dough for Verizon Navigator, or some other equally useful GPS system, you might find yourself in a jam if you were to get lost ambling around a big city. At Microsoft’s annual TechFest, they displayed a new project which could save you the cost of a taxi fare or the risk of becoming even more lost. Imagine being able to snap a picture of any building in the city, and sending it off to a database, soon to receive a map and information of where you are. Microsoft can make it possible.
To make a working model of the project, Microsoft had to take millions of street level photos from Seattle, the first city to be tested thus far. Instead of making text the only source of a GPS directional system, Microsoft researchers figured it would be a lot easier to just make the camera the input. Using the millions of pictures obtained, and cross-referencing distinguishing features of the buildings, they can then compare these to the photos sent in by users. — Andrew Dobrow
