T-Mobile myTouch 4G Selling for $79.99, Just Not from T-Mobile

Three retailers have dipped the price of the Android 2.2.-running, 4G-powered T-Mobile myTouch 4G to as low as $79.99. T-Mobile is offering it for $199 after a $50 rebate.

Access to “America’s largest 4G network”—or, at least, really fast speeds—just got even cheaper. Three retailers have cut pricing for T-Mobile’s flagship 4G smartphone, the myTouch 4G, from $199.99 to as low as $79.99 with a two-year contract, Into Mobilereported.

At Target Mobile, priced at $79.99, the myTouch 4G ships for free, while at Wirefly that price includes a mobile backup service. Radio Shack is also offering a deal, dipping the price to $149.99.

The HTC-made myTouch 4G runs Android 2.2 (or “Froyo”) and features 4G, 3G, EDGE, WiFi (b/g/n), Bluetooth 2.1 and GPS connectivity. The processor is a second-generation 1GHz Snapdragon, from Qualcomm, and the display is a 3.8-inch TFT widescreen, with a resolution of 800 by 480 pixels.

T-Mobile makes a point, in an ad that began airing Nov. 3, that the myTouch 4G can video chat with or without WiFi, and to that end there’s a front-facing camera, in addition to a 5-megapixel camera on the back, with video at 30 frames per second. There are 4GB of internal memory, plus an 8GB SD card, though it can support up to a 32GB card. And for a few extra bucks a month, the myTouch 4G can be used as a hotspot for up to four other devices.

Another perk: a Genius Button on the front of the phone puts the phone to work—e-mailing, searching the Web, finding an address, etc.—using voice commands, with the “genius” bit of things being that the phone “learns” its owner’s voice over time and so should make fewer mistakes.

But its most exciting feature, again, is its capacity to run on T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network, which as of Nov. 3 the company officially decided to call 4G, instead of the less-exciting “3.5G.” Verizon, which plans to roll out its 4G LTE-based network this quarter, is likely a bit miffed at having some of its thunder stolen. While the move was smart marketing on T-Mobile’s part, say analysts, it’s likely made itself a target for some retaliatory advertising—normally pointed at competitor AT&T Wireless.

“I’m imagining an ‘Our 4G vs. their 4G’ ad,” analyst Ken Hyers, with Technology Business Research, told eWEEK.

However, as the International Telecommunications Union has yet to formally define 4G, there’s no foul play in using the title—a point T-Mobile seemed to suggest in quoting Yankee Group Research Fellow Chris Nicoll in a Nov. 2 press release.

“Consumers do not understand the technical alphabet soup of technologies involved in 4G,” Nicoll offered, “but for our purposes we define WiMax, LTE and HSPA+ as 4G technologies.”

For now, T-Mobile is still offering the myTouch 4G for $199, with a two-year contract and after a $50 mail-in rebate. As the attractive brunette playing the “myTouch 4G” in the carrier’s new AT&T-bashing ad says: Bummer.

By: Michelle Maisto

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Apple plans to extend song previews to 90 seconds

Apple has told the record labels that it plans to extend previews in iTunes for songs over two minutes and thirty seconds from 30 to 90 seconds. In a note to its content providers, it said it believed "that giving potential customers more time to listen to your music will lead to more purchases."

Many had expected Apple to increase preview times eventually, but had though it would be to a full minute, and was expected by some to be announced at Apple's September music event. Several other music providers have begun to offer longer previews, which likely give consumers a better idea of the song they plan to purchase.

Labels will be forced to comply with the switch: the letter states that their continued presence on the store indicates their acceptance of the new terms. If they do not want 90-second previews of their content they will need to remove it from iTunes, Apple wrote.

It is hard to see why the labels would not want to comply: longer previews would seemingly increase sales. Add to this that Apple has provided protections for shorter songs by making the minimum song length a full minute longer, and no label would be giving their content away for free through a preview.

The Cupertino company so far has not acknowledged the change publicly, and as of Wednesday afternoon song previews still remained at 30 seconds. No timeline was given for the change according to press reports. It appears to only affect the US version of the iTunes Music Store.

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Facebook Unveils Mobile Platform -- But No Facebook Phone

Facebook Unveils Mobile Platform -- But No Facebook Phone

Facebook has a problem: How to get its 500 million users moving?

The popular social network has about a half billion users, yet Facebook doesn't have a single, unified version of its mobile site -- yet. That all changed Wednesday at a special event at Facebook headquarters, where company head Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a new mobileplatform.

But no Facebook phone.

"There's been a rumor floating around that Facebook was going to build a phone," Zuckerberg joked. "No," he said simply. But the company did need a way to simplify development for the 200 million people who use its social network on various mobile devices.

"The only platform bigger than this is the mobile web itself," Zuckerberg told attendees at the event. So he unveiled a new mobile platform including a unified, single sign-on feature, and new tools that the company claims will encourage developers to build better apps.

But no Facebook phone.

A number of developers came on stage to show off new apps that incorporate the new software, built with a new SDK -- or software development kit, the tools a programmer uses to write software -- which Facebook announced would be released shortly. Part of the SDK is a set of tools specific to mobileapplication developers. One is the single sign-on feature, which lets users sign in to Facebook simply by clicking a button, rather than entering their user info.

But no Facebook phone.

Prior to the event, rumors swirled about what would be announced at the mobile event, rumors centering on a potential phone. The invitation Facebook sent provided no details whatsoever other than to say that the event begins at 10:30 a.m. on November 3 and would be followed by lunch.

But the invitation sported an image of two shaded figures alongside what appears to be the old string-and-Dixie-cup phones that kids in treehouses have long used to communicate. One hopes an actual Facebook phone -- if it ever arrives -- will be slightly more high-tech.

Technology blog TechCrunch reported last month that Facebook was secretly developing a special smartphone.

Facebook then issued a carefully-worded response that said the company was not “building” a phone. The company had projects focused on “deeper integration with some manufacturers.”

But to be clear: There's no Facebook phone.

By Jeremy A. Kaplan

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Ben Horowitz: Why Andreessen Horowitz Just Raised $650,000,000

Ben Horowitz: Why Andreessen Horowitz Just Raised $650,000,000

Andreessen Horowitz just raised $650,000,000 for our second fund. Through the process, people asked us three questions consistently and I will answer them here.
Why raise $650M?

Isn’t smaller better? As a matter of core philosophy, we invest in companies not stages. We want to be in business with the best entrepreneurs going after the biggest markets and we do not care whether they need seed money, venture money or growth money. We believe in great entrepreneurs and the products and companies they build. We do not focus on special return profiles for various stages of investment.

As result, our fund is stage agnostic. As in fund 1, we are excited about investing $50,000 in exciting new seed deals and we are excited about investing $50,000,000 in companies like Skype. While $650M would be a large venture fund, it is a moderately sized seed, venture, and growth fund.
Why raise $650M? I heard you guys could raise at least $1.5B?

Interestingly, we get the opposite question as well. Why so small? We do not want the fund size to dictate our investment pace. We have seen other firms raise so much money that they lower their quality bar in order to “put the money to work.” We would strongly prefer to run out of money sooner and be forced to raise a third fund than to have that problem.
Why only one fund? Why not separate growth and venture funds?

First, from a returns perspective, we do not want to attempt to predetermine where the good investments will be. In our experience, the quality of companies in each investment stage varies wildly over time. It’s possible that the right strategy for this fund will be to invest $550M in venture, $50M in seed, and $50M in growth. It may also be the case that $400M in growth, $150M in venture, and $100M in seed is the right mix. One thing is certain; we won’t know until we see the companies.

Second, one of the founding principles of the firm is to have general partners who are skilled in helping companies at all three stages of development. As former entrepreneurs, we believe this is ideal. When you are raising seed money, you need an investor who can help you grow. When you are the founding CEO of a growth company, you want an investor who understands the value of a founder running the company and who can help you develop into a skilled CEO. As a general partner who has founded, grown, taken public, and run companies at scale, do I belong in the seed fund, the venture fund, or the growth fund? With one fund, I don’t have to choose and neither do our entrepreneurs.

Finally, we believe in being totally aligned with our investors. In venture capital, general partners are paid a percentage of the return on investments. This percentage is called carry. Firms that break their funds into separate vehicles for growth and venture typically separate the carry incentives as well. For example, if their growth fund loses 50% and their venture fund gains 50%, the general partners will be paid carry for a 50% gain on the growth fund, but and will not be paid anything or pay back anything on the venture fund. So, if you are an investor in both funds, even though you might lose money on your investment, you will still have to pay the general partners for making you money. That structure does not seem fair to us, so we elected to have one fund. If our investors don’t make money, we don’t make money.
Gee, that was fast. Have you even invested fund 1 yet?

We raised $300M for Andreessen Horowitz Fund I 16 months ago. Typically, firms invest venture capital funds in between 2 and 3 years. Why did we invest fund I so quickly? Two core reasons:
Prior to raising fund I, Marc and I were angel investors for three years. Many of those angel investments turned out to be outstanding venture-stage startups. As importantly, the entrepreneurs who ran them wanted us to invest in their venture rounds. As a result, we made investments in great companies like RockMelt, Nicira, and Apptio rapidly after raising the fund. And we are incredibly glad that we did.
We invested $50M in Skype. Companies that can become primary, important, long lasting consumer franchises generally do not come up for sale. When they have already reached over 100M users, are generating hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue and are deeply profitable, an opportunity to buy them is even more usual. So when we learned that Skype would be available, we jumped at the opportunity to be a part of one of the world’s most important companies

by.businessinsider.com

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Microsoft Raises Kinect Forecast to 5 Million Units

Microsoft Corp. boosted its forecast for the Kinect motion-control device for the Xbox gaming system to 5 million units this quarter, predicting the most successful Xbox product debut by sales.

Based on pre-sales, retail orders and consumer interest, the company expects to exceed a previous forecast of 3 million units, Don Mattrick, president of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business, said in an interview today. The device, which lets players control games with motion and voice, goes on sale tomorrow.

Microsoft and Sony Corp., with its Move controller, are competing against Nintendo Co., whose Wii machine set the standard for motion-controlled gaming. Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington, is using Kinect to attract a larger slice of the market for casual gamers, while extending the life of its Xbox 360 console, which went on sale in 2005.

Sony has been selling Move since mid-September. Michael Pachter, a video-game analyst at Wedbush Securities Inc. in Los Angeles, predicted Sony will sell about 3 million units by the end of this year.

Microsoft dropped 36 cents to $27.03 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares have fallen 11 percent this year.

Price Tag

Kinect costs $149.99 alone and comes bundled with Xbox machines, starting at $299.99. It sold out in preorders at retailers such as Amazon.com Inc., Best Buy Co. and GameStop Corp., according to David Hufford, a Microsoft spokesman. Those stores will have more stock when the product goes on sale tomorrow, he said.

In the U.S., 25,000 retailers will sell the device and 5,000 of those will stay open tonight for customers who want to purchase Kinect at midnight. Microsoft is holding a midnight event at the Toys “R” Us store in New York’s Times Square, Mattrick said.

“They are really defining Kinect as the must-have holiday item,” Mattrick said of retailers. “It means it’s going to be our biggest holiday ever.”

By Dina Bass 

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New reports from comScore and Nielsen show RIM is still the market leader in smartphones...but Android is coming on strong

New reports from comScore and Nielsen show RIM is still the market leader in smartphones...but Android is coming on strong.

Earlier this month, none other than Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs indicated that theiPhone had overtaken Canada’s Research in Motion as the leader in the smartphone market, and a report from market research firm IDC backed up the claim. However, in an indication of just how fuzzy all this scientific measurement of markets can be, two more research firms weighed in today—and neither finds the iPhone is leading the market. Both Nielsen and comScore find RIM is still the market leader for smartphones, although the iPhone is in second place andAndroid is showing rapid gains.

According to comScore, RIM remained the top smartphone platform during the third quarter of 2010, accounting for 37.3 percent of U.S. smartphone subscribers aged 13 years and over. That was actually a 2.8 percent drop compared to RIM’s share in June 2010. Apple’s iPhone accounted for 24.3 percent of the market—unchanged since June—and Google’s Android platform (now represented by myriad devices) accounted for 21.4 percent of the market, up 6.5 percent since June. Microsoft came in fourth with a 10 percent share for the third quarter (a drop od 2.8 percent since June), and Palm landed in fifth place with a 4.2 percent share, down 0.5 percent since June. (It’s worth noting Windows Phone 7 was not yet available to consumers, nor was the Palm Pre 2 on sale in the U.S.).

Nielsen’s figures also show RIM on top, but the percentages change a bit. According to Nielsen, RIM accounts for 30 percent of the U.S. smartphone market with the iPhone hot on its heels with a 28 percent share. Google’s Android platform is in a more-distant third place with a 19 percent share; however, where RIM lost ground in the third quarter of 2010 and the iPhone held steady, Android showed strong growth, and Nielsen says Android was the preferred platform amongst consumers who chose a device in the last six months. Nielsen also notes that while Apple has the most smartphone users under age 44, fully half of Android users are under 35 years of age.

The disparity of these figures from leading market analysis firms—and companies’ eagerness to embrace them to their advantage—highlights both the inherent difficulties in measuring things like “smartphone market share,” as well as how competitive the U.S. smartphone market has become.

• By: Geoff Duncan

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4G Wireless Image Scrambled As T-Mobile USA Enters The Mix

    

NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--So what is 4G? Thanks to the wireless carriers, the answer is only getting more confusing.

T-Mobile USA is the latest carrier to jump into the 4G fray, boasting in a new campaign that began Tuesday night that its HSPA+ network--which it previously claimed was 3G--is actually the nation's largest fourth-generation network.

That conflicts with positions taken by Sprint Nextel Corp. (S), which has been evangelizing the benefits of 4G for the past two years; its partner Clearwire Corp. (CLWR), which is responsible for building out the network and reports its third-quarter results on Thursday; and the other national carriers moving into 4G. Unsurprisingly, the move was not received well.

"Despite T-Mobile's marketing claim and their desire to try to keep up with companies like Sprint, T- Mobile's HSPA+ is not a 4G network," a Sprint spokeswoman said.

"Third-party research is clear--AT&T has the nation's fastest mobile broadband network, period," said an AT&T Inc. (T) spokesman.

The increased rhetoric underscores the high-stakes game played by the carriers as they jockey for position as the fastest and most advanced network on the block. With the preponderance of programs and services reliant on a speedy wireless connection, consumers are starting to show interest in so-called 4G networks, even if they don't quite know what they are.

The conflicting campaigns probably won't help the already scant public knowledge of wireless technology. In a recent Yankee Group survey of more than 1,200 consumers, 57% said they have either never heard of 3G or don't understand the term. With 4G, that figure jumps to 68%.

The practice of adding "Gs" with each technology revision isn't the healthiest practice for the industry, analysts say. More confusing is the use of 3.5G, which has started to pop up in phones such as Nokia Corp.'s (NOK) recently released N8.

"That is going to get pretty ridiculous really quickly," said Christopher Nicoll, analyst at Yankee Group.

Another wrinkle: none of the current networks actually qualify as 4G, according to the ITU, a U.N. agency responsible for setting global standards for communications technology. The agency last month said that only two standards, LTE-Advanced and WiMax 2, are considered true 4G technologies. While Verizon Wireless is launching an LTE network and Sprint and Clearwire have embraced WiMax, neither of the deployments come close to the specifications laid out by the ITU.

Still, by adopting the 4G name, T-Mobile USA is hoping to capitalize on the growing interest, even if its network is an update to a 3G standard. The carrier is already promoting the MyTouch 4G and G2 as the first phones capable of taking advantage of the network's highest speeds.

The carrier, a unit of Deutsche Telekom AG (DT), has AT&T in its sights early with a commercial that riffs off of the popular PC versus Mac ads, inserting instead the "old AT&T network" versus T-Mobile USA's newer 4G one.

AT&T, however, has been rolling out the same HSPA+ technology and claims it has the nation's fastest network. Unlike the other major carriers, it hasn't yet staked a claim in 4G, but plans to launch an LTE network next year.

T-Mobile USA said its network is in 75 markets and in some cases, offer a faster connection than the 4G equivalent offered by Clearwire and Sprint.

"If you look at the speed of the WiMax network out there, we're meeting, beating and exceeding them right now," T-Mobile spokesman Reid Walker said.

Walker added there already is customer confusion over 4G, and he says T-Mobile USA's higher speeds bring some clarity.

T-Mobile's push comes ahead of Verizon Wireless's own move into 4G. The carrier, a joint venture between Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) and Vodafone Group PLC (VOD), plans to have the network up in 38 cities and 62 airports later this year.

"We are comfortable with the way our LTE network will perform," a Verizon Wireless spokesman said. He declined to comment on whether the carrier would embrace the 4G name.

The increased noise over 4G only diminishes Sprint and Clearwire's lead, which has shrunk as other carriers prep their own upgraded networks. Clearwire, which turned on its WiMax network in the New York area Monday, is available in nearly 60 markets.

By Roger Cheng 

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