The first touchscreen BlackBerry, the Storm, received a mixed reception from reviewers when it launched in late November. But Verizon Wireless, the exclusive U.S. carrier, said earlier that week that the smartphone has taken the market by storm, with one million sold.

Verizon is using that sales figure to counter a report in The Wall Street Journal on Monday, which characterized the Storm’s launch as a “bit of a bumpy start.” Despite a marketing campaign of more than $100 million, the newspaper said, some buyers complained that it was buggy.

Selling at a Loss?

At launch, the Storm was immediately compared to the best-known touchscreen smartphone, Apple’s iPhone 3G. Verizon’s sales figure of one million by about two months compares well with Apple’s sale of about 2.4 million iPhone 3Gs in its first full quarter.

But a new report from iSuppli raises a new area of comparison. The market researcher said that its analysis of the Storm’s components show that not only are the constituent parts more expensive than the iPhone’s, but its maker, Research in Motion, is essentially selling the phone at a loss.

iSuppli indicated that the Storm’s cost of components and manufacturing is a bit less than $203, while the iPhone 3G comes in at less than $175. Software and other costs are not calculated. The Storm and the iPhone are roughly equal in price, about $200, after accounting for the Storm’s rebate.

That comparison misses the point, said Current Analysis’ Avi Greengart. While not commenting directly on the specific pricing assessment by iSuppli, Greengart pointed out that, even whether the prices are accurate, “Verizon Wireless is subsidizing the cost of the phone by the life of its contract,” as AT&T is doing with the iPhone.

Keyboard Expectations

Greengart plus noted that the news of one million Storms sold is good from a public-relations perspective,…

Original post by dhiram

It’s a sad day for Cox World Wide Web subscribers, ’cause whether the FCC or some other almighty agency doesn’t step in soon, your traffic could be slowed. The carrier has just announced a rather significant update to its data management policies, as it lays out plans to analysis a system next month that will “give priority to Web traffic it judges to be time-sensitive, like web pages, streaming video and online games.” We’re additionally told that “file downloads, software updates and other non-time sensitive notes may be slowed whether there is congestion on the local network.” Thankfully, “streaming video” was listed in the category that’ll supposedly get first dibs on available bandwidth, but one always has to wonder what kind of juju is going on behind closed doors when a plan such as that is announced. whether all goes well in the Kansas / Arkansas pop quiz markets, the system could be rolled out to all Cox Web customers (business users notwithstanding) by the year’s end. Lovely.

[Via HotHardware]

Filed under: Networking

Cox pursues Comcast down the details discrimination road originally presented on Engadget on Thu, 29 Jan 2009 09:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Original post by Darren Murph

Netgear quietly introduced us to its MCAB1001 MoCA Coax-Ethernet adapter (among other things) at CES that year, but the curiously useful device has just now set itself up for pre-ordering. Put simply, that is the device to get for those who both loathe wireless (and all those inexplicable dropouts) and can’t pony up the courage / fundage / willpower to wire their home with Ethernet. By enabling users to extend Ethernet signals by existing in-wall coax cabling, you can easily pass along web composition, Blu-ray / DVD material or practically any other digital signal by the coax network that’s (hopefully) already established within your domicile’s walls. Yeah, $229.99 is a bit pricey, but go price out a house full of Ethernet and next reevaluate.

[Thanks, Matt]

Filed under: Networking

Netgear’s Coax-Ethernet Adapter up for pre-order originally presented on Engadget on Thu, 29 Jan 2009 08:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Original post by Darren Murph

Google on Wednesday launched its latest innovation — one that sheds new light on a controversial problem: Net neutrality.

Called Measurement Lab, the tool seeks to reveal whether the root cause of a flaky Net connection is your broadband World Wide Web service provider, the application, your PC, or something else. Google partnered with academic researchers to develop a solution.

Google, the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, and academic researchers launched M-Lab, an open platform that researchers can use to deploy Net measurement tools.

Will M-Lab Bust the Bottleneck?

Researchers are already developing tools that allow users to measure the speed of their connection, run diagnostics, and attempt to discern whether their ISP is blocking or throttling specific applications, according to Google Chief Net Evangelist Vint Cerf and Principal Engineer Stephen Stuart. Cerf is one of the architects of the Net.

So how is M-Lab different? As Google describes it, existing tools generate and send some info back and forth within the user’s computer and a server elsewhere on the Web. Unfortunately, Cert and Stuart said, researchers lack widely distributed servers with ample connectivity, which poses a barrier to the accuracy and scalability of these tools. Researchers additionally have trouble sharing goods with one another. M-Lab sets out to address these problems.

“Over the course of early 2009, Google will supply researchers with 36 servers in 12 locations in the U.S. and Europe. All details collected via M-Lab will be made publicly available for other researchers to build on,” Cert and Stuart wrote in the Google blog.

Rekindling a Controversy

Google’s M-Lab rolls out just more than a week after the Federal Communications Commission launched an study into Comcast’s network-management practices. The timing of these events may rekindle the controversy around Net neutrality, which aims for equality among broadband users with no restrictions on composition,…

Original post by dhiram

How do you improve on a phone that’s already been diamond-studded, layered in carbon fiber, and next dipped in gold? Why, you add more diamonds and some hints of gratuitous platinum, of course. Meet the Nokia Royal Edition, an 8800 that succeeds its predecessors in terms of pretentiousness — but not necessarily in looks. It has 1160 wee diamonds around the edges and platinum plates on the fore and aft, all surrounding the same internals as those other, plebeian fashionphones. Only 50 of these will be sold at an undisclosed price that surely is equally excessive.

[Thanks, Robin]

Filed under: Cellphones

Nokia’s 8800 gets more bling, more expensive, more ugly originally presented on Engadget on Thu, 29 Jan 2009 08:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Original post by Tim Stevens

Businesses cannot afford to have downtime, and with so much depending on the operate of the Microsoft Windows platform, they plus have a need for tools that will help to maximize and preserve their investment in the Windows environment, even as they transition to the Windows Server 2008.

Fortunately, a number of proven tools and services are available to help organizations preserve and protect their Windows 2008 server. By providing new availability to virtualization, safety measure and management capabilities, Windows Server 2008 helps IT staff maximize control by their infrastructure. Windows PowerShell, for example, a new command-line shell with more than 130 tools and an integrated scripting language, makes control and automation of repetitive system administration tasks easier. The new Server Manager is an additional help by offering the convenience of a separate control panel from which administrators can install, configure and manage the server roles and features of Windows Server 2008.

One component of keeping critical IT environments up and running is having the capability to not only back up mission-critical notes but additionally to have fast and dependable recovery of that notes. Without proper protection, an infrastructure failure, natural catastrophe or even simple human error could send a profitable, productive company into a tailspin from which it might never recover.

To ensure a complete data-system protection strategy, organizations are now replacing their silo-based backup-and-recovery strategies with a individual, more comprehensive approach that maximizes Windows Server 2008 and legacy Window systems by supporting VSS writer integration, system state, Active Directory, BitLocker technology and cluster failover. In addition, these comprehensive data-protection solutions are powered by disk-based technology that minimizes IT downtime and helps businesses meet strict recovery-time objectives.

Intelligent archiving tools are additionally being integrated into data- and system-protection solutions to extend protection and availability to critical archives. In order to keep in compliance…

Original post by dhiram

I have never been one for New Year’s resolutions, but whether you’re the type of person who does like to prepare them, I implore you to assemble 2009 the year that you actually start backing up your computer.

The biggest barrier to most society backing up was it being an active rather than passive problem. by the past few years the burden of backup has lessened. Mac OS X Leopard’s day Machine is the easiest desktop solution I have found: plug a USB or Firewire drive into your Mac and day Machine does the rest automatically.

Local backups are good, but they don’t cover the extreme instances of info loss. All the backups in the world can’t cover the chance of me coming home to find my laptop and backup drive stolen during a burglary or, worse, destroyed in a fire. In those cases, off-site backup is the reply.

I’ve evaluated quite a few off-site backup solutions by the past few years, but have never found one that I felt offered the same passive experience that moment Machine offers. They were either too complex, too invasive to my computing experience or just plain didn’t work. That was until I found Backblaze.

Backblaze is a new startup for both Windows and Mac OS X that offers nonintrusive, behind-the-scenes backing up of your computer’s most urgent files. By default, the Backblaze application is set up to not back up your operating system, applications or program files.

It instead focuses on your personal input such as music, photos and documents.

One of the biggest differences you’ll notice with Backblaze compared with the competition is there are no storage limits. Some backup services charge per gigabyte of storage while others charge a flat monthly fee for an allotted amount of space. With Backblaze, you pay $5 a month (or $50…

Original post by dhiram