By Paul Thomson :: 11:27 PM
Wireless carrier T-Mobile may be gearing up to launch its new 4G LTE network at the end of this month, as signs of a New York City event being planned point to something big.
On March 26th, the carrier plans to announce changes to its service plans, and it is widely speculated that it will unveil the new fast data network at that time as well. The timing is perfect for a launch event, as T-Mobile plans to offer Blackberry’s Z10 and the Samsung Galaxy Note II as the first handsets on the network that offer support for 4G. The company hopes that 4G will service around 100 million subscribers by this summer.
The new plans that T-Mobile will roll out will likely include a $50 option that gives users unlimited phone minutes and texting, as well as a 500MB data allowance. For an additional $20 T-Mobile will add unlimited data as well, or users can choose to get 2GB of data for a flat fee of $10. The carrier will also roll out a family plan that begins at $80 for two lines.
By Gilbert Falso :: 10:27 PM
The Washington Post will be next in a series of daily newspapers to limit the amount of content that users can read online for free.
Joining the ranks of the New York Times and the Boston Globe, the Post will begin charging frequent readers of its web site this summer. Users who access 20 or more articles or features a month will be asked to pay a fee before subsequent articles are shown. The Post has not set the amount of the fee yet.
A large chunk of the Post’s audience will be exempt from the fees. This subset includes home-delivery subscribers, students, teachers, school administrators, government employees and military personnel. The home page of the Post, as well as home pages for each section and the classified ads section will not be restricted, either.
Katharine Weymouth, publisher of The Post, released the following statement: “News consumers are savvy; they understand the high cost of a top-quality news gathering operation and the importance of maintaining the kind of in-depth reporting for which The Post is known. Our digital package is a valuable one, and we are going to ask our readers to pay for it and help support our news gathering as they have done for many years with the print edition.â€
Insiders familiar with the Post organization claim that the paper will be introducing a new iPad application later this year, timed to release around the time the paywall is enacted.
By Cynthia Herbert :: 5:42 PM
Google’s Gmail application for the Android operating system was updated today, and among some of the new features available is the ability to reply directly from the push notifications pane on your device.
In addition to the easier reply function, Gmail for Android also allows users to archive mail, and search from within the notifications window.
“You can combine this with existing notification features like the ability to customize which messages you receive notifications for and set up different sounds for individual labels. So if you filter and label all the messages from your mom, you could set a ringtone to let you know you received a new mail from her and then quickly reply (because we know what can happen when you ignore your mother!),” said a Google blog post about the new version.
The new Gmail app requires Android version 4.1 (Jelly Bean) and can be downloaded from the Google Play store.
By Gilbert Falso :: 5:01 PM
Ah, March. When college basketball fans everywhere turn to one thing – brackets!
One thing that digital and social media have made much easier over the past several years is researching and creating the brackets that go along with this yearly NCAA March Madness disease.
From tracking the teams, to looking up statistics, percentages, and schedules, never before has such information been so easy to get a hold of and use.
Here are a few of our favorite sites for researching and creating those all-important predictions:
ESPN Bracket CentralThis is a good bet if you want to spread the bracket experience to family and friends. Pick your brackets, and create or join groups as you see fit. This year, the sports network is sweetening the pot for the very best bracket pickers – they’ll be entered into a drawing for a gift card from Best Buy worth $10,000.
Yahoo! Fantasy Sports
Like ESPN, the Yahoo! bracket application also allows you to join groups with family and friends, but also includes some pretty slick Facebook integration as well. Not only can you compete with your buddies, but you can also enter a huge open Facebook challenge with other Yahoo! Fantasy Sports users and Facebook users.
NCAA March Madness Application
The “official” app of March Madness, this offering from the NCAA is good for those who want to track and manage their brackets while on the go. The NCAA app is available for download on both iOS and Android platforms. And, like Yahoo!’s offering, the NCAA app also offers Facebook connectivity. If you’re a cable subscriber, you can also use the app to view the games on cable channels for free. If you’re not a cable subscriber, you’ll still be able to watch the games that are carried over the CBS network.
By Paul Thomson :: 4:39
In a blog post today, Lucy Bradshaw, General Manager of the Maxis label at Electronic Arts, admitted that the game could have been developed to run in a completely offline context.
However, she argued, the developer vision for the game was never that of an offline mode experience. From the beginning, the plan was to have connectivity required. Electronic Arts “rejected [the] idea [of offline play] because it didn’t fit with our vision.  We did not focus on the “single city in isolation†that we have delivered in past SimCities.  We recognize that there are fans – people who love the original SimCity – who want that.  But we’re also hearing from thousands of people who are playing across regions, trading, communicating and loving the Always-Connected functionality.  The SimCity we delivered captures the magic of its heritage but catches up with ever-improving technology.â€
The company has come under strong fire over the past two weeks for the lackluster performance of the long awaited SimCity game. Critics say that Electronic Arts failed to plan for the huge numbers of people purchasing and playing the game, and the company’s response to beefing up the back-end infrastructure has been too slow.
A few days ago, enterprising hackers on a forum dedicated to the new game found that they could enable indefinite offline play capabilities simply by altering a few lines of code in the software. This revelation was a direct counter to Bradshaw’s earlier claims that a “significant” amount of back-end technology was required to keep SimCity running, and prevented offline play.
While server access is still necessary for any global or regional interactions in SimCity, the majority of the code runs on your own machine, not on Electronic Arts’ servers.