Tim Conneally

Aircell has made a commanding name for itself in in-flight Wi-Fi systems. In its first year offering GoGo InFlight Internet service, the company has secured Wi-Fi contracts with Virgin America, American Airlines, US Airways, Delta, AirTran, United, and others.

At the beginning of 2009, United announced that it would begin to offer Aircell's GoGo Wi-Fi on its transcontinental service between New York and California "in the second half of this year," and it has finally been able to deliver.

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"We are fast entering a world where mass-market mobile devices consume thousands of megabytes each month," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski warned at CTIA Wireless yesterday. "So we must ask: what happens when every mobile user has an iPhone, a Palm Pre, a BlackBerry Tour, or whatever the next device is? What happens when we quadruple the number of subscribers with mobile broadband on their laptops or netbooks?

"The short answer: We will need a lot more spectrum."

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UK music store 7Digital is now open for business in the US, challenging iTunes with $7.77, DRM-free albums.

Online music store 7Digital officially gained support from all major labels in March of 2008, and has since enjoyed substantial growth by offering its platform as an API for developers to integrate into other services such as RIM's BlackBerry music download service and EMI's music discovery portal.

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Dell has smartphones on the way, but it's not talking about them yet.

In fact, the first Android-powered smartphone on AT&T's network could be coming from Dell, according to reports Wednesday afternoon.

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Qualcomm subsidiary FLO TV, the company responsible for the MediaFLO mobile content delivery system used in Verizon V Cast Mobile TV and AT&T Mobile TV, has launched its first piece of branded hardware, the FLO TV Personal Television.

The device looks almost exactly like a smartphone or a touchscreen media player, and has the specs to match. The main difference, of course, is that the FLO TV Personal Television is built with the single purpose of watching subscription FLO TV streams. The $249.99 TV is made by HTC, has a 3.5" capacitive touchscreen, and built-in stereo speakers.

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For the second time in three months, Amazon has dropped the price of the Kindle 2 e-reader. The device which began shipping in February for $359.99 begins October at $259.99.

Since debuting, the Kindle has dominated e-reader mindshare in the United States, but has faced serious competition from senior e-reader maker Sony, which not only makes the lowest priced product, but also the most feature-packed product as well. Sony's Daily Edition Reader has 3G wireless from AT&T, a touchscreen interface, and the ability to borrow e-books from participating libraries.

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AT&T has announced that it will now allow Voice-over-IP services to run on its wireless data networks, reversing the carrier's prior stance on the technology.

Reportedly, AT&T has been considering VoIP over 3G for weeks, but has continued to limit VoIP mobile apps to Wi-Fi networks up until even yesterday, when popular digital voice service Vonage released its own iPhone app, crippled to fit AT&T's and Apple's existing guidelines.

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Today, we finally welcome Windows Mobile 6.5 and the "Windows Phone" platform from Microsoft. As a part of today's Windows Mobile 6.5 debut, the new Windows Mobile Marketplace app store has opened for business, the new Bing for Mobile app has been unveiled, the My Phone sync and security service has been launched, the first Windows Mobile 6.5 devices have been announced, and the list of Windows Mobile 6.1 devices that can be upgraded to 6.5 has been published.

Microsoft is fully in mobile mode today.

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Today, Verizon and Google announced their partnership on the Android mobile platform, a collaboration that has long been expected, but has recently been bereft of new developments. Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam today said that the discussions between Google and Verizon began some 18 months ago but the timing of this announcement is in no way a reflection of "whatever's currently being discussed on the Hill." (i.e. The FCC's investigation of Apple's Google Voice rejection.)

Through this new partnership, Verizon Wireless will debut its first Android devices in the next couple of weeks. The carrier promised today they will provide "the best possible form factors from [Verizon's] partners in the hardware space, to bring those apps and services to market...there will be different form factors appealing to different audiences."

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After enduring patent infringement lawsuits from AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint in 2006-2007, Vonage lost its commanding position in Voice over IP telephony (also known as digital voice) to cable companies such as Comcast and Qwest. Today, the company looks poised to make a comeback with its new Vonage Mobile app for iPhone and BlackBerry.

The free application lets subscribers place packet-based calls over Wi-Fi or circuit-based calls over cellular networks. It ends up being similar to the Skype iPhone application in that it will only use VoIP if the mobile device is within range of a Wi-Fi signal. Otherwise, it will make traditional wireless calls over AT&T's GSM network. Furthermore, when connected to a Wi-Fi signal for a VoIP call, and a call comes in through the cellular band, Vonage Mobile reportedly drops the VoIP call.

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With a network that is already overloaded with data traffic, AT&T has enlisted the help of Opera Software's server-side compression technology to help bring mobile Web access to even more subscribers.

Today, AT&T debuted four new feature phones, two from Pantech (Reveal and Impact) and two from Samsung (Mythic and Flight) which the company touts as "Full Web Browsing Phones," equipped with a new att.net branded HTML browser that "utilizes advanced data compression from Opera Software, allowing for much faster delivery of HTML Web pages."

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It's quite easy for Adobe to throw around statistics about Flash, and you'll frequently hear members of the Adobe team say such things as "Adobe Flash is installed on 99% of PCs," or "75% of all online games are built in Flash," or "80% of all Web video is encoded in Flash." Though these statistics are dubious, there is little doubt about Flash's ubiquity.

But as mobile Web consumption has dramatically increased, mobile Flash technology has been struggling to deliver the full Web experience to resource-constrained devices. As Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously commented in mid-2008, the full version of Flash was too big, and Flash Lite was too small. What Flash lacked was a product "in the middle" that could fully deliver rich Internet content without also consuming a lot of CPU cycles.

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T-Mobile, Microsoft and Danger have confirmed a major data service disruption affecting an unspecified number of Sidekick users that could last more than three days.

In an official announcement in T-Mobile's support forum Saturday evening, the network operator said, "We expect data services to begin gradually returning in the next couple of hours (Saturday evening), Web browsing capabilities should be accessible first; additional functions such as IM, social networking applications and email will then follow. While we anticipate a significant portion of data services to be restored by Monday, some richer data services may lag. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, and appreciate your patience as we work hard with Danger/Microsoft to resolve this issue."

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This October has been declared National Cyber Security Awareness Month, a month in which Americans are encouraged to learn more about the "national security priority" that is the US communications infrastructure.

"Cyber attacks and their viral ability to infect networks, devices, and software must be the concern of all Americans," President Barack Obama said yesterday. "This month, we highlight the responsibility of individuals, businesses, and governments to work together to improve their own cybersecurity and that of our Nation. We all must practice safe computing to avoid attacks. A key measure of our success will be the degree to which all Americans educate themselves about the risks they face and the actions they can take to protect themselves and our Nation's digital infrastructure."

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According to a DigiTimes report today, newcomer to the smartphone market Acer will concentrate on releasing more Android devices. The source said it expects "at least half" of Acer's new smartphones to launch with the open source mobile operating system next year, even though the company actually showed off mostly Windows Mobile 6.1 devices earlier this year.

Acer first announced support for Android earlier this year, and President and CEO Gianfranco Lanci said it was being tested on several different hardware solutions. Acer's first Android device, the A1, is expected to come to market next month, but still has not been officially announced or specced.

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