As of yesterday Directv has launched over 70 of the 100 HD channels promised by year's end. They have started an all out media campaign to enroll HD subscribers by touting their lead over the cable companies. This is a good, given that it will take some time for the cable companies to react. The cable companies are stuck in the mire of having to transmit older analog signals which eats up a major portion of their bandwidth. They have to start managing bandwidth in the same way Directv has done from day 1. It will be interesting to see how many cable subscribers Directv is able to capture.
Last week the iPhone dev team finally broke through Apple's new encryption mechanism in the iPhone's latest firmware. Currently there seems to be only one solution to unlock the GSM phone; iPhoneSimFree (IPSF) is a paying service ($59.99) which seems to truly unlock the phone vs patching the baseband radio firmware. I plan on trying this method this week, however I have to first restore my baseband radio firmware in order to use IPSF. The process is the same as when I used patched the baseband in the first place, I just have to use Apple's original baseband firmware.
I have been working on a Windows Mobile Google Maps vs Windows Live Search comparison, just to learn today that there is a new version which includes voice recognition. This is a pretty big leap frog over what Google offers. I will have to see how well it works. My client update feature did not light up, so I downloaded it using Pocket IE at http://wls.live.com. The version is 2.5.2840.19676. The new version includes gas prices, pretty cool.
This week:
- Rework my comparison of Windows Live Search 2.5 and Google Maps for Windows Mobile.
- Update my iPhone to 1.1.1 and use iPhoneSimFree to unlock the phone.
Comments