Xbox 360 getting IPTV November 7 - Report

At the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft announced with great fanfare that the Xbox 360 would get IPTV, in a partnership with AT&T. Now, nearly four years later, it appears the console will finally be getting the functionality, according to a report on Engadget.

Citing several leaked slides and screenshots, the tech blog is reporting that starting November 7 Xbox 360 owners will be able to use their consoles as set-top boxes for AT&T's U-Verse IPTV service.

There is a catch, however--two catches, to be exact. Engadget's sources say that to use the service, there must be at least one DVR already in the home and activated to the service, which can provide up to four streams of HD video. Also, only Xbox 360s with hard drives will support U-Verse.

The addition of IPTV will come on the heels of the fall Xbox Live update, which will go live sometime before November 4. Features included in the update are Netflix search, ESPN 3 TV, and more lifelike avatars. The new avatars will be redesigned to better mesh with the Kinect motion-sensing system, which also goes on sale on November 4 for $150.

AT&T increases upgrade fee to $200 for some smartphones

If you're still feeling the sting from AT&T jacking up its early termination fees earlier this year, then you aren't going to like this latest bit of news. AT&T will now charge $200 for anyone that upgrades to a new smartphone model "early," before their original two-year contract term is up. This fee will definitely affect those that change handsets more often than every two years.

Previously, the company typically charged $75 to upgrade early if you qualified, though it has charged many iPhone 3G users the equivalent of $200 to upgrade to an iPhone 3GS after one year. In some cases, however, the company made exceptions based on how long a contract had been in effect or whether a customer had a more expensive voice and data plan. For the launch of the iPhone 4, AT&T even allowed some customers to upgrade without any fee at all.

In a memo to AT&T sales staff, the company noted that the change was necessary due to the increasing prices of smartphones like BlackBerrys and Androids. The pricing change does not apply to feature phones, which will still carry the $75 fee for early upgrades. It also doesn't apply to the iPhone, which, as we mentioned above, AT&T often treats as a special case.

"This change to our exception pricing is necessary to maintain our ability to provide customers with the best selection of devices," the company wrote in the memo. As long as consumers still expect to get smartphones for $200 or so with carrier subsidies, we'll have to expect these kinds of fees for the foreseeable future.

Flashlight app secretly lets you enable iPhone tethering

courtesy of macworld

Handy Light, a newly-available flashlight app for the iPhone, isn’t actually a flashlight app at all—it’s a sneakily disguised tethering utility that lets you share your phone’s Internet connection with your laptop. In other words, it’s an app that’s surely not long for this world.

It’s not surprising that Handy Light managed to trick its way past Apple’s App Store reviewers. To enable tethering, you need to configure an ad-hoc wireless network on your Mac, connect the iPhone to it, tweak some network and proxy settings, launch the app, and then literally tap a coded sequence of flashlight colors. No one could possibly discover the hack by exploring; you need to read detailed step-by-step instructions to get it to work.

Of course, now that the instructions are live, the app surely soon won’t be. Like the $10 NetShare app—which was axed by Apple nearly two years ago, the $1 Handy Light shares your Internet connection without AT&T getting a cent (unless, with all that tethering, you go over your new data cap).

The only question now is when Apple will pull Handy Light from the store, and perhaps whether Steve Jobs will send some heavies to the developer’s house to deliver a knuckle sandwich.

Handy Light requires an iPhone running iOS 4.0 or later, and at least mildly lax moral standards.

Woman gets iPwned!

With everyone talking about the new iPhone selling like crazy, I thought it would be appropriate to revisit an old video. When the first iPhone was released (2G BABY!!!), there was a high demand for them. Therefore AT&T put a one-iPhone-per-customer-policy in effect to prevent people from buying a lot of them and then selling them on ebay (you know who you are). This lady obvious didn't get the memo.

The True Face of AT&T

AT&T's iPhone contract expires in 2010, so will Apple switch carriers?

Courtesy of Dvice by Kevin Hall

The iPhone has been good to AT&T. It helped attract over 4.3 million subscribers toward the end of '08, with 40% of them new to the telecom giant. That's why AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson is currently in talks with Apple to extend the iPhone's exclusivity with his company into 2011. AT&T has been trying to shake off the cobwebs it's gathered from a landline-centric strategy, and breakaway mobile devices such as the iPhone helps it rebuild its brand.

"We have 77 million wireless customers and 30 million consumer phone lines," Stephenson told the Wall Street Journal. "Which customer base would you rather work from? We tend to come at this backwards."

So is there hope? Apple won't say either way. While AT&T's exclusive deal saddened those who didn't want to switch carriers but still wanted an iPhone, apparently Verizon was originally offered the gadget and declined. Hopefully in 2010 Verizon and others will rectify that mistake, and we'll have some choices.

InstallerApp for iPhone Plans to Shake up Apple's Monopoly

Have an iPhone and want to install jailbroken apps that aren't available on Apple's iTunes? Well up until now your only option was to make a choice; help keep the AT&T/Apple iPhone monopoly going or jailbreak your iPhone. Well, not anymore. Now there is a program available for Mac (and soon for Windows) called InstallerApp from RipDev that lets you install jailbroken apps onto your iPhone without it needing to be jailbroken.

InstallerApp is a program that will allow you to download iPhone apps to your computer and then transfer them to your iPhone over a USB connection. Once you get the InstallerApp and have it running, you will see a list of thousands of iPhone apps available from non-app store sources. You can browse by category or search for programs. InstallerApp supports Installer and Cydia, the 2 best known package installer's of jailbroken iPhones.

InstallerApp is commercial software and is available for $7 from RipDev's site.

The bottom line... this is a great way for someone who wants to follow the rules and is too scared to jailbreak their iPhone, but wants to experience some of the great "underground" iPhone apps out there. Apple may try to play Big Brother and shelter us from apps they consider foolish or inappropriate, but with this program, everyone wins.