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Fat Jump Pro (By SID On)Developer: SID On Price: $0.99 Version Reviewed: 1.2 Download: here Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.Requires iOS 4.0 or later. Located in the Warsow,Poland-SID on an independent mobile application developer has announced a recent update of Fat Jump Pro for the iPhone,iPad and iPod touch.Fat Jump Pro is a fast paced vertical arcade action for the iOS devices.Using the tilt controls the player must guide the jumping,little green hero (a healthy and crispy cucumber) up a never ending series of platforms... |
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Thursday, 10 November 2011
The Data Plan Dilemma Gets Uglier: Verizon To Drop Unlimited Plans Ahead of iPhone 5 Release
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Data transfer is the lifeblood of smartphone usage — and the thing that sends mobile phone bills (and tempers) through the roof. New news of Verizon canceling its unlimited data plan ahead of the iPhone 5‘s release joins a recent report that AT&T is overcharging for data usage on the iPhone and iPad. When will the data gouging stop? As the summer heats up, people might have more to stress about than the rising price of gasoline — a pair of news stories have surfaced this week concerning data plans on America’s top mobile carries — AT&T and Verizon — and how iPhone users are systematically getting as gouged at the “data pump” as they are the gas pump.
The iPhone 5 News Blog posted an article earlier in the week about a class-action lawsuit filed against AT&T for purportedly overcharging all 20 million of their iPhone and iPad users for “phantom” data transfers when the devices are not even in use, leading to bills that are anywhere from 7% to 300% higher than what they should be. Clearly, stories like this raise the level of concern on the part of prospective iPhone 5 customers, who fear that new features such as a cloud storage, NFC, and the 4G network (likely to debut in the iPhone 6), will only exacerbate data transfer usage. In our previous article, we postulated that the next shoe to drop on this developing story would focus on Verizon.
Well, the second shoe has dropped.
Data Plans: Moving In the Wrong Direction
Over the years, telecom-related plans have always moved from incremental billing to flat rate billing. Think about it: early Internet access on services like AOL were billed hourly, but eventually were forced to move to a flat rate billing model. The same has been true with long distance phone calls, with most land line voice plans replacing minute-by-minute billing with a flat rate.
Data plans, however, seem to be moving in the opposite direction.
With this news of Verizon abandoning unlimited data plans, smartphone users will be forced to scrutinize their own mobile Internet usage (particularly in our weak economy), much in the same way that mobile phone users have struggled to keep track of their “minutes” of phone usage. But as more and more mobile plans include either unlimited or high-level voice usage allowances, it is clear that carriers like Verizon and AT&T are looking for new ways to raise revenues, and hitting smartphone users up for data usage is clearly the new cash cow.
What the larger companies like Verizon and AT&T are failing to recognize is that they are giving price-leading mobile networks like Sprint the opportunity to undercut them on data plan pricing in the future. In the past, when Internet providers like AOL switched from hourly billing to flat rate pricing, it was a viable and necessary move, since more and more people were getting “online” every month; there were enough newcomers to the Internet experience to allow AOL to make more money with flat rate pricing, since it would attract more new customers.
But with an already established smartphone customer in place worldwide, carriers like Verizon would seemingly have more to lose by nixing their flat rate data plan, ostensibly losing that edge over their fiercest competitor, AT&T, and encouraging their own iPhone users to conserve and script on their data usage. And what if Sprint gets the iPhone 5? In spite of the fact that Sprint uses the slower CDMA technology, wouldn’t the iPhone 5 paired with Sprint’s Simply Everything plan look attractive compared to Verizon and AT&T nickel and diming iPhone 5 users on data?
Data plans are getting increasingly ugly for iPhone users, and it looks like the trend toward data gouging is only going to increase as the iPhone 5 looms closer.
This post was written by: Irfan Jam
Irfan Jam is a professional blogger, web designer and front end web developer. Follow him on Facebook
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