Now that the iPhone will soon be on all major (and most) minor carriers, we discuss T-Mobile’s potential resurgence as a major force in the mobile carrier industry. Does its new “un-carrier” plan help or hurt the struggling telecom?
Listen to the the latest episode of inThirty to find out, because according to iTunes, we’re “What’s Hot”.
We wish everyone recovering from Hurricane Sandy well, and episode 65 of inThirty goes out to the team at PSE&G for getting power back to Chaim, Harry, and Justin in time to talk about tablets. Google didn’t fair as well and their scheduled Android event was moved from IRL to online. Chaim managed to collect all of the sweet details about the dot 2 update to Jelly Bean and the hardware that’ll accompany it before he was knocked off the grid but Harry is not impressed. We pit the new Android tablets and the Kindle Fire against the recently announced iPad Mini and discuss price point, features, design, and determine along the way that this holiday season Amazon, Google, and Apple will duke it out in in the less than ten inch category. Chaim and Justin were introduced to a new contender in the ring, the Microsoft Surface, at Microtropolis (go on, Google it), while Harry went undercover at a Microsoft Store to try it. Harry likes its kickstand, Chaim says it’s revolutionary, Justin says it’s mutant disaster of a device. Take some aspirin (that’s a really subtle tablet pun), put on your headphones, and listen up.
Get your abacus app ready because on episode 59 of inThirty we take you through iOS 6′s launch by the numbers. First we hash out how many people will be running this hexa-release of iOS on the flagship iPhone 5, and it turns out, it’ll be quite a few. Something like 2 million people sacrificed their credit card numbers to the gods of industrial design and expect to have a brand spanking new i5 at their door on September 21. We try to calculate the amount of revenue the preorders will generate for Apple but our screens can’t fit all of the digits. Next, we take you through the BOM, the bill of materials, for the new iPhone 5. We figure out how much an extra 16GB of memory, or if you’re in the 1% and opt for a 64GB iPhone, an extra 48GB of memory really costs Apple, and how much profit they squeeze out of people just so they can store all of their Angry Birds high scores on their phones. Finally, Chaim goes all Suzy Orman on us and looks at the total cost of ownership of a carrier contract subsidized iPhone purchase and compares that to buying an iPhone at, gasp, full retail cost and bringing your own plan. For the students out there we should mention: listening to this episode counts as 3 credits of undergraduate study in macroeconomics.
Parents, you’ve got to catch episode 57 of inThirty – do you really want your son or daughter starting the school year without being able to explain the differences between the Motorola Droid RAZR Maxx HD and the Motorola Droid RAZR HD? We didn’t think so. Chaim takes us through the ins and outs of Motorola’s new crop of devices while Harry snores. Some are shipping with Android’s latest release, Jelly Bean, but most, unforgivably, come from the factory with the out of date Ice Cream Sandwich. Harry wakes up in time to gush over Nokia’s newest Lumias, all of which sport Windows Phone 8, or at least will, when they ship, but no one knows when that’ll be. Finally, Justin longs for an Amazon based smartphone, even just so he can tear it down. Oh, and wait, isn’t Apple going to announce something in a couple of days? We cover that, too. We don’t want your kid to show up on the first day of school not knowing the specs of the iPhone 5, after all.
Those last 49 episodes went by like a flash, didn’t they? For our over the hill 50th episode celebration we go three ways and take you through Amazon’s same day shipping, navigating family share data plans, and ask if you really need all those cable channels.