It May Take Up To 10,000 Years Before We Finally Get Rid Of 'Up To' Language In Broadband Marketing

from the up-to-something... dept

It's been nearly a decade since we first started calling out various broadband providers for hyping up their connections speeds using "up to" language, where they say you may get speeds "up to" X Mbps. Up to is the ultimate weasel phrase, because you never have to get anywhere near it, and can actually be well under it, and still be "accurate." Every so often federal regulators jump into the debate -- warning companies about this practice. At least a few broadband providers (especially in the US) have started to move away from using "up to" marketing. But it still is rare to see regulators actually go after anyone for making such misleading claims. Broadband Reports points out that UK telco regulator Ofcom seems to come out with a report every single year at this time promising that it's about to crack down on "up to" marketing, but never actually doing so. At some point, companies realize that the threats about "up to" language are about as accurate as the "up to" claims themselves.

Filed Under: broadband, pricing, speeds, up to, wireless

T-Mobile Finally Kills Off The Sidekick

from the say-a-little-prayer dept

The first ever smartphone that got me excited about what smartphones could do was the T-Mobile Sidekick, made by the company Danger, which was amazingly hyped up for a time in Silicon Valley. It remains the only phone that I ever bought the day that it came out (even though I didn't really use it as a phone, but as a portable email/internet device). Danger made some big mistakes early on, such as taking a pretty big investment from T-Mobile, which meant that no other carriers had any interest in carrying the phone (why help a competitor?) in the US. That really hurt the company's ability to grow. The company also had a really dreadful developer strategy -- initially launching without an SDK for outside developers, and then remaining an extremely closed system that pissed off many developers, and simply made many developers ignore the platform.

In 2007, after the Sidekick had long fallen off the map, and after the initial iPhone had already hit the market, Danger announced plans to IPO, but with financials that were anything but appealing. Microsoft stepped in and bought the company instead, probably more for the (remaining) talent than anything else. A year later, there was a massive server failure, that caused a bunch of people to lose data. It became clear that the platform was really on its last legs.

And, now, finally, T-Mobile is putting it out of its misery and will be shutting off service to its Sidekick servers. If you don't remember (or never knew), the way the Sidekick worked was everything had to go through special Sidekick/Danger servers hosted by your ISP (in some ways similar to the way Blackberries work). So, without those servers, the few remaining Sidekicks become even more useless. Somewhere, buried in a box, I'm pretty sure I still have my original (black and white!) Sidekick. I might just have to put it on my desk as a reminder of how quickly technology changes.

Filed Under: hiptop, sidekick, smartphones
Companies: danger, microsoft, t-mobile