Mobile Phone News

We can’t even imagine the uproar that AT&T and Apple would be dealing with if FaceTime calls — which travel over WiFi alone — siphoned minutes out of your cellular plan’s voice bucket, but fortunately, that’s a doomsday scenario we’ll never need to worry about because it’s at this time been confirmed that they’re totally minute-free. What’s more, when you start by initiating a voice call, it ends as soon as you switch from voice to FaceTime — so you won’t be charged for the portion of the call that’s conducted over FaceTime in that case, either. Of course, as long as FaceTime is an iPhone 4 exclusive, it’s plan to be pretty limited in scope — but once other vendors start getting in on the open standard (if “standard” is an appropriate term in this place) it’ll get a lot juicier, we suspect.

PSA: iPhone 4’s FaceTime won’t use your voice minutes originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Mon, 21 Jun 2010 18:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

At just 3fps and 213 x 160 resolution, we hesitate to call iVideoCamera a “video recording app” — it’s really more of an extremely low-res continuous-shooting still camera — but at least owners of iPhone 3Gs and original iPhones at this time have some sort of option for capturing their most treasured moments as one o’ them newfangled moving pictures. Jailbroken solutions are nothing new, but this marks the first time a video recording app for older iPhones made it all the way through to the App Store, and at just 99 cents, it may not really matter that the output sucks. At any rate, the real news in this place might be the fact that iVideoCamera is believed to be using unpublished APIs, so this might signal the opening of the floodgates — not to say the App Store necessarily needs any more floodgates opened.Apple greenlights ridiculously crappy video recording app for older iPhones originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Wed, 16 Dec 2009 23:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Nearly six months after large-scale trials kicked off, China Unicom — the only carrier among China’s nationals to be deploying HSPA — has broken the magical million-subscriber mark that have made the leap to its “Wo” 3G network. If you’re wondering whether the recent launch of the iPhone on Wo has contributed to that count, the answer is a definitive “no” — amazingly, a mere 5,000 units have apparently been sold so far, likely due to the phone’s prohibitive cost and the availability of unlocked devices and engaging attention alternatives. Be that as it may, the carrier seems convinced that the iPhone will contribute to Unicom’s bottom line in the fourth quarter, countered by continued marketing and build-out costs for Wo. Networks aren’t cheap — particularly when you’re dealing with a country the size (and population density) of China.

Filed under: China Unicom, Apple