512 Pixels

AFP:

The Chicago Tribune said the plan to “utilize as little content from the Associated Press as practical” was aimed at determining whether the Tribune Co., which declared bankruptcy in December, can sever ties with the AP.

The Chicago-based Tribune Co. has been looking for ways to cut costs and in October 2008 it gave the AP the required two-year notice that it might drop the service.

The Chicago Tribune said Tribune Co. television stations and newspaper websites would not take part in next week’s experiment.

The newspaper also said sports statistics from the AP will still be used along with items “considered vital.”

“But the company wants to see to what kind of void the absence of AP stories and photos would have,” the Chicago Tribune said.

As newspapers continue to cut costs, focus on more local news and publish smaller papers, this could become a trend.

Reuters:

AT&T Inc is suing Verizon Wireless in an effort to stop its bigger mobile rival from using “misleading” coverage maps in advertisements that AT&T says are causing it to lose “incalculable market share.”

According to the lawsuit which AT&T filed in Atlanta federal court, a recently launched ad campaign shows maps with white spaces that mislead consumers into thinking AT&T has no network coverage outside of areas where it offers high-speed mobile services, known as third-generation or 3G.

But AT&T argued that its customers can “fully use their wireless devices outside of a ‘3G’ coverage area and undisputedly have coverage in areas depicted by white or blank spaces on the maps used in Verizon’s advertisements.”

From Gizmodo’s Droid review:

Droid is a champion of possibilities: for Motorola, for Verizon, for Android 2.0. It exists to show you what each of them can really do. You can kind of think of it like a Super G1, laying out what it means to be an Android 2.0 phone, with powerful new processors and delicious new displays with sky-high resolutions. If Droid is merely the first in a new wave, we have a lot to be excited about.

Robert Enderle over at tgdaily.com:

…last week VMware servers were brought to their knees as a result of downloads for Fusion 3.0 a product that is used to run Windows on Mac hardware. This would suggest that an incredibly large number of recent Apple customers are putting Windows 7 on their Macs anyway and not waiting for Apple to license the product from Microsoft.

If Mac customers were so interested in using Windows full-time, they would have bought PCs. A surge in VMware downloads just means there are a lot of Mac owners who also need to run Windows. Which is good for Apple — the company’s OS is so compelling, people would rather run it most of the time, and just fire up Windows on an as-needed basis.

And:

Somehow I don’t expect this to make it into a Mac vs. PC commercial, the thought of the Mac guy wearing an “I’m a PC” T-Shirt is a little disturbing. But then if you take into account Psystar’s Rebel EFI utility that lets you run Snow Leopard on a regular PC you could even get to a more disturbing shot of the PC guy with an “I’m a Mac” T-Shirt. Of course, more disturbing for both companies would be that Google had 80 percent of the PC market and both guys end up wearing Google t-shirts.

Wait, what?

Jason Snell on Twitter this afternoon:

Our book about the iPhone has been rejected from the App Store BECAUSE IT CONTAINS THE WORD iPHONE. We were told: You can’t show an iPhone or even use the word iPhone in the icon. (@Pogue’s book does, BTW.) It’s the SUBJECT OF THE BOOK. So basically, you can write a book about the iPhone, and even sell that book on the App Store, but you can’t say what the book is about. In other news, watch for our Macworld Superguide book app. It’s about… something! I have to admit, my initial response to Apple’s rejection was to replace the word iPhone with the image of a hand giving Apple the finger. We worked with Apple’s rejectors. Removed the image of the iPhone. Changed title to bogus “Macworld Superguide for iPhone,” still rejected.

*By best, I mean most ridiculous.

Wired:

In the current developer build of 10.6.2, Apple appears to have changed around a lot of CPU related information. One of the effects of this is Apple killing off Intel’s Atom chip.

This could be a serious setback to what has become rather easy with machines like the Dell Mini 9.

InfoWorld:

Verizon offers three data plans for Droid customers: $30 month on top of your voice plan’s rate for non-Exchange usage, $45 per month on top of your voice plan’s rate for Exchange usage, and $50 per month total cost for a data-only plan (whether or not you use it to access Exchange). Verizon spokeswoman Brenda Raney notes that the requirement to get the $45 “smartphone plan” for corporate e-mail usage applies to any smartphone, such as the BlackBerry – not just to the Droid.

The extra $15/month for Exchange is some serious bullshit, Verizon.

Update: AT&T does it, too. Lame.

Phone Arena News:

Those who purchased the new BlackBerry Storm2 9550 found a Bing application pre-loaded on the device. Earlier this year, Microsoft and Verizon shook hands on a 5 year deal that will make Bing the default search engine on many Verizon phones, even those using Google’s open source Android OS. Keeping up with the attempt by Verizon and RIM to making both Storm models the same when it comes to software (it’s called a guilty conscience!), the carrier “pushed” the app to owners of the first-gen Storm on Friday.

Horrible. I can see bundling the app on new devices, but pushing it to existing customers without warning isn’t cool.

TUAW’s Josh Carr:

The vast majority of parts that Apple ships to repair centers are what they consider “re-manufactured.” As a Genius, I was coached to explain that process when we were asked where the parts came from. Customers would always respond with, “Wait, so you’re giving me a refurbished iPhone?”

[…]

This doesn’t just apply to iPhones and iPods; it actually applies to any part they put into your Apple product. The logic board they put into your MacBook Pro: refurbished. The optical drive they put into your iMac: refurbished. The DC-In Board they put into your PowerBook G4: refurbished. There are many, many parts out there that Apple will happily replace for you, but beware – it’s probably not new. Re-manufactured is no different than refurbished.

In my experience — which is the same as Josh’s according to this post — is that most people (A) already know this and (B) don’t care, as long as their products get back up and running quickly.

Engadget’s Chris Ziegler:

Of course, it’s like dating a supermodel: just because the DROID is unbelievably attractive doesn’t mean you want to marry it. Those that aren’t used to Android (or have tried it before and didn’t like it) might cringe at some of the platform’s nuances, and it’s still not as visually slick as webOS or iPhone OS is. I personally found the physical keyboard to be a pretty miserable experience – worse than the G1 and the CLIQ – an inevitable casualty of trying to fit this much technology into a space less than 14mm thick, but the good news is that the capacitive display is large enough to make the soft keyboard very usable for me. It’s also the smoothest, fastest, most satisfying Android experience on any device to date, a combination of 2.0’s enhancements and the speedy OMAP3 heart powering them.

…via Hulu.

MacNN:

The single largest addition to the setup process is the integration of a clever Migration Assistant tool. Much like Apple’s software of the same name, it’s meant to transfer an existing system to a new one – in this case, to create a VM on a Mac from a Windows PC. It’s relatively painless as it actually uses Bonjour zero-configuration networking to find the Windows computer on the local network and make the conversion. We would definitely take heed of VMware’s advice to use Ethernet for the process, however, as this is not a quick process: with the OS alone taking several gigabytes and likely many apps and documents to bring over, Wi-Fi will simply be too slow and unreliable. It’s also a good idea to have a large amount of space free as the finished VM will likely involve more than the total amount of disk space used by the Windows system.