Derek Kessler is Special Projects Manager for Mobile Nations. He's been writing about tech since 2009, has far more phones than is considered humane, still carries a torch for Palm (but BlackBerry's alright, too), and got a Tesla because it was the biggest gadget he could find. You can follow him on Twitter at @derekakessler.
Pre-paid plans are becoming a more-and-more viable option these days, especially if carriers continue to make improvements like Verizon has just done with the introduction of their new "ALLSET PLANS" (no more all-caps from here on out, mkay). These new plans start at $35-a-month for basic phones, but if you're smart and opt for a smartphone, it starts at a mere $45-a-month. That low...
The build-outs of the LTE networks of AT&T and Verizon in the United States have hit the point where they're covering smaller cities in 4G radio signals. In fact, just today Ma Bell announced that they're flipping the switch to turn on AT&T LTE coverage in 12 municipalities around the United States, though the largest in this batch is Bismark, North Dakota, population: 65,000....
If you happen to be on one of AT&T's Mobile Share plans and have friends, relatives, acquaintances, coworkers, or just people you want to message with that happen to live outside of the United States, then we've got good news: AT&T is making international messaging free on February 28th. In addition to the free messaging, AT&T is rolling out reduced international calling...
The old adage goes that you have to spend money to make money, and that's exactly what T-Mobile's been doing. Today the fourth-place US carrier reported their Q4 2013 earnings and the results were mixed. While they added 1.65 million new customers — good for the long haul — the hyper-aggressive marketing and incentives resulted in a quarterly loss of $20 million. Granted, that's on...
We go hands-on with the very first BlackBerry 10 smartphone manufactured by Foxconn: the BlackBerry Z3. Announced today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the Z3 is set to retail for less than $200 and is bound for a launch in Indonesia (hence the "Jakarta" codename). It spots a 3G radio (no LTE here, yet), a 5-inch display, and is said to have a long battery (typical for a...
BlackBerry announced today that they have signed car manufacturer Daimler AG and airplane builder Airbus Group as BES 10 customers with plans to deploy BlackBerry 10 devices to their workforce. Dr. Michael Gorriz, CIO of Daimler AG said: "BES10 in combination with BlackBerry 10 smartphones offers us the safest environment for mobile device management. With BlackBerry Balance...
Late last year saw AT&T adding international LTE roaming in Canada and the UK, and today they're adding 13 more nations to the list. If the added services are treated in the same way as AT&T's deals with EE in the UK and Rogers in Canada, the rates charged for the "Data Global" add-ons won't change with the addition of LTE services, though AT&T did not say if that would be...
The advent of social media profiles has created an interesting problem, from a philosophical perspective: what happens to your profile after you die? Originally they would just go dormant unless somebody had your password, but then Facebook updated their policy to place the profiles of our dearly departed into a "memorial" mode where visibility was restricted to only friends. But...
Yesterday we reported on the plans put into motion by the United States Air Force that would transition the branch of the military away from BlackBerry devices and towards iPhone and Android products. Understandably, security is a major concern for the Armed Forces, and BlackBerry has been known for years for taking security very seriously. Competitors have been stepping up their game...
Stand-up comedian Jerry Seinfeld's been back on the prowl recently with his oddball and descriptively-titled Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, though his eponymous "show about nothing" has never been far from the public consciousness (see: iToilet and Google Wallet). Seinfeld himself showed up on The Tonight Show this week and he, as he's prone to do, talked about how we use our...
The United States Air Force is replacing 5000 legacy BlackBerry smartphones with Apple's iPhone, and eventually all of their BlackBerry users will have to make the changeover. The announcement, reported by Defense News, comes as the future of BlackBerry within the Department of Defense is debated, with the chips seeming to fall on the side of transitioning away from a network supporting...
T-Mobile's caught flack from BlackBerry users over the past weekend for their efforts to woo them over to the iPhone 5s. The "Great offer for BlackBerry customers" campaign went over like a lead balloon for the CrackBerry faithful on T-Mobile, resulting in enough of an uproar that even T-Mobile USA CEO John Legere found himself in the crosshairs. Just a day after the ads went out,...
One week ago we asked you about how your smartphone factors into your dating, romance, and sex lives. And while we expected quite a response, we didn't expect this much of a response. More than 17,000 of you took part in our survey in the past week, and the results were interesting, to say the least. There are plenty of interesting correlations and divergences based on age groups and...
Here at Mobile Nations we like to think of ourselves as being real tech for real people. And we know that in addition to owning smartphones, real people go on dates, send each other photos, have sex, and all sorts of other stuff. The smartphone is playing a greater and greater role in all of that, so we wanted to know just how you are using your smartphone to get it on. We're not...
What a show, #CESlive. The 2014 edition of the International CES was just as wild and crazy as we'd expected, and our coverage was more wild and crazy than we'd ever done before. From curved UHD TVs and OLED displays to smartwatches and smartphones, the millions of square feet that comprised the show floor of CES 2014 was full of the insane, the amazing, and the just plain cool. Up here...
There are two things that have been a huge deal at this year's CES: curved UHD TVs and gadgets that you can wear on your person. While we might blog about television sets on occasion here at Mobile Nations, we just so happen to have an entire site dedicate to the latter: Smartwatch Fans. Editor-in-Chief of Smartwatch Fans Adam Zeis was joined by Kevin Michaluk, Rene Ritchie and Phil...
It's only the second day of CES, but things didn't slow down in the slightest. Between everything happening on the #CESlive stage and the ongoing insanity of the show floor, day 2 of CES 2014 was, for lack of a better term, insane. Kevin checked out the BlackBerry-aping Typo keyboard for iPhone, John Legere insulted the competition, WWE dumped everything they've got on the web, and...
One of the fun things about CES is that we get to bring a good portion of the Mobile Nations team together. Being that we're out around the world, it's rare to have two of us in the same room, let alone 20. So we take that as an opportunity to do fun things, like in-person podcasts. Our first podcast came by way of Phil, Alex, Richard, and Andrew of Android Central. You can expect that...
CES officially kicks off on Tuesday, January 7th, but when it comes to the big press announcements, Monday's the day. Today saw press events from Sony, Audi, Samsung, Huawei, LG, and more. The day wasn't short on drama or hilarity, nor new product announcements. Lots of TVs, lots of phones, lots of tablets, and an impending avalanche of smartwatches and fitness trackers. CES hasn't even...
CRACKBERRY PRESENTS THE BEST OF 2013 AWARDS 2013 was a crazy year for BlackBerry. BlackBerry 10 launched to start off the year we got a few new devices, plenty of great apps, and rounded out the year with a fresh raft of corporate drama and a new CEO. We're not quite sure what 2014 will bring for BlackBerry as a company, but we do know that we'll see...