We don’t know if Verizon’s Unlimited Plan announcement had anything to do with it, but AT&T announced today an unlimited plan for the same $99 as Verizon. The plan will be available starting Friday, February 22, and like Verizon’s, it only includes voice calling, data and messaging will cost extra. The plan will be available to both existing and new customers, and anyone can get it month-to-month with no contract. We find AT&T’s plan very good for consumers.

We had a feeling that the lineup of unlimited plans we got word of earlier this week were too good to be true, and sadly it was. Verizon has made their Unlimited Plans offical, offering three plans that can each have additional lines added for an additonal cost. The $99/month Basic Plan includes limitless calling only, messaging of all types and data still cost extra, while the Select Plan ($119.99 per month) offers messaging but you will still have to pay $1.99 per MB of data. The Premium Plan is the one that’s really unlimited, offering up unlimited everything for $139.99 per month or $269.99 for two lines. With this news we are let down.

Like we predicted about a week ago, the long-rumored GSM Palm Centro is now officially available on AT&T upsetting Sprint’s expiring exclusivity, giving AT&T users access to the amazingly small handset. Unlike Unlike Sprint’s version, the AT&T Centro uses EDGE data for a somewhat slower browsing experience; besides that, though, it features a 1.3 megapixel camera, microSD slot, Bluetooth 1.2, support for AT&T’s push-to-talk service, and a full QWERTY keypad. Price with contract and rebate is $99.99.

Via AT&T

Many techies have sent have written in saying that Verizon is going to offer unlimited calling plans. Starting Tuesday February 19th, Verizon will offer the following plans:

$100 - Nationwide Unlimited (voice)
$120 - Nationwide Select Unlimited (voice, SMS, MMS)
$140 - Nationwide Premium (voice, SMS, MMS, VZNav, VCAST, email)
$150 - Nationwide Email and Messaging (voice, SMS, MMS, and data)
$170 - Nationwide Global Email and Messaging (voice, SMS, MMS, and international data)
$200 - Family plan with two lines, $100 per additional line.

More benefits included for premium-paying unlimited users:

5GB cap on data is out
No contract extension for current customers
Available on one or two year agreements
All plans include Mobile Web 2.0 portal access (skip it)
No roaming or long distance

Thanks to everyone who tipped us.

Dell announced Tuesday their plans to purchase the business email services company MessageOne for $155 million in cash. MessageOne’s software, which is delivered to customers over the Internet, helps companies manage and archive e-mail, minimize outages and prevent data losses, said Dell in a statement. MessageOne was co-founded by Dell’s Michael Dell with his brother Adam Dell and is owned in part by Impact Venture Partners and Impact Entrepreneurs Fund. If there is a deal, Michael Dell, his wife Susan and their children’s trust will receive about $12 million. Adam Dell will get about $970,000 and his parents will receive about $450,000.

Via Reuters

Cricket wirelesswas the first wireless company to offer unlimited cell phone service and now Sprintis joining with them. Unlimited use of everthing is available from Sprint. The Sprint Helio phone has had an unlimited service for some time, and just lowered the monthly fee to $99, while Cricket has offered unlimited service it is nice to see that a truely reliable provider now offers a true unlimited everything plan.

The bad news is that it is only available in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Tampa, and Minneapolis-St. Paul. But for the lucky people in those cities for $119.99 a month you get unlimited voice, texting, web, email and picture mail. The plan is available now.

Most of the news from Sandisk is about new higher capacity and we give you a picture, but today we have a different story. Sandisk has just announced two new memory cards. The first is a 16-gigbit flash chip that contains three bits per cell, based on Toshiba’s “3D” flash tech. It will be available in March. The chip features 8MB/sec write performance, and is much smaller than conventional MLC chips.

Sandisk also announced that they are working on 43nm MLC fabrication, which will bring us 32 gigabit flash chips. Those will be available later this year. No word on pricing at this time.

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For months there have been rumors of NVIDIA acquiring Ageia and now it is confirmed that those rumors are true. We have not heard the amount that NVIDIA paid for Ageia, but the company says the move made sense due to the similarities in GPU and PPU designs. There has always been a war between the companies so it will be interesting to see how the industry reacts to the news.

Southwest Airlines has announced they will begin to test in-flight Wi-Fi as of the summer of 2008. Just after JetBlue and American Airlines, announced that they are also testing in-flight Wi-Fi. The service is satellite-delivered and will be provided by Row 44, who claim to be the current leader in airborne broadband communication. The first part of the testing phase will be on only four planes and will allow passengers access to e-mail, music, shopping and virtual private networks.

Row 44 is also working with Alaska Airlines and Virgin America to provide in-flight Wi-Fi access. The exact date for testing on Southwest Airlines has not been announced.

 

Most of us techies use Bluetooth and WiFi because it is much faster and more efficient when used to transfer data between devices, compared to IR (infrared). KDDI R&D Laboratories have found a way to make IR reach speeds of 1Gbps. In fact that is 250 times faster than the previous limit of 4Mbps. They claim that they can transfer a full music CD in under a second. We hope that there are devices in the future that offer this new IR technology. But most likely manufacturers will stick with Bluetooth and WiFi.