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The Sprint Nextel merger, and what you should know.

scaredpoet

Sprint

CNet News has an interesting article analyzing the “new Sprint.” A lot of it points out some of the same issues I raised when I first complained about what a dumb idea this was. Namely:

– While investors love a merger, any merger, this one combines two companies that couldn’t possibly have less in common from a technical standpoint, unless one company happened to be a cell phone company and the other happened to, oh, sell seafood or something.

– No synergy until at least 2010. Basically the “new” Sprint is going to be running “old” technology until at least that date, right alongside its existing state-of-the-art network, and trying to leverage both as somehow equal, even though they speak different languages.

The only real gain seems to be that Sprint gets to leapfrog to the #3 spot in the US, in terms of how many paying customers it has, even if those customers aren’t unified. That’s a high price to pay just to become #3.

One little oversight…

scaredpoet

rokr

Meet the Motorola ROKR, the first cellphone compatible with iTunes.

Just one problem: you would expect a net-capable iTunes cellphone to be able to access the Apple Music store wirelessly, enabling you to purchase music on the go.

But, nope! You can only transfer music to your phone by plugging the phone into your computer, iPod-style.

So I guess the only real outstanding feature of this phone is that it plays AAC and MP3 files. Oh, wait, so can other phones.

Oh… well, maybe it’ll offer some form of high-speed data. Oh, wait… Motorola has quietly pulled high speed EDGE from its current and future phone lineup, including the ROKR. Oops.

Well, maybe the ROKR has a huge amount of phone memory. Oh wait, it doesn’t… it uses TransFlash, like other phones.

iPod interface? Well, you can’t get the full experience without a scroll wheel, which the ROKR lacks.

So uhm, what’s the advantage to this phone, again?

Paypal decides that no good deed should go unpunished

scaredpoet

Isn’t it ironic that when one of the fabled scummiest sites on the ‘net actually endeavors to do something nice for a change, the good deed doesn’t go unpunished?

Well, take a look at somethingawful.com. I’m sure that the five people who actually read this blog are aware of SA and their brand of humor, but if you happen to be googling by this page and have had your head under a rock since teh beginningz of teh INTARWEB, let me describe it as… no, you know what? You just gotta visit the site. It defies explanation.

Anyway, SA’s content was orignally hosted in New Orleans, and we all know what happened there. (If you don’t know, just stop reading, right now. Because I’m not going to waste my time explaining it to you.) Feeling charitable, the proprietor of SA decided to raise money for Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts via PayPal donations, and managed to raise $30,000 in a mere nine hours.

And it would probably have raised more, if it weren’t for PayPal. Because they decided that a charitable effort on somethingawful.com is just way too suspicious and therefore must be fraudulent. End result: they freeze the account’s assets. How nice.

And PayPal wonders why whenever so much as a cent lands in my account, I immediately withdraw it to my bank.

So a word to the wise: if you’re looking to gather donations for any cause, don’t use PayPal. As it stands, PayPal earns money on interest for every day that you keep an account funded, and while I have no problem with this for commercial transactions, I do take issue with it for charity-bound funds, especially charity-bound funds that they’ve intentionally tied up in red tape. Especially for a company that is not under bank regulator oversight, even though it looks, walks, smells and acts like a bank. You might instead want to consider opening a free checking account at a bank and simply accepting checks. Or, just tell people to donate to established chairities, such as the Red Cross.