Today, AT&T has announced the company will offer shared data plans for those customers who have multiple Windows Phones or other smartphones. Available in late August the plans range from 1gb to 20gb with monthly fees as high as $200 plus $30 per smartphone. The shared data plans will also allow customers to add devices, other than smartphones, for an additional monthly fee. Go over your monthly data allotment and it'll cost you an extra $15 per gigabyte.
There will be no changes to AT&T's current device upgrade policy that allows eligible customers to upgrade phones without being required to switch plans. Existing individual and family plans will still remain available for AT&T customers as well.
The plan is limited to ten devices, one of which must be a smartphone, and includes tethering and unlimited domestic calls and texts for smartphones and quick messaging phones. AT&T Mobility's Chief Marketing Officer David Christopher sees the new plan as sharing a bucket of data.
“With these new plans, the more you share, the more you save. They’ll be a good fit for a variety of new and existing customers. But if customers want to stay on their current plan or choose from our existing plans, they can do that, too. It’s their choice."
With the announcement, AT&T joins Verizon and their Share Everything plan by offering shared data. No word if we'll see rollover data as we do with voice minutes (wouldn't that be nice).
So...what do you think? Shared data a good idea? Or does the pricing need to come down a bit before these plans become more attractive?
Source: AT&T
Seems as though we are finally seeing the rollout of the Tango update for Lumia devices. This morning my carrier unlocked Lumia 800 received the notification that an update was available. On plugging in device the update is listed as OSVersion 7.10.8112.7, which has been reported to be the first of three updates for the device (second is Tango 8773, and third is firmware). Whilst Tango has been seen going out elsewhere and onto other devices. Looks like the Lumia 800 is finally get to have a go with Tango.
As part of this update the improvements include better MMS support, exporting contacts to a sim card and selectively import contacts from sim cards also. Along with that are a number of ‘quality improvements’ to the device. Once the update completes, the Lumia devices will then gain access to some of the updated Nokia exclusive apps that are reliant on the Tango flavoured OS.
The update is progressing now on the device I have here. I will update the post when its completed. If you are seeing the update roll to your device be sure to let us know. Details of device and carrier would be helpful too.
[+] Lock Screen is a stellar app and a must-have
Looks like it’s a good week in the Windows Phone Marketplace for deals as we just got tipped that Snack Studios have made their pay-apps free for an undisclosed time.
The developers have numerous apps in the Marketplace and in our opinion, all are top notch with an elegant design and useful functionality. Those are apps are the following:
All of those apps are normally $0.99 but dropped to free on July 7th. There are ‘lite’ versions for some of these apps but you can evidently have the full ones for zero—so hop to it as these are some seriously nice programs.
Hit the links above which take you to the Marketplace or just search for ‘Snack Studio’ to find all of their apps. Thanks, Nettwerk, for the tip!
With the recent release of the Microsoft Office 2013 Customer Preview, many have been hitting a giant wall when it comes to connecting Hotmail and Gmail accounts in Outlook.
Outlook 2013 supports Exchange ActiveSync as an explicit option when creating accounts, which kisses goodbye to the pesky Outlook Connector. The problem is when Outlook can't detect Hotmail (or Gmail) accounts correctly. Should a valid address be entered into the account setup assistant and it can't configure Exchange ActiveSync, it will resort to POP and SMTP protocols. This isn't ideal.
Lucky for those who suffer from the above issue, a simple workaround is available that enables Hotmail users to enjoy the new Outlook experience...
Read moreBen ("The PC Guy") Rudolph has continued to take the Smoked by Windows Phone marketing campaign across the states, and he's showing no signs of easing back with more videos being published to the Windows Phone YouTube account. We previously looked at a handful of new videos being added to the account and commented on how we enjoyed the new style, so it's pleasing to see the company continuing to refine and push the platform using this successful campaign.
With the active "Dare to Live" tour in the UK, which is focusing heavily on the number of wins the platform achieves, the Smoked campaign is relaxed to put more emphasis on how Windows Phone can make participant lives easier through a series of challenges. Check out two more videos after the break.
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It seems that if you’re a Windows Phone fan you got to have merchandise to prove it—rock stars have it, sports teams have so why not smartphones?
If you’ve been looking to part with your money to prove your dedication then you’ll want to swing by the official Windows Phone Gear store powered by Café Press. The store launched last month and since then it has received a new merchandise design—"100,000 apps and counting"—which features a myriad of little Windows Phone app tiles.
The new option is short, simple and is available in a coffee mug, water bottle, sticker and magnet. We’d opt for the coffee mug personally as we think that looks the coolest.
Interestingly, we remember this design was picked up and modified by Microsoft’s KC Lemson (who’s hilarious on Twitter--you should totally follow her) from SharePoint specialist Leon Zandman, which goes to show you that neat designs can come from anywhere.
Head to the Windows Phone Gear store to see if there’s anything that piques your interest. Thanks, marco300, for the heads up
Continuing on our regular From the Forums feature, where we bring you the latest hot threads from our community, there have been a number of discussions that have caught our eye. One of the more debated topics were the Nokia Lumia US sales figures that were circling the web. It was originally believed that the manufacturer has only managed to push out 330,000 Windows Phones since it launched in the states. Head on past the break for the full run through of 'fluff'.
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Baseball Pro '12 (formerly known as MLB Pro '12) is a nice Windows Phone app to keep you up to date with all the stats, scores and news from the Major League Baseball season. The app was recently updated to follow along with players Twitter tweets.
Version 1.4 adds a twitter page to the Player Profile pages so you can see what your favorite ball player is tweeting. Additional features include:
You will need to create a Baseball Pro '12 profile (free) to get the most out of the app. Even if you opt out of creating the profile, Baseball Pro '12 still offers a cornucopia of information from the Major League Baseball season.
Baseball Pro '12 is a free, ad-supported app that you can find here at the Windows Phone Marketplace.
Microsoft today blogged about their strategy for Skydrive and how its going to fit in with Office 2013. Skydrive is already the backbone for many MS services, everything from Xbox Cloud-saved games to providing a space to upload photos when sending from Hotmail. In this little preview, we get a look at how Office may look on WP8, complete with new style Windows logo.
This year will see Office 2013 released, as long as you're signed into your PC with your Live ID it will automatically save your documents to Skydrive as the default option. The post then goes on talk about the new feature of Office 2013 where it will remember the exact paragraph you were last reading so that when you pick up your next device you’ll be right where you left off.
Whilst a mockup - its showing off that new Windows Logo
The post goes on to state that those features will extend to the mobile device also. Synchronised reading position for a document being worked on certainly sounds very useful. What more can we speculate will be rolled into Windows Phone 8? If WP8 is going to be much more business friendly than Windows Phone 7 then I am expecting a good deal of features baked in.
We know that Skype is going to be first class citizen with Office 2013 but I would expect to see Lync thrown in here for good measure. If they are talking about synced reading views then I would expect the same form of touch based reading experience that is offered in Office 2013. Currently Windows Phone already has some nice touches in the Office Hub, recent documents already exists but Office 2013 takes that slightly further by showing documents from all applications the the various storage locations you have been using.
What else might we expect? Well Word 2013 can now edit PDF documents. Perhaps WP8 will be able to dispense with a PDF viewer completely in favour of Word in reading mode. Presence is a huge thing in the corporate world so seeing who’s online for live document collaboration or chat using Lync or Skype? I don’t see why the already excellent Windows Phone version of Office can’t go on to be a real star in the Windows 8 story.
I’d love to know what you would like to see in Office 2013 on Windows Phone 8.
Source: Microsoft
Although news on or about Windows Phone may be slow coming out today there’s still plenty going on in the tech world that’s tied to Microsoft with some residual effects for our favorite mobile OS. Instead of spamming our own site with tangential news, we figured we would just summarize in a digest. Cool?
Today’s new stories that we've found interesting are the following—
So head past the break to catch up on some of these interesting stories making the rounds today...
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