By Satish |

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

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• Virgin Mobile USA To Kill Their Postpaid Service (Helio) On May 25th
• AT&T wants to make sure your iPhone works at SXSW
• Video: Hasty hacker hobbles together a Windows Phone 7 skin for older WinMo phones
• Microsoft: No, WinMo 6.5 devices will not be upgraded to Windows Phone 7
• Motorola Cliq XT with T-Mobile branding caught in the wild

Virgin Mobile USA To Kill Their Postpaid Service (Helio) On May 25th Update: This is now confirmed. See Virgin Mobile's statement below. According to a series of tips I've just received from multiple trusted sources, Virgin Mobile USA is planning to shut down the post-paid chunk of their wireless services on May 25th, 2010. You see, there once was a little wireless carrier called Helio. Bringing over all kinds of crazy sliding what-nots from South Korea, they tried their damnedest to offer the coolest cell phones on the block. They also bled money like a busted spigot, burning $710 million before they were ready to call it quits. In June of 2008, Virgin Mobile (who then offered solely pre-paid wireless plans) came along and snatched up Helio for $39 million in stock, primarily to serve as a foundation for their then non-existent postpaid service. A great plan, until Sprint acquired Virgin Mobile just a year later, primarily for their pre-paid service. Sprint obviously already has a big ol' post-paid service, making Virgin Mobile's (relatively small) post-paid service mostly useless. As a result, Virgin Mobile will be ending their postpaid offerings come May 25th, less than two years after they purchased it in the form of Helio. It's currently unclear what will happen to active Virgin Mobile postpaid accounts, though they will presumably be transitioned over to Sprint's postpaid services. We reached out for a comment from the two companies early this morning, and have not yet received a response. Update: We've just confirmed this with Virgin Mobile. Current Virgin Mobile (ex-Helio) customers will not automatically be transitioned to Sprint. Here's what they said: No customer will be automatically migrated to Sprint's postpaid service. However, Sprint has created a special offer for our customers. Current postpaid customers are being given $50 towards the purchase of a Sprint postpaid handset with a new two-year agreement. This credit is in addition to any applicable rebates that may apply. Postpaid customers moving from Virgin Mobile to Sprint will also receive $150 off of handsets as part of Sprint's standing new customer offer. Activation fees will also be waived.

AT&T wants to make sure your iPhone works at SXSW Anyone who's been to SXSW in the past few years, ever since the iPhone's release, knows that the AT&T network absolutely explodes during the festival. Texts, if they ever make it through, take hours; calls are dropped at an alarming rate, even by AT&T standards; and Internet access is essentially impossible. It's hard for AT&T to keep up because Austin, any other week of the year, isn't absolutely flooded with iPhone users mucking about, asking where the Facebook party is, or if they're on the list for the Gawker party. (I'm on the list, but I'm not going this year so it doesn't matter.) The point is, AT&T has its hands full that week, so let's give them an A for effort for trying to prevent another iPhone meltdown this year. SXSW starts on March 12, and runs through March 21. It's a couple of days worth of tech, music, movies, and open bars. It's sort of an exaggeration, but every single attendee rocks the iPhone. It brings AT&T's network, already sorta meh, to it knees. This year, though, AT&T has prepared itself for the huge influx of users. AT&T has installed a distributed antenna system at the Austin Convention Center. In a perfect world, it adds the equivalent of eight cell towers to the covered area. AT&T has also three temporary cell sites for good measure. These things are typically installed during big, but temporary events. Think Super Bowl or, well, large conventions. The company also says it has "added fiber-optic connections to more than quadruple the backhaul capacity of each of the eight cell sites that serve the event area, and temporary sites will also be served by extensive backhaul." Whatever that means! Fingers crossed, every SXSW attendee will be able to FourSquare till their battery dies. That's all you can ask for. Flickr

Video: Hasty hacker hobbles together a Windows Phone 7 skin for older WinMo phones Posted: 01 Mar 2010 11:06 AM PST Wowza. Consider me impressed. It took Microsoft 3 years to develop Windows Phone 7 Series — but its only taken 2 weeks for some far-too-talented dabbler to recreate the look and feel of the new OS as a skin for older Windows Mobile handsets, relying on nothing but screenshots and demo videos. Get ready for tons of fake Windows Phone 7 videos and people saying "No! Seriously! I swear my buddy has Windows Phone 7 on his 3 year old WinMo handset!". While impressive as heck as a user-made mod, it's important to clarify that this is just an interface tweak, built on top of Lakeridge Software's WisBar Advance Desktop — it's not a port of a Windows Phone 7 ROM or anything of the sort. Think of it like HTC's TouchFlo interface: it's fun to look at — but deep down, it's still Windows Mobile 6.5 (in this case, running on a Toshiba TG01). The man behind the mod, LeSScro, hasn't released the mod for public consumption just yet – keep an eye on this thread at XDA Developers for its eventual release.

Microsoft: No, WinMo 6.5 devices will not be upgraded to Windows Phone 7 Posted: 01 Mar 2010 10:12 AM PST Cue the sad trombone, folks. If you were waiting around with your Windows Mobile 6.5 device with hopes that Microsoft would one day bless it with a new chance at life in the form of Windows Phone 7, it's time to move on. APC Magazine just got the full spiel from Microsoft themselves: Windows Mobile 6.5 devices won't be upgradable to Windows Phone 7 series. (You hear that? Five hundred XDA hackers just scoffed and said "Yeah, we'll see about that.") Why? Standards. Microsoft has a very, very, almost ridiculously strict set of hardware guidelines that they want manufacturing partners to follow when building Windows Phone 7 Series handsets — and for the most part, old handsets just don't fit the bill. They either lack one of the three mandatory keys (search, back, and Windows key), or — get this — they have too many keys. A while back, a shot of the HTC HD2 allegedly running Windows Phone 7 Series hit the net. We were quick to debunk it here, with our reasoning being that the HD2 lacked the mandatory search key. Sure enough: Microsoft's GM of Mobile Communications in the Asia-Pacific, Natasha Kwan, says the HD2 won't be getting the upgrade "because it doesn't have the three buttons". Of course, this just means that they won't be getting the upgrade treatment from Microsoft. As we mentioned above, there's probably a mighty army of hackers just waiting to get their hands on Windows Phone ROMs for the sake of down-porting it to older handsets; if it's feasible, it'll probably happen.

Motorola Cliq XT with T-Mobile branding caught in the wild Posted: 01 Mar 2010 09:39 AM PST Ever since the announcement of the Motorola Cliq XT back at Mobile World Congress, every whisper and rumor has indicated that T-Mobile US would be picking it up come March 10th. While that date is still in no way confirmed, it's looking pretty likely that the launch can't be too far off. A handful of shots of the Cliq XT rocking T-Mobile's logos have just made their way to the guys over at AndroidCentral, indicating that it's made its way into the hands of someone not under 2 tons of Non-disclosure agreements — such as a store manager or inventory handler. Being that this ones running Android 1.6 and lacks the physical keyboard that the original Cliq had, I'm not feeling it – anybody out there going to be camping in line for this one?