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AT&T and T-Mobile are about to merge for $39 Billion. It is going to be a mixture of cash and stock in the deal. Although it looks like nobody really wins in this deal. As a matter of fact the consumers of these providers are noted to be the biggest losers in said deal. T-mobile has always been very aggressive with their plans which has worked well for a lot of consumers but with this merger who knows what will happen to people on T-mobile plans, also now we have to worry about the fact that there will only be three major carriers now, AT&T, Verizon and Sprint. Sprint was actually working on buying out T-Mobile until AT&T jumped in and stole the show with the $39 Billion dollar deal. So now we will see what this buyout will mean not only for the consumer but for the other two competitors that are still in the wireless game.

A few posts ago I wrote about Delicious a bookmarking site that you can log into from anywhere and get any bookmarks you have saved. Well it is now being sold for a nice little price tag of around $1-$2 Million. Although the sources that are stating these numbers do not have any information on the actual buyer of the software but they did say it was a strategic partner. Although in my last post about Delicious I did add that it was possibly going to be bought and it looks like that is going closer to being a reality. This will be a very interesting get for company that is buying Delicious. It is said that this is one of the most highly regarded products at Yahoo and that people are very loyal to Delicious. And with Delicious being the most widely used internal property, this will be a solid get for whoever is buying Delicious. There will be more to come on this once the deal is complete which from some sources say could be as early as next week!

There has been wide speculation that next iPhone with have a NFC chip in it. Now for those who don’t know what NFC is, it is known as Near Field Communication. It is suppose to enable mobile payments and other contactless communications between phones and special readers. This chip has been rumored to be in the iPhone 5 and since Google has built NFC into its latest phones on the Android you would think that Apple would compete to have the same technology. Although now there are reports that the iPhone 5 is not going to have it, a report from a United Kingdom publication named The Independent, said on March 14th that Apple has decided not to incorporate the NFC chip into the next generation iPhone due to the lack of a clear standard across the industry. Although we really won’t know for sure until Apple holds its annual iPhone event in June.

The New York Times announced they have a new paywall. While the top news stories will be free to read there will be a number of different pricing tiers for accessing the articles for different devices. The New York Times is even okay with give Apple their standard 30 percent. Although here is what the loophole, if you access the New York Times via Facebook or Twitter you will actually be allowed to read for free. There is also no limitation to this. The Wall Street Journal has also done this in the past, although they did it through Google. The key to it is easy but only few people really knew the trick to accessing WSJ articles through Google without having to pay. Simple as just Googling the title of the article you want to read and by accessing through a link on Google you were able to access the article. Guess we can start calling this the Social Loophole. Have fun reading!

It’s just been 24 hour but IE9 has hit the ground running and taken the internet by storm. Internet Explorer 9 has been downloaded over 2.35 million times in the first 24 hours since it’s release on Monday night. That is over 27 downloads every second or if you really growing. Although even though those numbers are nice to see, Firefox still has IE beat. Firefox version 3.5 was downloaded 5 million times in 24 hours and Firefox 3 in 08 was downloaded a massive 8 million times in one single day. But that number is a bit inflated if you figure that back in 08 there wasn’t many browser choices that were as secure as Firefox. Now with Google Chrome, Safari and of course the newest version of Firefox on the way this new Internet Explorer might actually be comparable to the likes of Chrome and Firefox. Below is a video of the IE9 launch event that can fill you in on what IE9 is all about!

So believe it or not it has been a month since the iPhone 4 hit the market on Verizon and well it seems to have made a solid impression. The real question is will it continue? An analytics company that tracks mobile phones named Chitika has kept a close eye on this launch and they have some pretty interesting information from just this past month’s launch of the iPhone on Verizon. 1 out of every 8 iPhones in the US market is on the Verizon network. That’s about 12.4 percent if you like percents. So now it comes down to whether or not Verizon can keep the shift going or if it will stay around the 12%. I have a feeling that it will probably hover around 12% maybe go as high as 16-20% but my thoughts are that it will grow substantially when the iPhone 5 comes out. If you have been following my blogs since I started writing them you know I wrote a compelling article on why you should wait for the iPhone 5 vs. jumping onto the iPhone 4 wagon. So the next month should be interesting to see if the iPhones percentages rise on Verizon or stay the same, I will keep everyone updated on what I find as time goes on.

In the epic battle of the Zune and iPod, it seems like the iPod has finally won. Microsoft has decided to remove the Zune from its lineup of devices. Well at least the hardware is going away. Microsoft has decided that it would be best to stop making Zunes. But the real question is, does anyone really care? I personally jumped on the Zune bandwagon when it first came out and for the most part I was just mildly impressed. Although it looks like they are going to keep the Zune software up to date since it has become a staple in the Xbox 360 and is also on the Windows phones. It is unclear if Microsoft will rename the software side of things or just keep the name Zune. Microsoft will continue to sell the rest of the Zunes that have already been produced. So if you want something that might be a relic very soon go grab yourself a Zune HD!

So many friends and I are always going back and forth about what phone is better the iPhone or the Android. The debate usually starts up when one of our phones has a major glitch or issue. Well today I get to put another small on the iPhone. Did anyone who had an iPhone have to get up for work on Sunday and happen to use the iPhone as your alarm clock? Well if you did you might have been extremely late to work. You may ask why if you don’t answer yes to that question. Well a glitch in the iPhone caused many of the phones to spring back instead of spring ahead. So if you were looking to get up for let’s say 8AM you got up at 10AM. Oh the wonders of the iPhone! I personally have a Droid X and I woke up and checked my phone and then checked my PC and cable box and wouldn’t you know it, all of the times were correct. Now this was said to happen in US iPhones and isn’t the first time this issues has come up. Also it didn’t matter which carrier you used for the iPhone both AT&T and Verizon had this issue, so if it is not the carrier then it is the phone. This being a known glitch it has happened before outside of the US. In England this happened back in November 2010 the alarms failed to switch from British Summer Time to Greenwich Mean Time and this also happened in Australia during their daylights savings time. So the question begs to be asked, will Apple fix this glitch before the next daylight savings time??? A+ Apple…. A+!

Pwn2Own 2011 is here and for those who are unaware of what this is, basically some of the greatest minds in the in technology come together to try and hack devices and software to prove and show vulnerabilities in some of the technology out there. I wanted to share some highlights I found so far. First Research in Motion has a new webkit browser for the Blackberry. A three man team was able to hack this browser and able to hack the device and steal the contact list and image database. IE8 on Windows 7 was found to have three vulnerabilities on a 64-bit SP1 version of Windows 7. Believe or not thought the first product to be hacked was a Macbook. The firm VUPEN was the company who was able to find the vulnerabilities in the Safari browser which they were able to than hijack the machine.

Now don’t freak out about this. The reason this happens is so they can all make their products better. Anyone was able to hack a product won a prize and shared the information of the vulnerabilities so the companies could fix the issues. Most of these are already being fixed as speak they have not already been placed in updates already. So there you go sometimes hacking can be positive.

A while back I wrote a blog about the absurd charges kids where racking up on the iPhone and iPads while playing games. Purchasing in game items and such which cost some unhappy iPhone owners hundreds of dollars. The new iOS 4.3 update that came out on Wednesday will require a password after an application is downloaded. For those who didn’t know there is was a 15 minute period after something was downloaded before you needed to put in a password again. Which meant if you downloaded a game for your kid and they started playing it and there was some in game content you could purchase well a child, unknowingly could purchase said items without having to put a password in, which caused many people huge bills on their credit cards via the iTunes account. This is good to know that Apple hears the cry’s of unhappy customers and are willing to regulate things like this.