AT&T reportedly unlocking iPhones for deployed servicemen as well

The nation’s second-largest carrier, AT&T, is beginning to unlock in-contract iPhones for the United States military personnel deployed abroad, a new report claimed Monday. As you know, AT&T is now unlocking out-of-contract iPhones for its regular subscribers.

The unexpected policy change has been instituted following unconfirmed reports last week that some disgruntled customers who had complained about the situation to Apple CEO Tim Cook via email saw their handsets unlocked.

As a result, AT&T subscribers can now slip in a SIM card from another wireless operator and use their 3G GSM iPhones with compatible cellular networks overseas and in the United States, such as T-Mobile USA (which welcomed the change)…

According to unnamed sources who spoke with MacRumors:

In addition to unlocking phones for off-contract customers, AT&T is also quietly unlocking iPhones for U.S. service members still under contract with the carrier.

The publication stressed that federal law mandates that carriers suspend service without penalty for deployed military personnel “upon presentation of their military orders”.

Though AT&T is not required to unlock the handsets, they are nonetheless choosing to do so on their own, the report has it.

If you are considering unlocking your AT&T iPhone, we have a handy survival guide to help find your way around AT&T’s online technical support chat system.

Tanking margins reportedly forcing US carriers to drop iPhone subsidies

Apple may be poised to become the world’s first trillion dollar company thanks to the iPhone, but sustainability of the pricey handset is now being put into question. One prominent analysts warns that United States carriers such as AT&T – faced with plummeting margins at a six-year low – are now considering reducing iPhone subsidies and adopting stricter upgrade policies.

If instituted, these changes could result in a more expensive iPhone and an estimated worldwide drop in sales of 27.5 million units in the June quarter, with a revenue estimate $1 billion below consensus.

Blame it on “aggressive” upgrade policies instituted by the world’s carriers. That’s the crux BITG Research analyst Walter Piecyk wrote in a Monday note to clients (via AppleInsider):

Operators, unwilling to stall the pace of ARPU growth, offered generous upgrade policies including some that enabled a fully subsidized phone upgrade only one year in to a two year contract. We expect those policies to change as the faster upgrade rate of smartphones compared to legacy feature phones has been a costly surprise to post-paid and pre-paid operators, alike.

As a result, Piecyk expects that iPhone sales in the United States will decline four million sequentially to nine million units, resulting in a worldwide drop in sales of 27.5 million units in the June quarter.

Apple retook the title of the world’s leading smartphone maker from Samsung by selling an astounding 37 million iPhones during the holiday quarter.

Interesting enough, the analyst warns carriers are banding together on this initiative. This indicates to me that carriers are growing wary and jealous because profit from the iPhone business is not being split fairly.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt, writing for Fortune, gave this quote from Piecyk’s note to clients:

The commentary by wireless operators is likely to be decidedly more firm in how they plan to continue to hold back the rising phone upgrade rates that are hurting their margins. Even weak operators like Sprint, which has a large contractual commitment with Apple, will likely experience a decline in iPhone sales based in part on changes to its upgrade policies last year.

They will not be alone as we expect a similar trend at Verizon, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, America Movil and Telefonica, to name a few. In the United States, we expect iPhone sales to decline 4 million sequentially to 9 million with the largest impact coming from AT&T, Apple’s largest customer.

He wrote that carriers will “stunt the pace of phone upgrades” in 2012, beginning this quarter, dismisses the rumors of an Apple HD TV set launch in 2012 and downplayed the Chinese market.

The analyst also did what analysts rarely do, downgrading AAPL from “neutral” to “buy”. The company is scheduled to report quarterly earnings in two weeks.

The iPhone is one expensive device to sell even if its users are more valuable to wireless companies than a typical smartphone owner. Wireless operators in the United States spend billions in upfront payments to Apple.

For example, fourth-largest Sprint Nextel had to cough up a whopping $15.5 billion to get an estimated 24 million iPhones. For each iPhone, carriers pay an estimated $600-plus, selling it to consumers for $199 or less with a two-year contract.

The service contract gradually covers cost of subsidy, allowing your carrier to eventually recoup their investment and profit. iPhone subsidies are the highest in the industry because it’s such an iconic device that attracts people.

But with four major carriers now selling the iPhone in the United States and a bunch of local ones either offering or about to offer it, customers are less inclined to switch their network just to get an iPhone. As a result, churn rate is dropping and so are the carriers’ margins.

At the same time, Apple’s margin on the iPhone business remains the envy of the industry as the company continues to gulp up well over half the mobile phone industry’s profits.

We’re only speculating here, but if carriers are really banding together to drop iPhone subsidies, Apple may be forced to make its phone more affordable to everyone.

What do you think, is a $600-plus iPhone really sustainable for carriers? Perhaps that’s just a lame excuse the carriers need to conspire and break Apple’s tight grip on the wireless industry?

iPhone 4 Wallpapers

iPhone 4 Wallpapers...cont

Tsunami 'ghost ship' sunk by US Coast Guard cannon fire

KODIAK, Alaska -- The US Coast Guard used cannon fire Thursday to sink a derelict Japanese "ghost ship" that was left drifting towards the US following last year's devastating tsunami.

The unmanned Ryou-Un Maru fishing boat was sent more than 6,000 feet to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean by a gunnery crew on a Coast Guard Cutter.

Coast Guard Petty Officer 1st Class David Mosley told NewsCore the 200-foot-long ship sank at around 6:15 p.m. Alaska time.

The crew began firing rounds at the slow-moving vessel from a 25-millimeter cannon at around 1 p.m. Alaska time, when the boat was 180 miles west of Sitka, Alaska.

The ship had entered heavily trafficked waters, where large cargo vessels and tankers travel from North America to Asia. The Coast Guard said it posed an "imminent threat" to sailors and the environment.

The Coast Guard reported a light fuel sheen on the water, which was expected to quickly dissipate, and a small amount of floating debris in the spot where the vessel went down.

The vessel had more than 2,000 gallons of fuel on board, although the Coast Guard does not believe this will cause any problems on shore, saying it should be dissipated naturally by the wind, wave and weather patterns before reaching land.

Earlier this year experts warned of a vast, loose debris field drifting inexorably toward the US West Coast following the magnitude 9.0 earthquake of March last year.

The wreckage could include virtually anything that floats, oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer told FOX News -- and that includes portions of houses, boats, ships, furniture, cars and even human remains. Close to 19,300 people are believed to have died in the disaster.

While the bulk of the debris was expected to hit some time in 2014, Ebbesmeyer said, "I would not be surprised to see some fishing vessels by April, and the main mass of debris start arriving a year from this March."

Oakland university shooter was hunting staff member who had left the school

The man accused of slaughtering seven people at Oakland's Oikos University was hoping to find and kill an administrator who no longer works at the school, police said Thursday.

One Goh -- who is reported to have confessed to the Monday killing spree -- was angry that the woman, whose name has not been released, refused him a full refund of his $6,000 tuition fees when he dropped out of his nursing classes late last year, the Oakland Tribune reported.

The woman's identity is being kept a secret due to concerns for her safety, but police said she left the school soon after Goh.

When he failed to find the woman, Goh instead killed six students and a receptionist with a semiautomatic handgun, also wounding three others, before stealing a victim's car and driving to nearby supermarket where he admitted his crimes to staff and was arrested.

He has been charged with seven counts of murder and related offenses, and faces the death penalty. Arraigned Wednesday, he is next scheduled to appear in court April 30 2012, when he is expected to enter a plea.

The husband of one victim, Efanye Chibuko, said Goh's poor behavior while he was a student at the school had been reported by his wife Doris, the class president, to staff.

"The school was aware of his violent tendencies," he said.

Also Thursday, police -- who are still trying to recover the murder weapon -- rushed to a trash can near the Oikos campus after a homeless man reported seeing a gun inside, but a search did not find a firearm. They are continuing to search waterways between the crime scene and arrest site.

The news follows claims a day earlier that Oikos nursing director Ellen Cervellon was Goh's target. Both Cervellon and a close friend were quoted by media outlets saying she had been the target, but was absent from campus Monday morning.

Facebook friends Nasdaq

Facebook has tapped Nasdaq to list its shares ahead of its much anticipated market debut expected in May, delivering a blow to Nasdaq’s arch-rival, the New York Stock Exchange.

The social network founded by Mark Zuckerberg is said to have picked the tech-heavy Nasdaq over the Big Board because it delivered a more attractive marketing and branding pitch, said sources close to the process.

Facebook will file revised initial public offering documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission later today to announce its decision, a source said.

Facebook, whose expected IPO next month could raise as much as $10 billion, will trade under the ticker symbol “FB,” as first reported by The Post.

Part of Nasdaq’s appeal is that it offered Facebook top billing in co-branded ads on TV and billboards, the source said.

Nasdaq, run by CEO Robert Greifeld, and NYSE CEO Duncan Niederauer have been locked in a pitched battle to woo the tech giant in a high-stakes competition to nab the biggest tech IPO listing since Google went public in 2004.

Both CEOs courted Zuckerberg’s company by personally flying to Facebook’s home turf in the Silicon Valley to deliver their pitches to Facebook executives.

Sources say that Zuckerberg wasn’t intimately involved in the selection process, leaving the decision to Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.

While there was little difference between the two Wall Street exchange platforms, sources said, marketing prowess tipped the scales in favor of Nasdaq, which is already home to tech giants such as Apple and Amazon.

Nasdaq’s win is a huge victory for Greifeld and solidifies the exchange’s position as the go-to platform for the biggest tech companies.

The decision is about more than bragging rights. Bagging Facebook further bolsters Nasdaq’s ability to lure tech darlings like micro-blogging outfit Twitter that have yet to go public, observers say.

Sources say that the loss marks a setback for Niederauer’s NYSE, which had been making inroads into tech IPOs with big listings such as Pandora and LinkedIn.

Last year, the NYSE listed 44 percent of the technology IPOs in the US, bringing 19 new tech companies public. But the exchange has been pushing to take a bigger bite out of Nasdaq’s tech dominance.

One source notes that the NYSE had been hoping to build up enough cachet with a Facebook listing to try and lure away more established companies like Apple from Nasdaq.

An NYSE spokesman declined to comment on the exchange’s plans or the Facebook listing.

A Nasdaq spokesman did not return a call for comment, while a message for comment to Facebook was not immediately returned.

How the Brett Favre scandal derailed Jenn Sterger's dream

She was a bad girl gone good -- until Brett Favre brought her back down.

Jenn Sterger's winning physique rocketed her to national fame on Sept. 15, 2005, when a TV camera's pan of the bleachers found her sitting pretty in a tight pair of jeans shorts, a bikini top and a cowboy hat at the Florida State-University of Miami football game.

Overnight, Sterger, now 27, gained a cult following. She decided to move to New York to pursue a career as an actress and model.

She graced both Maxim and Playboy and began her stint as a "game-day hostess" for the Jets in 2008. The job was created for Sterger and entailed wearing cleavage-baring jerseys while reporting feature spots from the sidelines.

But in 2009, the vixen decided to shed her image as a walking pair of silicone 34Ds.

While in Tampa for Super Bowl week, she set her sights on manager Phil Reese.

"I thought she was very charismatic," Reese said in an exclusive interview, in which he agreed to tell the story of Sterger's dealings with sexual harassment and the NFL.

"We traded barbs throughout dinner," he recalled of their first meeting. "She was instantly likeable, and that's what I look for in clients. You can't teach someone how to light up a room at a pitch meeting. You either have it, or you don't, and she had it."

At the time, Sterger was living in Hoboken and working on "The Daily Line," a sports show on the Versus cable network. But she told Reese she harbored grander ambitions, he said.

"She obviously got a lot of mileage out of the implants, and it became a problem, professionally and personally," Reese said. "She wanted to be seen as Jenn, not as a chest."

Reese agreed to take her on as a client. But he couldn't predict how her sex-kitten past would come pawing back.

Sterger was Reese's only female client, he said, and he looked after her like a sister.

"She mentioned she wanted to get the implants removed, and I was all for it," said Reese, who scored her a spread in Cosmopolitan magazine, where she talked about removing her breast implants.

"My boobs were not only the first thing some producers saw," she wrote in the story. "They were also the only thing."

The magazine spread was supposed to be the beginning of a new chapter for Sterger, Reese said.

But less than a year later, her attempt to be acknowledged as something other than the "hot chick" derailed spectacularly.

On Oct. 7, 2010, the sports Web site Deadspin published e-mails, voice mails and pictures Sterger allegedly received from Favre when he was the Jets' quarterback.