Engadget has reported today that Apple and AT&T originally signed a five-year exclusivity pact in 2007 with the launch of the original iPhone, although it is unclear whether that deal is still in effect, just three years later.
The site found the official details out after reading a 2008 court filing by Apple, although a USAToday report made it clear in 2007 that AT&T was the exclusive distributor of the phone in the United States. Verizon also passed on the original deal.
The filing was necessary because Apple and AT&T were the subject of a class-action lawsuit filed in 2007, which claimed that the carrier had a monopoly over iPhone customers, since after their contract expired, they could not jump to another carrier, as the handset was locked down.
Nilay Patel of Engadget says the real question may be whether the deal is still in effect, or been reworked since 2008: “Contracts can be canceled, amended, and breached in many ways, and AT&T’s spotty recent service history plus the explosion of the iPhone and the mobile market in general have given Apple any number of reasons to revisit the deal. In addition, the two companies obviously hit the negotiating table again to hammer out the iPad’s pricing plans, and there’s no way of knowing whether that deal involves the iPhone as well.”
It will be interesting to see whether or not an iPhone for Verizon or any other carrier is on the way sometime this year, or if that 2012 deal is still in effect.
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Nokia, which announced two months ago it was beginning a “Design by Community” project to create a new phone, has said this week that the project is almost completed, with fans finishing voting on what they want the most in the new smartphone device.
By the end of the month, Nokia designers will have turned out some mockups of the upcoming device.
UnwiredView says fans voted and decided that the phone would be the following: “10mm thin monoblock made out of aluminum. Its features should include: a 4 inch capacitive touchscreen display, open source operating system, unlimited multitasking, Wi-Fi 802.11 n/b/g, USB 3.0, HDMI, Dolby surround sound, and an 8MP camera with 4X optical zoom, dual LED and Xenon flash, and HD video recording.”
The smartphone should also have “DbC OS 1 temperature and location sensors” which would monitor your local conditions at all times.
The device is expected to include multiple OS support as well, likely with Symbian^4 and MeeGo.
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Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have become the first three countries to get Internet addresses in non-Latin characters, being approved in Arabic this week by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
Registrations for websites using the new domains will start soon, and Egypt has already given approval to three companies to use the new Arabic suffix.
“Introducing Arabic domain names is a milestone in Internet history,”says Egyptian Communication and Information Technology Minister Tarek Kamel said in a statement. “This great step will open up new horizons for e-services in Egypt as well as boosting the number of online users and enabling Internet service providers to enter new markets by eliminating language barriers.”
Until the recent decision, all websites had to end with “.com” or “.org” among other strings using Latin characters, which could get confusing for nations with no familiarity with the characters.
ICANN noted that the middle east has only about 20 percent on their populations online, on average, a far cry from the over 60 percent seen in most developed nations.
Additionally, a suffix for Russia in Cyrillic is expected to be the fourth new domain accepted soon. By the end of 2010, suffixes for Jordan, Qatar, Tunisia, Palestine, Hong Kong, Thailand and Sri Lanka are also expected to be approved.
