@fanman

They are MVNOs. They don't own the network, but rather buy minutes wholesale from T-Mobile, Orange, etc. and resell them.

If the players that actually own their own network collude and jack up the wholesale price, MVNOs also have to increase their prices.

@LordPaul

Think about what happened in Canada when Rogers bought out Fido and in the United States when AT&T Wireless merged into Cingular. It reduced the number of companies providing mobile phone service in each country by just one, but the service fee skyrocketed shortly afterwards.

When the number of players are in the single digit territory and no new player can enter (at least until the next spectrum auction, which could be 5~10 years away), just one merger can make it much, much easier to create a price-fixing cartel and keep everyone in line.

EU anti-trust monitors and the U.K. Competition Commissions can't be happy about this.

Can someone please explain the fundamental difference between LCD and e-ink (your eyes will not hurt like hell after reading e-ink display continuously for hours) to these people so that they will stop posting these uninformed "quips" about e-book readers?

It could very much be for Telus whose HSPA (data)/UMTS (voice) network is soft-launching on September 2nd according to media reports.

Yes, the librarians in charge of digitizing books really get off on trying to find a way to make the mindless task of scanning books more difficult and time-consuming.

British papers were reporting earlier today Nokia is set to drop Symbian in favor of Maemo.

Several weeks earlier, it was reported that the new version of Symbian will drop backward compatibility with apps for previous versions of Symbian, making Symbian a very unattractive platform for 3rd party vendors to develop on until the new version is released next year.

This significantly raises the possibility that Nokia is chucking Symbian altogether and adopting Windows Mobile.

Makes sense since Bell and Telus are scheduled to launch their own HSPA+ network in Vancouver in Q4.

It would also mean that BL-40 would support HSPA over AWS bands (1700 Mhz) as Telus/Bell is deploying HSPA on both the traditional 850 Mhz region and the newly licensed 1700 Mhz region.

That is, BL-40, or at least the version destined for Telus, compatible with T-Mobile USA's 3G networks.

Why is the PC from the Mac commercials wearing those awful shades?