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Amazon #AtHome brings free content to Fire TV and Fire Tablet devices
To help keep users entertained while they stay home during the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon is bringing curated content from over 100 partners to a new #AtHome section on its Fire TV and Fire Tablet devices in the US. Fire users will have access to free TV shows and movies, including Billions, Silicon Valley, The Sopranos, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, Star Trek: Picard, The Twilight Zone and more. Amazon will stream the upcoming Prime Video SXSW virtual film festival and One World: At Home Together Concert, the benefit concert hosted by late-night comedians to raise money for the WHO’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund.
Apple pushing its at-home advisor program to college students
Apple is reportedly boosting its efforts to recruit college students for its college advisor program by passing out flyers on college and university campuses. As an Apple At-Home advisor, you receive a free iMac, full benefits and are paid more than $10 per hour to work 16 hours per week during the school year and 40 hours per week in the summer. Best of all, you get to work from the comfort of your home and on a schedule that fits your lifestyle. Oh, and that employee discount on all Apple products is a nice perk as well. To be eligible for this program, you must be enrolled in college and maintain a GPA of 2.7. Tech savviness is a plus as you will be helping customers who call into AppleCare and need technical support for their Apple software or hardware. Patience and a sense of humor are also helpful as you will be handling a variety of questions from skilled and not-so-skilled customers.
T-Mobile to pull the plug on the @Home phone service
See the lovely duo in the pic above? Well, you'd better print it and hang it, as T-Mobile is canning the @Home service -- but will, however, continue to support it. The service was launched in early July 2008 and allowed you to get unlimited calling via your broadband connection for only $10 on top of your wireless bill. The only reason given in a statement from T-Mobile on Fierce Wireless was "The needs of our customers are constantly changing, and T-Mobile must foresee and adapt to these changes." It's expected T-Mobile will continue selling the service while supplies last, so if you want in, you'd better pony up your cash tout de suite.
Hands-on with T-Mobile @Home
We've been tooling around with T-Mobile's just-launched @Home service for a little while now; frankly, there's not much to write about, but in the case of a product like @Home, that's a very good thing. In order to be successful, the whole setup has to be drop-dead simple -- bear in mind that the carrier is targeting folks stubbornly refusing to give up their landlines here -- and it absolutely was. We'll be upfront, we cheated a bit by simply hot-wiring the HiPort router into our existing router, but it worked like a champ nonetheless with the blue phone service status light coming on about 90 seconds after we plugged it in. Customers choosing to play it straight and replace their existing router (or those who are buying a router for the very first time) are greeted with a fold-out poster explaining the step-by-step process to get the ball rolling in plain English.Sound quality was excellent, caller ID worked, and the voicemail system was up and running right away; if you've got messages, a blue light flashes on the router itself. No status symbol appeared on the handsets themselves to indicate that a voicemail was waiting, though, which kind of sucks considering that your router isn't likely to be positioned somewhere you can readily see it; the only saving grace is that you get the stuttering dialtone when you pick up the line.Overall, for $10 on top of your bill, this seems like a total no-brainer for any T-Mobile customer with a landline, especially since you can port your number -- and the VTech handset isn't a bad little cordless, either.Update: Folks have been pointing out that the voicemail button on the phone should light up when you have messages, but for us, it wasn't -- we checked it thrice. Just a word of warning!%Gallery-26064%
T-Mobile @Home gets friendly with your home phone
Still really attached to that landline phone? Seriously? That's cool, we still love you, and T-Mobile still wants your business. Following a few months of trials, the T-Mobile HotSpot @Home Talk Forever service has mercifully morphed into the simpler "T-Mobile @Home," featuring a Linksys-sourced router that plugs into a broadband connection and allows any plain ol' telephone -- you know, the plug-in kind -- to take advantage of unlimited nationwide calling for $10 a month on top of your regular T-Mobile bill. The so-called "HiPort" router runs $49.99 on a two-year contract, and if you're in the market for a fancy new cordless, they'll sell you a two-handset VTech DECT system for $59.99. No worries when you're ready to hop back into the 21st century, either; the system will happily work with T-Mobile's HotSpot @Home WiFi cellphones, too. Look for the whole shebang to go on sale July 2.
