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>> Cox Communications goes wireless; EBay wants you to buy it now; and Blackberry and Palm
have new phones coming your way; It's Wednesday, August 20, I'm Natali Del Conte and
it's time to get loaded.
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>> Cox Communications is trying its luck in the mobile world. The company was vague
on details, but says that their plan is to offer a wireless service that will combine all of their
offerings into one device. The device will use its own cross platform interface, and Cox
contents and applications will go mobile. The company just recently forked over 304,000,000 dollars
earlier this year for special licenses geared towards their upcoming broadband service. Wireless
is a hard business to plan these days, just look at Sprint. I'm not sure why they would choose to
go it alone in this market instead of partner up with the carrier, but we'll have to wait and see what
they have up their sleeve.
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>> EBay wants you to think of them as more of a store than an auction site. The company's
making moves in that direction, by reducing the fees that it charges sellers for fixed priced items.
Under the new pricing, which goes into effect on September 16, sellers who offer items at fixed buy
it now prices, will only pay 35 cents for that listing, which is a 70 percent reduction in upfront
fees. The company is also expected to launch a new search engine that will help buyers navigate the
site better. EBay is trying hard to compete with Craig's List and Amazon so the smart thing to do seems
like to deemphasize the auction experience where you have to wait and see if you won your item, and
make it more of an instant gratification shopping experience.
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>> Archos released a new series of internet tablets that are also personal media players.
We saw these at CVS and while they're great they were not the sexiest of gadgets. The new media
players look much improved. The Archos 5 is the leader of the bunch and it has a 4.8 inch touch
screen, plays pretty much any video format you can think of, has WiFi built in speakers and up
to 250 gigs of memory. The Archos 5 G has less memory but can connect to and HSDPA cellular network
and the Archos 7 is just like the 5 but it has a 7 inch screen. Each one has a different launch
date between September and December and the prices will range from 400 dollars to 550 dollars.
They can also all function as a DVR if you buy the 99 dollar docking station, this means that when you
undock it you can take your recorded TV programs on the go. Which I actually find to be the most
compelling feature.
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>> Palm confirmed rumors about the new Trio. It will in fact be called the Palm Pro and
leaked pictures appear to have been valid. Here are some legitimate photos that Palm sent out
themselves. The company did not confirm any of the specs other than the fact that it will have a one touch WiFi
button, GPS, a high res [phonetic] flush fitting touch screen, and run Windows Mobile. We don't know
price or release date yet.
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>> There's also another Blackberry on its way if leaked photos of a new flip phone are
correct. The Blackberry 8220 and 8210 are rumored to be the flip phones that Blackberry's been
working on. None of this is confirmed and we don't have enough details about them to mention, but
will be interesting to see a Blackberry flip phone since they've never competed in this market before.
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>> Here is some confirmed Blackberry news. The Wall Street Journal has launched a mobile
application for Blackberry users to read their financial news on the go. The application is called
the WSJ Mobile Reader and it's a free application that lets users view headlines, summaries, and
full articles. This is more than the news organization has done for the iPhone which does not have a
Wall Street Journal application. We can make a small inference about this, Wall Street Journal readers are
still by in large Blackberry users.
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>> The new Palm and Blackberry may look cool but fewer of us are going to buy them. A new
research report shows that Americans a buying fewer mobile phones this year than they were at this
time last year. 28,000,000 cell phones were sold in the U.S. in Q 2 of this year which represents a
13 percent decline from Q 2 last year. This was the third quarter in a row with a year over year
decline and the lowest figures since NPD began tracking cell phone sales in 2005. The phones that
we did buy however, were more expensive than ever, so the mobile handset market did not really lose
that much money, but think about it, the market is already well penetrated. More people buy Smart
Phones which they tend to keep longer because they're built to last longer, and the economy is still
not exactly in tip top shape so this shouldn't be too shocking.
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>> It's now time for our regular battery freak out. These stories pop up every few months
and this time it involves the iPod Nano. Two iPod Nanos in Japan are said to have over heated
and sparked fire causing minor burns on their owners. The offending Nanos were sold between
September of 2005 and September of 2006 which means it wasn't the most current generation of
Nanos on the market. Apple has promised that it would replace these Nanos and any that burn up
like this in the future. We should certainly hope so.
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>> Microsoft Office Labs has released an Outlook plug in that helps you manage your in
box. It's called Email Prioritizer and it has a pause button so that your exchange server just stops
dumping messages in your in box when you simply can not deal with them. When you unpause,
the messages that have been stored will appear in a priority system. They'll be ranked between zero
and 3 stars according to rules that you set up yourself. I like this priority system and the idea
of a pause button because even though you could accomplish the same task by just turning Outlook off,
we never do that. You can find this feature at Officelabs.com. It requires the latest version of
Outlook 2007 and you must be running a PC.
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>> Katie Couric is using Dig to collect user questions for her convention coverage.
Our very own evening news anchor posted a video of herself in Dig swag [phonetic] requesting that users
follow her on Dig, submit questions for convention coverage, and Dig up or down the questions that
they like or don't like. You can see her on her YouTube page at Youtube.com/Katie Couric, or
you can join her Dig network on Dig.com/users/Katie Couric. I don't mind saying that
I'm really proud of the way our network is using technology to reach out to the country for this
important election coverage. I hope you'll join in the fun.
^M00:05:37
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>> Those are all your headlines for today, but I will be back tomorrow with more.
Thank you for watching. I'm Natalie Del Conte with CNET TV and you've just been loaded.
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