But Mike notes that AT&T is already OK with setting up Windows and Blackberry phones with data only plans (but not iPhones) and that a data/VoIP-only phone is what Google proposed to the FCC when bidding on wireless spectrum back in the day.

The initial post that there would be a Google phone — an in-house, top-to-bottom Google developed handset running android — was met with scepticism by the press. Most people quoted previous statements from Google’s Andy Rubin stating that they would not “compete with their own customers” by releasing a handset of their own. That mimes Microsoft’s strategy with PCs and Phones, versus their in-house designed Xbox and Zune hardware.

But there is a difference here, despite the quote from Rubin: Google does not charge for Android, so are these people customers or beneficiaries of the only real modern mobile operating system that they can licence. And Free. I mean, WinMo is currently terrible and costs money and Symbian is a joke. Blackberry isn’t up for grabs. And does Google care if they lose a few points of market share? I don’t think so.

This isn’t even close to their core business, except that whenever someone gets on the internet, Google stands to make money. In this case, Google wins not by licensing more OSes to be used on phones, but in the very act of getting more phones in the world, no matter what the OS or platform. Now that’s scary power. [Techcrunch]

According to comments on various message boards, BlackBerry data is either out or patchy at least in the States and Canada, with users unable to access BlackBerry services — but not necessarily third-party software like Opera Mini or Google Maps, although some, like Facebook, use BIS and are thus having problems. It’s not carrier-specific, with problems being reported on Verizon, T-Mobile, Telus and Rogers, but it’s also not universally down like the Great Sidekick Outage of 2009 — some users are reporting no problems at all, while others are completely unable to access data. We’ll keep you updated, but in turn, why don’t you keep us updated: Any BlackBerry users out there having data problems?

Well, for one, Nokia, whose smartphones have failed to penetrate at all in the US, despite massive popularity overseas, and whose Symbian OS is starting to look downright old. Manufacturers like LG and Motorola, who for the last year were depending mostly on the waning Windows Mobile 6.1, have had a rough time of it, while Palm, presumably included in the “Other” category, consolidated its line to one phone for the duration of 2009, which has done wonders for its image, but unfortunately not for its sales.

Interestingly enough, Apple and RIM are doing spectacularly well for similar reasons: both have appealed to mainstream consumers with new products — the marked-down iPhone 3G and cheap-but-decent BlackBerry Curve line, respectively — while pushing app stores as a selling point. And honestly, look around. Smartphones are decidedly a thing right now.

I’ll be interested to see what happens next year, when Android’s had a little time to spread its legs. It looks like Google helped buoy HTC a little bit this year, but Android phones are still a rare sight. [Ars]

The magazine drew together reader survey results with their own internal data to evaluate peoples’ experiences repairing and replacing certain classes of products, and the results aren’t terribly surprising: Point-and-shoot cameras are cheap and difficult to repair, and get noticeably more advanced over short periods of time, you may as well just replace them if they break outside of two years of ownership. LCD HDTVs? Hold on a little longer.

Granted, the general trend here seem to be that it’s not worth repairing anything that’s more than a few years old, so it’s less a guide about when to replace than confirmation that today’s gadgets — even the most expensive ones — are more or less disposable. Full chart below. (Click to enlarge) [Consumer Reports via Consumerist]

Compared against the Droid Eris, the decidedly secondary, little-advertised rebranded Hero that happens to be launching alongside the Droid Droid, the Pixi’s hasn’t been driving much Google traffic at all, according to Google Trends. More odd is that even with reviews starting to hit, exciting deals showing up online and a release date rapidly approaching, the Pixi’s buzz is flat.

A couple of points: Although I searched for “Droid Eris” in quotes, there’s a good chance the Eris is getting a leg up on Google searches by piggybacking on the hyper-hyped Droid Proper. Also, I’ve seen three people, two of whom work with gadgets for a living, write “Pixi” as “Pixie” in the last 24 hours, which is funny! Also probably a bad sign, for the buzz. But still, that explains a disparity, not totally flat interest, or the weirdly tiny bump in attention the phone got when pricing was announced back in October. What gives? [Google Trends]

Designer Christian Swinehart has parsed piles upon piles of Choose Your Own Adventure titles, and rendered them as a series of visualisations, from charts documenting how frequent “catastrophic” endings occur as opposed to “favourable” ones to animated representations of every single permutation of a given book to a full-on digital copy of Zork, which tracks your every move on a visual graph.

See your favourite childhood books exploded into animated data sets? Click here. [via MetaFilter]

Do you think that computing was a hard road until now? Watch Trillions, and you’ll understand why we need to come fast with new technologies, to make our data networks more like our bodies and less like traditional systems.

Makes me want to go back to the age of mail and cassette tapes. Or fast-forward until they iron out all the bugs. Somebody think. Fast. [Likecool]

What surprises me about these facts and figures — apart from iTunes skyrocketing again after the introduction of variable pricing — is the fact that CDs are not completely dead yet. They are clearly going down, but I had this mental image in which all of those round mirrors were destroyed, melting like Dali clocks in a desert of indifference. [Mint]

There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte. In other words, a yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB.

In terms of data on current human scales, a yottabyte is nearly infinite (though I’m sure the NSA will manage to fill the thing in like two weeks, and iPods will come with yottabytes in just a few months).

To be fair, the yottabyte figure is just one estimate generated by a Pentagon think tank. The facility could hold a mere hundreds of petabytes. But either way, the prospect is as unsustainable as it is frightening. This one facility will burn through as much electricity as the entirety of Salt Lake City.

All of this data comes from the book The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency by Matthew M. Aid. And while the paranoid among you may read it, I, MARK WILSON, HAVE NO REASON TO FEAR THE NSA’S INVOLVEMENT IN MY LIFE OR INFORMATION AT ALL. [NYBooks via CrunchGear]

TomTom owns Tele Atlas, who drives the roads of the world in order to make maps, and until recently was a major map provider for Google. Nokia owns the only major competitor, Navteq, who has also provided maps for Google. Look at Google Maps now, though, and you’ll see that the entire US bears just one single copyright: Google’s.

Street View wasn’t just a neat way to get imagery to accompany the data already found in Google Maps. As it happens, it was a way to drive the same roads that were already in Google Maps, tracing them with Google’s own road teams, and—through efficiency and brute force—do away with those costly map licenses. Google has mapped the US, and will surely map the rest of the world soon enough.

Garmin might have a long-standing relationship with Navteq, but they don’t own any maps. How can they compete when they still have to pay? TomTom owns the maps, but they make money licensing maps to car makers, competing GPS makers and web services — like Google. Before, Google was a fat revenue source for TomTom; now Google is a sprightly competitor.

If a unique supply of data was the only thing keeping TomTom and others on the Google chuck wagon, who will be next to fall off?

I was always afraid of spiders growing up, not because of the eight legs or the umpteen eyes, but because of the way they kill their prey. They get them in a nice convenient position, then they use their venom to hollow out their victim’s insides, until they’re just dead-eyed shells. To be killed in such a manner is my worst nightmare; perhaps I should ask TomTom how it feels.

I am a fan of Google products, and a daily user of them. This is not an attack of Google’s business practices, but an explanation of the sort of destructive innovation that has made them so huge so fast. (It’s also a warning to consider carefully any entities that gets this strong, especially if you plan on going into business with one.) Though predecessors like Microsoft experienced similar explosive growth, and grew a similar sudden global dependence, we’ve never seen the likes of Google. The GPS business isn’t the only one that will be consumed by its mighty maw before its had its run.

We’ve already seen the devaluation of the office apps that make Microsoft rich; we’ve already seen how Google’s experiences with Apple and others helped it create telecommunications platforms (both mobile with Android and completely virtual with Google Voice) that threaten its former partners’ existence; we’ve already seen how Google converts photos, videos, news wire stories and other former commodities into freebies by smashing the false notion of scarcity that “service” providers had literally banked on.

So who is next? What other hallowed brands will go the way of Garmin and TomTom? Reuters and AP? Corbis and Getty? Warner and Disney?

This is a tale already told, bound to be told again, but the fundamentals are worth studying (even if we use Google Docs spreadsheets to do it). I have never spoken with a spider, but I am certain they’re not evil, despite what fantasy lore tells us. They’re just doing what comes naturally, and doing a hell of a job.