In what surely must feel like vindication for the iowa LECs, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is threatening legal action if any more calls are blocked. And no degrading or otherwise interfering with the service either, he says! That addresses two of the most disturbing complaints that the iowa's have levied.
What's left unaddressed is the resolution of the millions of dollars in unpaid bills.
On whether or not the FCC would force AT&T and Qwest to pay disputed access-charge bills, Martin said that was a separate issue, and covered by petitioning processes that might take further time to resolve. “If you have a dispute about the intercarrier compensation rules, you can file petitions, and come to the commission to get redress,” Martin said. “But you can’t just stop letting consumers make those calls.”
You can't just stop letting consumer make those calls. Exactly!
In the news this morning, RIM has introduced the BlackBerry Curve. They're definitely stepping up their game. The Curve is billed as the worlds smallest QWERTY keyboard device, and includes an upgraded camera, plus a suite of multimedia software sourced from Roxio to get media on and off the device. The Boy Genius Report had this to say:
The press release comes with details on the device, including new additions of a 2 megapixel camera with 5x digital zoom, a currently available and supported A2DP Bluetooth audio profile, a newly designed media player, a revamped desktop media manager, based on the ever-popular Roxio Easy Media Creator, that now provides CD ripping and photo editing functionality. Photos taken from the device can be instantly uploaded to your Flickr account, by way of Yahoo! Go.
I've held a couple of these in my hands recently as friends in the industry have been testing them for RIM. Lightweight, small, very media capable, and with the lynch-pin BlackBerry email technology, this device is going to take back some of the market that RIM has been losing to Microsoft recently.
I held off on buying the BlackBerry 8800 because, unlike the Pearl, the 8800 lacked a camera, which I've come to highly value. My next BlackBerry will certainly be the Curve.
More from RIM at the official BlackBerry Curve site.
