New Gadgets and Gizmos

Sprint Nextel and Verizon are rolling out new, more consumer-friendly calling plans, reflecting the hyper-competitive state of wireless.

Starting Monday, Sprint will begin offering a new “share” plan that offers 3,000 voice minutes and a bounty of add-ons for $169.99 a month for two lines. Additional lines cost $19.99 each.

In addition to the 50 hours of calling time, subscribers will receive: unlimited messaging and e-mail, unlimited access to the mobile Web, 50 streaming music channels, 25-plus live TV channels, on-demand TV — clips as well as full-length TV shows — and unlimited GPS navigation. For sports fans, there’s also unlimited access to NFL Mobile and NASCAR Sprint Cup Mobile. BlackBerry users also qualify for this plan.

Cheaper plans with fewer services start at $69.99 a month. Depending on the plan, lines can be added for as little as $9.99 a month.

For a family of three, the $169.99 plan represents a $45 savings off Sprint’s prior plans, says Walter Piecyk, a telecom analyst at Pali Research. The savings is $60 compared with Verizon and $45 compared with AT&T wireless. The latter don’t offer GPS navigation or BlackBerry options, he notes.

With prices for gas, food and other necessities rising, Piecyk says Sprint’s approach is pitch-perfect.

“If you can save somebody $50 to $60 on a rate plan, they’re going to switch,” he predicts.

Sprint has been struggling with a string of operational problems related to the Nextel merger. Piecyk says most consumers don’t care about that — but they do care an awful lot about saving money.

“If you cut the price enough, that moves customers,” he says.

Verizon, on the cusp of becoming the USA’s No.1 wireless carrier, thanks to its proposed acquisition of Alltel, is also turning up the marketing heat.

Next week, Verizon plans to start offering discounts of $8 to $21 a month to people…

Apple is making headlines with the new iPhone 3G, and the academic world is seeing some opportunities for business case studies.

The iPhone 3G has built-in GPS for expanded location-based mobile services, and iPhone 2.0 software with support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync. It can run hundreds of third-party applications built with the recently released iPhone software developers kit.

Quad-band GSM and tri-band HSDPA provide voice and Internet connectivity around the world. The iPhone 3G supports Wi-Fi, 3G and EDGE networks and automatically switches between them. It also makes multitasking easier with simultaneous voice and data communications, so users can browse the Web, get map directions, or check e-mail while on a call.

Appeasing the Enterprise

To compete with the Blackberry, the iPhone 3G includes, besides Microsoft Exchange support, contact and calendar syncing, remote wipe, and Cisco IPsec VPN for encrypted access to corporate networks.

Fareena Sultan, a digital-marketing professor at Northeastern University’s business school, said with features such as 3G, enterprise support, third-party applications and availability in more countries, the iPhone can better appease the enterprise customer.

“This could enable Apple to challenge the Blackberry market more aggressively,” Sultan said. “Also, more third-party applications could help soften the impact of the Android initiative from Google and the Open Handset Alliance.”

Gloria Barczak, chairperson of the marketing department at Northeastern, said Apple’s additions of 3G technology and GPS are the right moves to gain market share in the enterprise market.

She said download speed was a notable deficiency in the original iPhone and slowed enterprise adoption of the product. But the lower pricing may do the most for consumer adoption, she added.

Appeasing the Consumer Market

In the U.S. the iPhone 3G is priced at $199 for the 8GB model and $299 for the 16GB model. The phone goes on sale in the U.S. on July 11.

“The big…

On Monday, Apple introduced a new service that delivers push e-mail, push contacts and push calendars into the “cloud” of native applications on the iPhone, iPod touch, Macs and PCs.

Dubbed MobileMe, the service also provides a suite of ad-free Web applications that aim to deliver a desktop-like experience through any modern browser.

MobileMe applications — available at www.me.com — include Mail, Contacts and Calendar, as well as Gallery for viewing and sharing photos and iDisk for storing and exchanging documents online.

“Think of MobileMe as ‘Exchange for the rest of us,’” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Now users who are not part of an enterprise that runs Exchange can get the same push e-mail, push calendars and push contacts that the big guys get.”

Pushing Against BlackBerry

Here’s how it works: With a MobileMe e-mail account, all folders, messages and status indicators look identical whether you are checking e-mail on an iPhone, iPod touch, Mac or PC. New e-mail messages are pushed instantly to the iPhone over the cellular network or Wi-Fi, removing the need to manually check e-mail and wait for downloads.

“With the BlackBerry, if you are sent an e-mail, you get it right away. In the previous version of the iPhone, you had to go back and sync up before you could get your e-mail,” said Phil Leigh, a senior analyst at Inside Digital Media. “If you can get e-mail on your iPhone on the fly now, that’s a pretty significant advantage.”

Push technology also keeps contacts and calendars continuously up-to-date so changes made on one device are automatically pushed up to the cloud and down to other devices. Push works with the native applications on the iPhone and iPod touch, as well as Microsoft Outlook for the PC. It also works with the Mac OS X applications Mail, Address Book…