Most relevant sentence: "After the 14-day trial, the always-on feature will cost $3.99 per month, added to your AT&T bill."
They have had time, however, to try to squeeze as much money from this venture as possible while they still have exclusivity. I've now received two emails from AT&T about their navigation app. They charge $9.99 per month for it. How many other iPhone app developers can send out an email to every single iPhone owner at will? Zero. The rest of us have to charge 99 cents (one time) if we want to get noticed on the App Store.
And now that they've cashed in on Apple's brilliance and innovation, they're going to do the same with Loopt. They are the perfect example of a company willing to do whatever it takes to increase profits, but not willing to do much of anything to help their customers.
I can understand bashing AT&T I hate their service, but I think Loopt charges for their service on most providers.
Oh and the $9.99 per month thing made me choke too. Especially when TomTom has a $99 app.
Not that its clear if map updates will be free or in-app purchases with TomTom.
It uses OpenStreetMap instead of the proprietary map databases, but hey, I'll take 90% as good for 2% of the price any day.
How do you think us Verizon customers feel? At least you get phones with WiFi...
1. Health care reform
2. Phone network reform?
If you're trying to make a snarky comment about how phones aren't important when compared to health care, I actually would find it quite refreshing if everyone stopped talking about health care, and started talking about how America's technological infrastructure is years behind.
Overall if you are one who prefers text based communication over voice & loathe AT&T, you still can use an iPod Touch via Wifi or buy a Verizon or Sprint MiFi and use that as your communication device. Of course there are issues with doing this, but last two months has worked great for me.
If health care is going to be nationalized, it can't be a productive part of the economy anymore. It's already (probably) a net drain on public resources. If we're gonna have something like public health care, we need a way to pay for it. Fixing our technology infrastructure enables this country to create more wealth.
It all depends on your priorities. I personally am against nationalized health care, and, more importantly, all this "debate" is doing is pulling everyone even farther and farther apart. Everyone is yelling and screaming and calling each other names, and I'm frankly sick of it.
> That argument is based on other countries who are the size of Texas to Rhode Island.
Normally, I'd agree with you. But I live in Pittsburgh, down the street from CMU, and several of my friends can't even get FIOS. Let alone the kind of crazy awesome internet they have in Japan or South Korea. You can't get that anywhere in the US. Of course, rural areas aren't going to be able to get fiber to their homes, but there's no reason to be so far behind in urban areas.
And while the MiFi seems interesting, it's completely unreasonable that I can't just get wifi built into my phone. I don't want to carry around a whole second box for something that should just be built in.
Overall I am sure when LTE (Verizon's 4G) & or Wimax (Clearwire) offer ubiquitous coverage will start to see Internet mobile devices with built in 4G. Though carrier's don't want to be dumb pipes, but I'm thinking that's what they'll become, as us consumers only need/want them for the pipe!
I agree that carriers will have to become dumb pipes... if they don't want to be a dumb pipe, they should let someone else be one, and just build off of that. Then again, with all of the money and history that's involved in the telecommunications industry, I'll imagine that we'll be held back for quite a while longer.
Maybe it's just me, but would anyone here pay $3.99 per month for this?
Probably not, but I think the other 90% of the world might. My cell phone bill is high because I pay $15 extra for tethering. My little sister's cell phone bill is high because she buys ringtones. As much as I think that's a waste, way more people buy the latter than the former.
They already pay hundreds of dollars a year for things like this: http://www.flexispy.com/spyphone-flexispy-apple-iphone.htm
And surely AT&T could just provide a simple "track this phone" service themselves and cut out loopt altogether for this particular use case.
$9.99/month for two family members. $14.99/month for up to five.
There's no way in hell I'd want my kids "friends" (who knows who they friend on loopt) seeing where my kid is at.
All that being said, I wonder if Loopt could offer a "for parents" app that just allows parents to see where their kids are (w/o all the other app functionality). I'd bet a ton of parents would pay for that.
We all know that teenagers are plenty creative when it comes to sneaking around. 1) drop cell phone at friends house and enable call forwarding. 2) do whatever you want.
You can run Latitude on the iPhone but the whole no-background-apps thing renders it nearly useless.