Weekend Open Thread

Five people in southern China have been charged with intentional injury in the case of a Chinese teenager who sold a kidney so he could buy an iPhone and an iPad, the government-run Xinhua News Agency said on Friday.

The five included a surgeon who removed a kidney from a 17-year-old boy in April last year. The boy, identified only by his surname Wang, now suffers from renal deficiency, Xinhua quoted prosecutors in Chenzhou city, Hunan province as saying.

According to the Xinhua account, one of the defendants received about 220,000 yuan (about $35,000) to arrange the transplant. He paid Wang 22,000 yuan and split the rest with the surgeon, the three other defendants and other medical staff.

The teen was from Anhui, one of China's poorest provinces, where inhabitants frequently leave to find work and a better life elsewhere. He bought an iPhone and iPad, and when asked by his mother where he got the money, admitted selling a kidney.

Apple products are hugely popular in China, but are priced beyond the reach of many Chinese. IPhones start at 3,988 yuan ($633), and iPads begin at 2,988 yuan ($474).

Windows Phone platform on a bright, crisp 4.3-in. AMOLED screen with a high-bandwidth LTE connection. AMOLED display is made of Gorilla Glass and sports an 800-x-480-pixel resolution.

It has an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera with a Carl Zeiss lens, and a 1-megapixel front-facing camera you'll mainly use for video chats. I can't say that I was overwhelmed by the camera; it seemed no better or worse than those in other phones with similar camera specs.

Lumia 900 has a single 1.4GHz Qualcomm APQ8055 processor. It comes with 16GB of internal storage, but no SD card slot to add more if you want. It sports 512MB of RAM rather than the more common 1GB. Despite this, the Lumia 900 is fast and responsive. I experienced no delays in running apps, watching videos, browsing the Web or doing any of my other usual tasks. Judging from the responsiveness of this phone, there's no need for more than one core. LTE connection, the first on a Windows Phone. I found the connection to be quite variable, ranging from about 7 Mbps to 13 Mbps when I tested it in Cambridge, Mass. Reviewers in other cities found variable speeds as well, generally ranging from 8 Mbps to 20 Mbps.

Incidentally, it's easy to forget that smartphones like the Lumia 900 are not just small computers, but phones as well. I found the voice connection to be clear and strong.

And it's inexpensive: A 4G phone that can be had for $99 isn't currently easy to find. But soon 4G will be commonplace on $100 phones, including two upcoming Android-based phones: the LG Viper 4G LTE on Sprint and the LG Lucid on Verizon.

When using LTE heavily for browsing the Web, downloading and using data-intensive apps, I was unable to get a full day's use out of the Lumia 900. In moderate use, it lasted the day. (The 1830mAh battery, unfortunately, isn't replaceable.)

Also, 16GB of storage may not be enough for most people, and the lack of an SD card slot means that this amount of storage is all you'll ever get on the phone. It's true that Windows Phone integrates well with Microsoft's SkyDrive cloud-based storage service for additional cloud storage, but if you want to store music, video or media on the phone itself, you may find yourself hamstrung.

And, of course, there's always the Windows Phone app issue -- the Windows Phone's 70,000 apps lags far behind the 400,000-plus you'll find for Android phones and the 500,000-plus for the iPhone. And it's not just oddball outliers that aren't available for Windows Phone 7; major apps such as Pandora can't be downloaded either.

The bottom line

The Lumia 900 is clearly the best Windows Phone you can buy today, with a sleek design and top performance that rivals the best Android phones and the iPhone. Combine all that with an attractive $99 price, and you have a winner.

I'm certainly not suggesting that Arizona or any jurisdiction pass such a law, but it is for this reason that we have judicial review. This just reminds me of the old Communications Decency Act that was enacted in the 1990s. Same premise, ban offensive speech, but different justification (porn, not "bullying").

The same result will happen if this were to become law too.

But as always, the solution to being on the receiving end of offensive speech lays with the person on the receiving end, not the sender. More people, children and parents in particular, need to learn how to use the "block" or "ignore" features of their particular social networking site, and use them liberally when needed.

What's the model?

So my year-long promotional price with Comcast runs out this month. I haven't bugged them to extend it yet, but I've been ordering antenna-related items so that some friends of mine and I can get my house ready should things fall through with them.

I know that even if Comcast does extend the deal they won't do it forever, so even if they do give me what I want, the antenna goes up anyway.

Update... got the bill, somehow we are getting two packages charged to us...oops.. will have to get that straightened out....So I guess it did not work too well......

Samsung Electronics, the world’s top technology company by revenue, posted record quarterly operating profit of 5.8 trillion won($5.1 billion) on booming sales of its Galaxy smartphones and of the Note, a mini-tablet and phone.

Samsung, which raced to the top of global smartphone rankings last year with close to a fifth of the market, from just 3 percent in 2009, is set to go head-to-head with Apple this quarter with the expected introduction of its revamped Galaxy S to take on Apple’s next iPhone.

“Samsung and Apple are expected to launch the new Galaxy S and iPhone in the second quarter, respectively, and they will engage in a full-fledged war,” said Lee Ka-keun, analyst at Hana Daetoo Securities.

“Samsung Handset margins are estimated to have topped 20 percent. Apple had an operating margin of more than 37 percent in the October-toDecember quarter.

Samsung is expected to have shipped a record 44 million smartphones in the first quarter, up by almost 25 percent from October-to-December levels, according to a Reuters survey of analysts.

While Apple is Samsung’s biggest rival in smartphones, the U.S. company is also its biggest client, purchasing Samsung’s high-end displays and microchips for the iPhone and iPad. The two are also locked in a bruising global patent war that spans about 30 legal cases in 10 countries.

AT&T said the negotiations reflected "the spirit of the longstanding relationship" between AT&T and the union.

More than 40,000 employees at AT&T Inc will keep working under the terms of an expired labor contract while their union continues negotiations with the telephone company, averting a potentially costly strike for now.