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Carriers like Verizon and AT&T are trying to convince Netflix to pay for the bandwidth its subscribers consume on their networks. Today Netflix delivered a rather oblique response. It’s giving its iPhone customers the option of turning off cellular access to Netflix completely and instead rely on old-fashioned Wi-Fi to deliver their movies and TV shows.

With more and more customers moving off carriers’ old unlimited data plans to tiered data buckets, streaming any reasonable quantity of video is all but impossible without incurring major overage charges. In its latest update to its iPhone and iPad apps, though, customers can toggle on and off 3G/4G connectivity. It may mean sacrificing Netflix access everywhere, but it could help them avoid rather unpleasant phone bills at the end of the month.

There are still a few unlimited options out there for iPhone users. You can stream to your heart’s content on Sprint’s 3G network. There are still millions of customers grandfathered into Verizon and AT&Ts’ old unlimited plans, but both operators have begun throttling back speeds once customers hit unspecified – and seemingly arbitrary – thresholds, making video streaming all but useless.

What’s more, Verizon is doing everything it can to coax, cajole and boot customers off their unlimited plans this summer. Unless the carriers firm up some kind of revenue sharing pact with Netflix – which Verizon may well be in the process of cementing – it looks like streaming movies is going to be primarily a Wi-Fi affair.

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class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-96810" title="iRig Mic Cast" src="http://www.technologytell.com/apple/files/2012/05/irigmiccast-promo1.jpg" alt="iRig Mic Cast" width="566" height="330" />

Your iDevice’s microphone may be okay for phone calls and Skype, but how about recording concerts? Expo floor interviews? Dictation? Lectures? It’s no longer a concern now that IK Multimedia has announced they’re now shipping the iRig MIC Cast, and ultra-compact microphone for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

class="alignright size-full wp-image-96811" title="iRig Mic Cast" src="http://www.technologytell.com/apple/files/2012/05/irigmiccast-promo2.jpg" alt="iRig Mic Cast" width="218" height="300" />iRig MIC Cast plugs into your iOS device’s mini-jack to provide crystal-clear aural recording quality thanks to its tight pickup pattern that minimizes background sounds. The unidirectional condenser capsule isolates the intended audio source, yielding dramatically better results than an integrated microphone.

The iRig MIC Cast also features a dual gain setting that provides two different sensitivity settings for either close-up or distant sources. So, whether you are recording a one-on-one interview or a class in a lecture hall – the iRig MIC Cast can be adjusted to accommodate the situation. Users can have confidence in what is being recorded, via a stereo mini-jack headphone output that enables real-time monitoring.

The iRig MIC Cast is literally about the size of a large coin and its bumper-friendly jack makes it possible to plug in — even if your iPhone, iPod touch, iPad is in a protective case. It can easily fit in your pocket, briefcase or computer bag for easy transport.

The iRig MIC Cast comes with a tabletop stand for clear view of the screen and so the camera can better capture the user for FaceTime or Skype meetings.

Two free apps are available for the iRig MIC Cast: iRig Recorder, an easy-to-use voice recording/editing app, and VocaLive, a multi-effects processing app for singers.

Additional iRig MIC Cast features include:

• class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;line-height: 26px">Stereo mini-jack headphone output which enables real-time monitoring of what is being recorded using headphones or speakers
• class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;line-height: 26px">Incredibly flat frequency response with zero tonal coloration
• class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;line-height: 26px">Ultra-compact profile that can be carried anywhere with ease
• class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;line-height: 26px">Has a bumper-friendly mini-jack connector that fits the majority of iPhone/iPod touch cases
• class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;line-height: 26px">Works also with all regular phone calls and any Voice-Over-IP app

iRig MIC Cast costs $39.99/€29.99 (excluding taxes) and is available from electronic and music retailers around the world.

Product [iRig MIC Cast]

With so many people writing about Apple, finding the best stories and reports isn’t easy. Here’s our daily pick of stories about the company from around the Web that you shouldn’t miss:

• Ars Technica has an excellent look back at Apple’s HyperCard program on the 25th anniversary of its invention. HyperCard no longer exists, but it foretold the coming of the world wide web, Matthew Lasar writes.
• The Wall Street Journal breaks down the primary reason Apple makes so much money on its devices compared to competitors: the lower prices it pays for parts. It uses Nokia’s Lumia 900 as the latest example.
• It wasn’t just Apple CEO Tim Cook that talked about Steve Jobs at the All Things D conference in southern California this week. Wired describes how Jobs’ legacy has been felt at the event all week long.
• Also at the ATD conference was the screenwriter of the upcoming Jobs biopic based on Walter Isaacson’s biography, Aaron Sorkin. Gizmodo rounds up some of Sorkin’s most interesting comments from his onstage interview, including how intimidating he says it is to write about someone as revered as Jobs.
• TUAW sits down with Nolan Bushnell, Atari founder, who talks about what it was like hiring Jobs and how he sees Atari’s early culture reflected in Apple today.

Image courtesy of Flickr user kalleboo

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class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-96802" title="Crusader Kings II Sword of islam" src="http://www.technologytell.com/apple/files/2012/05/swordofislam-promo1.jpg" alt="Crusader Kings II Sword of islam" width="640" height="360" />

Seems like just last week when Paradox Interactive announced the Mac version of Crusader Kings II, and already the additional content is on its way. In June, the Sword of Islam DLC will accompany patch 1.06. The patch is free, the Sword of Islam will run you $9.99.

Crusader Kings II is a strategy game set in Medieval Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, recreating the economic, political, religious, and social aspects of the Middle Ages.

Sword of Islam enables players to rule as the Muslim lords, delivering a wealth of specific new mechanics distinctive to these rulers, creating a whole new gameplay experience. Laws, marriage, holding, traits, titles and more will work completely differently.

The v1.06 patch will add new features to the game, including an expansion of the map into Mali-Songhay, differentiation on strong and weak claims, new plot, expanded combat and more.

Six months after launching its iPhone app, Etsy says that nearly one in five visits to its site comes from a mobile device.

In a blog post today, the company said that it has surpassed 1.5 million downloads of the app (two months ago, it reached its one millionth download).

The New York-based marketplace for handicrafts also announced a few updates to its iPhone app. For buyers, the app now enables new ways to search for available items. Beyond browsing by category, visitors can now browse their Activity Feed and explore channels, such as “kids” and “home.” It also lets users customize the channels they see and it provides a more robust search engine so that users can search for people, as well as shops and items.

With the updated app, Etsy also said that it gives sellers a way to view their shop metrics on the go, including the option to receive alerts when they’ve made a sale.

Earlier this week, commerce site Fab.com also released some mobile figures. Inspired by Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker’s D Conference talk, in which she said mobile now accounts for 8 percent of e-commerce revenue, CEO Jason Goldberg dug into his own company’s mobile business.

His finding: “In short, it’s growing. Big.” On his blog, he wrote that Fab mobile revenue now amounts to 23 to 25 percent of weekly sales, and that’s just 30 weeks after they launched their mobile app. The lion’s share of the revenue (95 percent) comes from the iPhone and iPad, he continued, with the iPhone contributing 55 percent of weekly mobile sales and the iPad contributing 40 percent.

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class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-96784" title="k760" src="http://www.technologytell.com/apple/files/2012/05/k760-e1338464064324.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="458" />It’s great to see big companies like Logitech implementing greener energy into their products, and they deserve to be proud of the release of their newest Wireless Solar Keyboard K760, made for both Macs and iDevices alike. The K760 touts a very slick design with a distinguished Apple feel to it, and runs completely on solar power from the sun or even artificial lighting thanks to a strip of photovoltaic cells across its top.

Rebtel, which bills itself as the biggest mobile VoIP company after Skype, is expanding its emphasis on mobile with the launch of its first iPad app. The company is looking to ride the wave of iPad growth and get even more people on to its free and low-cost calling service.

Rebtel is now up to 17 million users, who access the service over Wi-Fi and 3G on iPhone, Android devices and PCs. IPad users previously could install Rebtel’s iPhone-optimized app on their slates, but now with the dedicated iPad app, they get a fuller experience that takes better advantage of the larger screen real estate. The app offers tablet-optimized navigation and graphics and also integrates with an iPad address book, making it easy to see who you can call for free. An Android tablet version is expected in the coming weeks while a Windows Phone client is expected by the end of this summer.

Andreas Bernstrom, Rebtel’s CEO said the app makes sense as more people shift their computing work load to mobile devices. He said one of Rebtel’s strengths is that it was built from the ground up to be mobile, which is how most of its customers utilize the system.

“We are squarely in the middle of the post-PC era, marked by an increasing amount of consumers who have leapfrogged the classic desktop PC in favor of multi-purpose mobile devices that allow for greater creativity and social interaction. We are excited to expand our development pipeline to respond to this growing global demand for tablets and iPads.”

Rebtel, which just passed the 15 million user mark in February, continues to grow as more people are turned on to its ability to offer free and cheap calls. Bernstrom said Rebtel calls to outside linesare up to 60 percent cheaper than Skype. He added the company, which is set to do $85 million in revenue this year, has an average revenue per user that’s three times that of Skype. He said the average user is spending 350 minutes a month calling on Rebtel.

The rise of so-called over-the-top voice and messaging providers is putting more and more pressure on carriers, who are seeing some of their most profitable services undercut by Internet-based apps. Bernstrom said the operators are increasingly having to confront the new realities of business as more users look to OTT services. A Juniper Research report forecast that 640 million people will use OTT mobile VoIP services by 2016.

Carriers will need to adjust their pricing plans and reconcile the fact that while most of their traffic is data, most of their revenues comes from voice and SMG. Mobile analyst Chetan Sharma reported recently that 85 percent of carrier traffic for the four nationwide mobile operators networks was pure data, but that data only accounted for 39 percent of all mobile data revenues.

“At some point, they’ll have to say, ‘Screw voice, you’ll get it for free. Now, do you want 5-10-15 GB of data?’” Bernstrom said. “That’s years away but we’re helping speed that up.”

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class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-96676" title="Spotify-for-iPad" src="http://www.technologytell.com/apple/files/2012/05/Spotify-for-iPad.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="480" />

The Spotify iPad app received an update this week, adding a few improvements. One major addition is push notifications, a significant feature missing from the original release. Along with the notifications, the app received a few bug fixes and an intro guide for new users of the Spotify service.

According to the developer notes, the notifications system in Spotify will notify users when a playlist gets updated and when new subscribers are added.

Fixes in v0.5.1:

• Retina album art is now always synced when you’re offline

• App could sometimes become unresponsive after scrolling and navigating at the same time

• Improvements to Facebook login, screen locking when offline syncing, performance and stability.

Spotify for iPad can be found directly in the Apple’s App Store.

Product [Spotify's Website]

Tim Cook visits a Foxconn plant in March. (Credit: Bowen Liu/Apple Inc. via Bloomberg)

Months after a third-party investigation into the labor practices at Foxconn, the electronics manufacturer who counts Apple as its most important customer, very little has improved, a Chinese labor rights group said Thursday.

Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior, or SACOM, released a new report that says despite outside audits of Foxconn ordered by Apple, the contract manufacturer has yet to implement or even advise most employees of the audit’s findings and recommendations. The report was based on interviews with 170 Foxconn employees, according to Reuters.

“The workers are not aware of FLA recommendations” and “the workers cannot monitor the implementation of corrective measures,” says SACOM report (translated from Chinese via Google). The group also says Foxconn continues its illegal practice of “unpaid overtime, excessive overtime” and called the company’s earlier commitment to improving conditions “just empty talk.”

Some things have changed, but not enough, is the group’s message. While employees’ base pay has increased, their overall salaries have fallen as overtime has been cut, as promised. But “some workers also had higher production targets and had to work unpaid overtime after pay hikes,” according to the report.

The FLA, or Fair Labor Association, was sent to audit Foxconn by member company Apple in January. In March, the FLA produced its report based on interviews with 35,000 workers at three Foxconn plants in China. It listed excessive overtime, unpaid overtime compensation, health and safety risks and communication problems as the main issues that “led to a widespread sense of unsafe” conditions at the factories. That same day Apple CEO Tim Cook visited one of the factories in China, and has promised to be more involved.

On Tuesday, Cook said in an interview at the All Things D conference that Apple “put a ton of effort into taking overtime down” for Foxconn employees.

Foxconn has acted agreeable to these modifications to its practices. This SACOM report comes just weeks after Foxconn CEO Terry Gou told reporters that improving worker treatment was “a competitive strength” and said that Apple was helping to pay for improvements to the conditions under which its most popular products, the iPhone and iPad, are built.

Unfortunately, it’s also not surprising that we haven’t seen vast improvements yet. When the FLA report was released, Foxconn said it was committed to compensating workers owed backpay for overtime, reducing working hours to within the Chinese limit of 49 per week, and improving safety at the factory — but it set its own deadline pretty far out: July 2013.

In a response to the SACOM report, Foxconn told Reuters: “The welfare of our employees is without a doubt our top priority and we are working hard to give our more than one million employees in China a safe and positive working environment.”

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