Tuesday focus: Gadgets
AT&T Inc. said last week it will start selling iPhones without requiring a two-year contract, but they will cost $400 more.
Spokesman Michael Coe said AT&T will sell the phones starting Thursday for $599 or $699, depending on the storage capacity. The two models cost $199 or $299 under contract.
The phone company had said in July, when the latest version of the iPhone was launched, that it would sell contract-free phones in the United States. Such phones are sold in some other countries.
The new phones will still be “locked” to AT&T and won’t work with any other cellular carrier unless they’re modified. AT&T will only activate them on the regular iPhone plans, which include a $30 monthly charge for data access. Prepaid service will not be available.
Apple Inc., the maker of the iPhone, has been selling the device from its stores and Web site, but would not say if it would sell the contract-free version.
Apple is widely expected to release a new version of the phone this summer.
FREE BOOKS: Google Inc. is making half a million books, unprotected by copyright, available for free on Sony Corp.’s electronic book-reading device.
It’s the first time Google has made its vast trove of scanned public-domain books available to an e-book device, and vaults the Sony Reader past Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle as the device with the largest available library, at about 600,000 books.
The scanned books were all published before 1923, and include works like Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” as well as nonfiction classics like Herodotus’ “The Histories.”
The books are already available as free downloads in the Portable Document Format (PDF), which works well on computer screens but not on e-book readers. Google will provide the books to the Sony Reader in the EPUB (electronic publication) format, which lets the lines flow differently to fit a smaller screen.
Google spokeswoman Jennie Johnson said the company wants to make the books available as widely as possible.
“Really our vision is: any book, anywhere, any time and on any device,” she said. “We want to partner with anybody who shares our vision of making them more accessible.”
Associated Press