iPhone News Updated

Verizon iPhone hotspot feature: $20 extra per month for 2GB data

The wireless hotspot feature that Verizon is packaging with its version of the iPhone 4 will cost users $20 per month in addition to regular data charges. The company confirmed the pricing late Tuesday when speaking to Macworld, noting that it’s the same price that other Verizon smartphone owners pay for the privilege.

AT&T iPhone owners currently cannot share their 3G connections with multiple users over WiFi in the same way Verizon iPhone owners will be able to. Instead, AT&T users must tether the phone to their computers via cable or Bluetooth and pay $20 per month on top of the $15 or $25 monthly fee they already pay for data—they don’t get any extra data allotment for tethering, either.

Contrast that with Verizon’s hotspot plan: although it also costs $20 per month on top of the normal monthly data plan, the hotspot feature will get its own 2GB pool of data to pull from that is separate from the phone’s individual data use. 2GB may be plenty for many smartphone owners, but it isn’t much for a “real” computer or two sharing a single hotspot; some users will undoubtedly be disappointed that they can’t share the unlimited data pool that they can get on the phone itself.

Verizon announced yesterday that it was keeping the $30 unlimited monthly data option for the iPhone launch. However, as Verizon COO Lowell McAdam said during the company’s quarterly earnings call, the offer is only temporary—Verizon will be switching to a tiered system in the “not-too-distant future.”

[Thanks: http://arstechnica.com]

MicroStrategy Ramps Up Business Intelligence For iPad, iPhone

MicroStrategy will announce a series of new BI (business intelligence) products for Apple mobile devices, transactional data systems and on-demand deployments at its annual user conference on Tuesday in Las Vegas.

The company is rolling out additional ways to visualize data on iPads and iPhones, including “heat map” and calendar-style presentations. Another new feature will enable in-memory data stores on mobile devices to receive new information without having to recreate the whole repository. MicroStrategy’s in-memory capabilities will now also be able to suck in data from multidimensional databases such as Oracle’s Essbase.

A product called MicroStrategy Transaction Services will allow mobile applications to talk to transactional systems back at the home office. For example, a store worker could use an iPhone “to scan the bar code of an item, identify the product as a top-seller, see the sales forecast for the item, and immediately initiate a re-order,” the company said in a statement.

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