Sprint's Palm Pre plan is $384/year cheaper than AT&T's iPhone plan

The Palm Pre is better than the iPhone in many ways: it has a real keyboard, the OS supports multitasking beautifully, and it is significantly cheaper. Yes, with a contract the 8GB iPhone 3G is now only $99 compared to $199 for the Palm Pre, but the contract is where all the hidden costs are. Sprint's Palm Pre plan is $384/year cheaper than AT&T's iPhone plan with the same features. Here's the math:

Sprint Palm Pre base plan: $70/month. Features included:

• 450 anytime minutes
• unlimited data
• unlimited nights & weekend minutes starting at 7pm
• unlimited text
• voice guided GPS navigation by Telenav

(Source)

AT&T iPhone base plan: $70/month. Features included:

• 450 anytime minutes
• unlimited data
• 5000 nights & weekend minutes starting at 9pm
• ...and that's all. Pretty bare bones, but may be enough for some people.

Extra features you may want:

• $9 for Early Nights and Weekends (starting at 7pm)
• $5 for iPhone Text Messaging 200
• $20 for iPhone Text Messaging Unlimited

(Source)

An AT&T iPhone plan with almost all the features of the Sprint Palm Pre plan would therefore be $70 base + $9 early N&W + $20 unlimited sms = $99/month. That's $384/year more expensive than the Sprint Palm Pre plan. Note I said "almost": there is currently no iPhone app with voice guided GPS directions, and while tomtom did just announce an iPhone app that does exactly this, I suspect tomtom will use the new in-app iPhone payments system to charge a monthly fee to users of this app, so the price difference for true feature parity could be even higher.

For unlimited everything plans ("Simply Everything" is what Sprint calls it) the savings with Sprint become more pronounced: $100/month on Sprint vs. $150/month on AT&T, making the iPhone $600/year more expensive than the Pre.

Bottom line is that the Palm Pre is better than the iPhone and cheaper as well. The only problem is that it's sold out everywhere, so good luck finding one :)

Full disclosure: I've been a loyal Palm Treo user for 5 years, I have a friend that works at Palm, and I spent significant effort to get a Palm Pre the day it came out. The Palm Pre is better than the iPhone, and its story needs to be told.

Update: Appmodo has a very thorough comparison of the iPhone 3.0, the Palm Pre, the Android G2, and the Blackberry Storm. It's a lot of information, but it might help you decide which one you want if you're looking to get a new smartphone.

IE8 Image Size Bug Breaks Google Maps, Even in EmulateIE7 Mode

Google Maps currently does not work on IE8 Beta 1. Even in the "EmulateIE7" mode of IE8 it does not work completely: most of the UI works OK, but the pan/zoom controls and markers don't show up on the map. It appears this is because of a bug in IE8 (in both IE8 mode and EmulateIE7 mode) where the size of Image objects is multiplied by 100:


I hope this gets fixed in IE8 Beta 2 (due out in less than 2 weeks).

Running Man on Street View

Me, running furiously to keep up with the Street View van as it drove by Google:

Creepy scam site using my name and picture!

Ok, so they changed one letter in my name, but that just makes it even more creepy. http://www.maxern.us/ is the creepy scam site and on http://www.maxern.us/maxern-work.php there are a bunch of bogus testimonals about how MAXERN will help you make money, one of which is by "Eman Parker" of "Menlo Park, CA" who evidently looks exactly like me:

"I dont know much about website development but i wanted to make my website.maxern not only made website for me but also helped me in earning. Its really helpful."

I recognize the identities of a bunch of other people giving testimonies on that page. All have their name slightly mispelled. Looks like the pictures and names come from Orkut. Maybe it's time to delete my Orkut account.

Possible identity fraud thanks to Helio

I just got this letter in the mail from Helio:

We are writing to you because of a recent compromise in security. Helio has discovered that restricted data containing certain personal information was accessed through illegal means.

We regret to inform you that your name is among those that may have been compromised. While we are uncertain whether your personal information was actually obtained, we know that the individual(s) responsible sought and retrieved some personal information, including customer names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers (last four digits).

Helio has taken steps to secure this data by limiting access to this information, resetting passwords and implementing new procedures to protect this information. In addition, Helio has notified the appropriate law enforcement agencies and an investigation is being conducted.

About 1.5 years ago I bought a Helio phone to try out the built in GPS, but returned it within a month because it was nowhere near able to replace my Treo. I was a bit peeved at Helio because the sales guy ensured me that I could get all my money back if I returned it within a month, but in the end I still had to pay for 1 month of service. Now, thanks to this "compromise in security", I need to deal with the hassle of potential identity fraud - contacting credit bureaus, placing a fraud alert with them, being on alert myself for the next year, etc. Ugh. I hate Helio.

Vitamin D "substantially reduces all-cancer risk" - by 60%!

I've blogged before about the health importance of vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin, and new evidence keeps coming out. In June of this year the results of a great vitamin D study were published that concluded that "Improving calcium and vitamin D nutritional status substantially reduces all-cancer risk in postmenopausal women.^" The study is very high quality because it was a "4-y, population-based, double-blind, randomized placebo-controlled trial" with 1179 post menopausal women. The first key point is that the subjects that took vitamin D plus calcium had 60% less cancer (compared to those that took the placebo) over all 4 years (with a P value of 0.01, meaning the probability that this result was due to chance alone is 1%), and 80% less cancer "when the analysis was confined to cancers diagnosed after the first 12 mo" (with a P value of less than 0.005 indicating even higher confidence). The second key point is that because the trial was an intervention trial (double-blind, randomized placebo-controlled) it shows that vitamin D (possibly plus calcium) was actually the cause of this reduction in cancer (as opposed to just being correlated with it, as most previous studies have shown). And by the way, a third group that was given just calcium did have reduced cancer rates too but the reduction in cancer was not as significant and the results were not as conclusive (due to a higher P value). I wish the study had had a fourth group that took just vitamin D - I bet this would have shown that vitamin D alone prevents cancer significantly.

If you want to read something less technical than the actual study then I recommend an article at theglobeandmail.com that describes the study like this: "A four-year clinical trial involving 1,200 women found those taking the vitamin had about a 60-per-cent reduction in cancer incidence, compared with those who didn't take it, a drop so large — twice the impact on cancer attributed to smoking — it almost looks like a typographical error." It's also got a bunch of great background on vitamin D and the increasing awareness of it in the medical industry as something of a wonder drug that prevents diseases of all kinds.

Another recent study suggests that vitamin D is likely safe up to at least 40,000 IU per day, and remember that it is extremely cheap (~$10 for a years supply), so take more vitamin D! I've been taking over 4000 IU per day for at least 6 months, and my dad is up to 7500 IU per day now :)

Facebook poll: What mapping site do you use?

I just ran a poll on facebook to see which mapping site people use. Mostly I was curious about facebook polls, but the market research is also useful to me as I work on google maps. I was impressed by how fast the responses came in (182 in ~20 minutes), and it was fun to watch them in real time, though at $0.25 per response it cost a pretty penny. Maybe I can expense it :) The results were a bit surprising to me, but maybe not given the demographic (facebook users on facebook at midnight). Anyways, click through to see the detailed results with breakdowns by age, gender etc.

Rants:

• Why is blogger's image upload so slow tonight and why does the image come out grainy even when I select large size?
• I wish the preview button on blogger's compose page showed me what the post will look like on my blog's frontpage (currently the preview doesn't look at all like it does once I post it because the width is different).
• Facebook should make it easier for me to share my polls with my friends.
• I wish facebook polls showed me a geographic breakdown of the users that responded.
• I would also like to be able to control the time range over which the poll will be shown so I don't just get facebook users at midnight.
• Make the polls app easier to find on facebook. I want to be able to search for it! Currently the only way to get to it is through a little link at the bottom of the page.
• I wish facebook allowed poll results to be viewed without logging in.
• Why does it take so long for facebook to import this post as a note? I'm tempted to just write the note in facebook instead of on blogger so it will be distributed faster on facebook, but then the note would only be accessible to facebook users. I wish facebook was more open in cases like this. Photos can be viewed without logging in (if the user who uploaded an album sends you the right link), why not notes?
  
• Why did gmail mark this post as spam?!?! I have a google groups email list I set up to distribute my blog posts to people (like my parents) that prefer to read them via email than via a blog reader or the web. I myself am also subscribed to this list but the message it sent to me was marked as spam :( C'mon, I'm using Google's Blogger to send a message through Google Groups to my Google Mail account, and it gets marked as spam. Sigh.

Update:

Another rant: Turns out that facebook doesn't allow users to see polls that others have created :( Isn't the whole point of facebook to make it easy to share things like this?!? Anways, I've taken a screenshot of the poll page and changed the links above to point to that screenshot instead of facebook so others can see it.