Then act and act fast: Amazon has the Samsung Galaxy Nexus 4G for $100. That’s $700 cheaper than buying it without a contract and $200 cheaper than you can get from Verizon itself. And, yes, it’s on Verizon’s 4G network, which is expanding rapidly and is fairly reliable. It’s also running Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest and greatest version of Android.

So, if you need a new phone, or want an awesome one? Get this now.

OK, OK, the iPPeel doesn’t exist to be redundant, or facilitate another round of those “Yo Dawg I Heard You Like X” jokes the Internet found funny five years ago. It actually exists to solve a problem corporate road warriors are all too familiar with: roaming charges.

The iPPeel is basically an iPhone case that puts a basic cell phone on the back of your iPhone. We’re not talking anything complex here: this is the cutting edge of 1999 technology. The big advantage of this phone is that it’s small enough to be part of an iPhone case, and that it’s a dual-SIM card phone.

For those unfamiliar, a SIM card is basically your phone’s identification. The SIM lets you access a network without being charged roaming, for example. The iPhone has a micro-SIM card, for its purposes, but the iPPeel uses two full-sized SIM cards.

So, in theory, if you were flying to Europe and Asia a lot, you could have an American iPhone, and have Asia and European SIMs in the iPPeel, while still using the iPhone’s WiFi capabilities for the Internet.

Sound neat? It is, but it’s going to run you $70 for the privilege of saying you love phones so much, you put a phone on your phone.

iPPeel Transforms the iPhone into Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde [Chip Chick]

You’re not alone. Verizon appears to be in the middle of a major network outage, affecting dozens of cities. It just took most people a long time to notice because the phone browser is so crappy. HEY-YOOOOO! But, seriously, what’s actually going on?

Nobody knows, which is the really troubling part.

Here’s what we do know, in an easy-to-digest list format:

- This happened sometime overnight.
- 3G and 4G are both out, nationwide.
- Voice and text are both functional, but who uses a cellphone to call people anyway?
- It’s unclear if this was the result of a system failure or a deliberate attack. Verizon is aware of the problem and is working on it, but their spokesman stated he wasn’t authorized to discuss the problem with the press. That’s usually PR code for “we have no idea what the hell has happened, but we don’t want to freak people out.”

So, what can you do during our long national nightmare? Well, stop bothering Verizon customer service, for one thing; they’re aware of the problem. Secondly, if you need to get the Internet on your phone, find a Starbucks or a McDonalds: they both offer free WiFi and you can get your phone back online in minutes.

But for now we sit, and wait. Or just use our laptops.

Verizon Suffers Nationwide Outage [The Verge]

But don’t get excited just yet. They just finished testing them on rabbits, and currently the technology can only support one LED. Also, to power it, you need to strap a battery to the side of your face.

However, scientists are hopeful that with some technological breakthroughs, they can have these on the market by the 2020s. No word on whether they’ll be encrypted, or what will happen when a friend sends you an “important picture message” that turns out to be Goatse. Maybe their next invention will be a way to remotely punch somebody in the crotch?

Bionic Contact Lens to Project Emails Before Our Eyes [BBC]

To be fair to the boys in red, they’re being really up front about this: they sent all their customers an email laying out their policy changes, what they’re collecting, and how it’s going to be used. Unfortunately, they did it through a bulk email that nobody pays attention to in the first place, so…yeah.

So, how do you opt out? You can either visit www.vzw.com/myprivacy or just call 866-211-0874

Important note: this won’t stop you from getting ads on your phone. They’ll still be allowed to bug you that way. It’s just that those ads won’t be targeted, so you won’t be getting spammed with worthless coupons for crap you’d never buy because you happened to text next to the Useless Crap Store. Forget privacy, that alone might be worth it.

Verizon Welcomes Users to The Ad-Targeting Party [TechCrunch]

UMA isn’t brand new: the standards for it have been around since at least 2004. But wireless networks hadn’t penetrated as far as they have now, when everybody and their mom has a wireless router plugged into their modem (and if you don’t, get with the times, Grandpa). Also, needless to say, cell phone providers aren’t terribly eager to have a technology around that makes their network obsolete.

It’s a fascinating concept, but we can see some roadblocks: although standards were recently delivered for 802.22, that is, big honking wireless routers connected to TV antennas that provide wireless to a sixty mile radius (really), 802.22 systems aren’t going to be up and running for a while. And relying on other people’s networks (which may often be locked) for your wireless seems a bit iffy; what happens if the power gets knocked out, and you can’t pick up roaming?

Still, if you’re sick of shelling out for the data and the text and the calling, this might be a viable option, especially if you live in a major city with a lot of open public WiFi networks. After all, why pay more for data caps?

Republic Wireless to offer unlimited calls, SMS and data for $19 per month [Engadget]

Since we crank out so many stories each week some really good ones get lost in the cracks. And since so many new people visit Guyism every day (thank you), we thought we’d take some time on the weekends to share a few classics that many of our newer readers may have missed.

Sporting events can be an unbelievable experience. A mixture of beers, tears and jeers can turn a regular Saturday into a memory that will last a lifetime. But it’s not all fun and games when you get off the couch and go see a game in person. Recently I went to a Celtics game for example, and the lady sitting next to me was one of the most obnoxious human beings on the face of the earth. Sitting with what I assume was her parole officer, this woman ruined what would have otherwise been a great game. Which leads me to my first example of things that can destroy a sporting experience…

7 WOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!
I swear to you, at one point the woman sitting next to me yelled “woooooooooo” 25 times in 30 seconds… and it was during a TV time-out. That is not an exaggeration. I understand that when the Jumbotron asks you to make some noise that you should heed it’s advice, but just screaming willy-nilly like a tone-deaf moron for no reason whatsoever just makes you an obnoxious idiot. I don’t mind people yelling obscenities or screaming a good joke down from the rafters, but seriously, if you’re just going to scream for 2 straight hours, stay home or go be a carnival barker somewhere else.

6 Beer is ridiculously expensive
At most stadiums, beer prices are tend to hover around the $7 range and that’s probably the low end of the spectrum. You could buy a six pack for that price. It’s just a huge rip-off! I know that stadiums need to make money, but I’ve seen $12 beers before and that’s simply a slap in the face to your fans. I’m calling shenanigans! Cut payroll for garbage players or find another way to make a few bucks without taking it out on your fan base. I gotta pay $15 for parking, then $36 bucks to get a buzz going? And all so Eddy Curry can install an ice cream maker in his Maserati.

5 Fights
I understand fanaticism/and I’m all for it. Sometimes the heart wants what the heart wants — those that don’t get what the heart wants often let their fists try and heal the pain of heartbreak. Every Dodger game I ever went to I saw a fight. People always hate on L.A. fans because they leave early, but the reason they do is that murder rates go up 50% after the 7th inning. Fans want to go out and have a good time and leave their troubles at home. And nobody should have to worry about their kids accidentally getting caught in the middle of a brawl that breaks out between opposing fans. This is supposed to be a fun day out with friends, not a damn Fight Club.

4 People who bring signs
Glad you took the time and effort to state so eloquently the reasons you think Duke players felate goats, but I paid good money for these seats and I want to see the game, not some goofy anagram for ESPN. Sweetheart, I highly doubt J.J. Redick is not going to see your sign and decide to marry you on the spot, so please put your sign down during the middle of the game so everyone behind you can watch Dwight Howard dominate the paint.

3 Thunder sticks
I don’t know who invented them but I know he had to be deaf. If I wanted to hear crap banging together for two hours I’d have bought tickets for “Stomp!” These things aren’t too bad when you have a section of people with them, but leave it to the one uber-drunk guy that thinks he’s Keith Moon to try and wail out an entire Van Halen album while everyone else is trying to concentrate on the game. For the love of all that is holy, if you have these things, please try and use them in moderation.

2 The guy on his cell phone the whole time
Really? You came to a sporting event and you’re gonna sit there on your Blackberry and gab to your buddy at home the whole time? I thought the television had play-by-play announcers that gave people watching at home the details of the game? Other folks don’t want to hear the details of your back surgery while rooting for the inevitable Albert Pujols home run. We are all here together, so lets all root here together and leave the cell phone recap for the ride home.

1 Traffic
If you gotta park at the stadium then you gotta wait in traffic. And wait. And wait. It’s an unavoidable part of the process, but that doesn’t make it suck any less. Nothing is worse than knowing you have to leave a game in progress to beat the other 50,000 people to the freeway. It sounds petty, but along with how expensive everything is and the time and effort it can take to go see a game, it’s sometimes just better to buy a nice TV and enjoy the action at home. And when 3-D televisions hit the market–get out of here. No seriously, get out of here cause I’m trying to enjoy the game from my living room.

As bloggers, we’re often trying to multi-task on our smart phones. Whether it’s watching youtube videos, sending emails or more importantly, trying to write a post on the fly. Enter in the Samsung Galaxy S. With the 4 inch display, you’ll be able to watch videos with clarity and because of it’s 16GB internal memory and Android 2.1 operating system, those videos are loaded with impressive speed. But it is the Samsung’s use of swipe technology that pushes it over the top. Instead of pounding away on the touch screen, the swipe keyboard allows you to simply drag your finger across the screen and type in words faster than you would normally. Watch as this person types in an entire paragraph in less than 30 seconds.

Important features: Super AMOLED Touch Screen with 4.0″ Display, Android 2.1 (Eclair Platform)

If you ever wake up and find yourself in a horror movie, just invest in a satellite phone. Sure you could sit around and ask questions like, “Am I in a horror movie?” or “How did I end up in a horror movie?” but would that really help save your life? Probably not. But satellite phones get reception everywhere, thanks to the powers of satellites. Even when you’re getting chased by a guy in a prison jumpsuit and a mask made of human flesh, your satellite phone will be there, unlike your friend John who got killed by said guy in prison jumpsuit. Real reliable, John. As always. Anyway long story short, that’s why I chained you up in the basement. Experiential learning is always the best.

Normally a butt dial is just a barrage of random noise being left in a voicemail message or coming through the line on a call. Other times it ends up being a funny story to tell after the fact among family or friends

Calls between friends, family, and other common acquaintances are all common in the butt dialing world. But as Duke graduate student Kathryn Ellis found out, a butt dial can strike at any moment no matter how prepared you think you are.

“I was in a graduate school interview with my phone in my back pocket on silent and everything,” Ellis explains. “In the middle of the interview I hear this low moaning sound coming from my pocket, but I ignored it thinking my interviewer couldn’t hear it.”

Ellis said that she had somehow managed to take her phone off silent, turn the speaker phone feature to on, and continuously speed dial the same number. The moaning she heard was a woman on the other end asking who was calling and why they kept calling and hanging up.

“Apparently my butt is better with my phone than I am, because to this day I don’t know how to turn my phone on speaker,” Ellis said. “It was really embarrassing though, but my interviewer didn’t miss a beat and kept on going with the interview.”

[ABC News]

Six middle school students could face child porn charges after a boy took a nude photo of his 13-year-old girlfriend and “sexted” it to his pals’ cell phones, cops said.

The six boys, ages 12 to 14, will be summoned to Falmouth District Court for a hearing to determine whether they should be charged with possessing, exhibiting or distributing child porn in the form of a text message photo, according to The Cape Cod Times.

Columbia University Professor Sari Locker said surveys suggest one in five teens has sent or received nude or semi-nude pictures. “When boys receive a nude picture of a girl, they think the next time they see her they can go further with her in a sexual way than before,” she said. “It becomes an invitation to advance a sexual relationship.” But Locker said she believes criminal charges are excessive: “Clearly these boys are not sexual predators or pedophiles.”

I think it’s kind of horsecrap how the boys are always getting in trouble for this. What about the girl? She basically mindraped all these poor innocent young boys. They’re just victims in this crazy technologically advanced world.

I feel like I’ve covered this story way too much and it’s easy to continue to make the same cliched “GUY” joke about like how “WHY DIDN’T GIRLS DO SHIT LIKE THIS WHEN I WAS IN SCHOOL AMIRITE” but I think the more applicable question is why don’t I know more high school girls who are doing this right now? I mean I’m more than capable of going down to the schools and introducing myself. But that’s the problem: my lack of ambition. And lack of a trenchcoat. Which really ties back into the ambition thing.

[source]

Psychic fails at..psychic..ness

Pro tip: Don’t be specific with your cold reading guesses when you’re a ugly old lady pretending to be a psychic.

This is totally why I failed at being a psychic too. I’d go to do a reading where I’m in touch with the dead and then I’d be like, “I bet your husband’s death was a tragic one…WAS IT MARSHMALLOWS? DID HE DIE IN A VAT OF MARSHMALLOWS? I BET IT WAS MARSHMALLOWS.” Sure, it was a correct guess one out of the first ten thousand times, but it didn’t do much for my psychic street cred.

Phone companies f’ing you on text messages

It may be a shocker to learn that major corporations are f’ing you everywhere you go. Well, add another confirmation on that fact to the list: It costs you .20 for every text you send. It costs cell providers approximately 0 dollars. And 0 cents.

Telcos are ripping you off. If you are surprised by this, you may also be interested in some prime real estate I have for sale. It’s on the Moon.

But just because we all know that we are being scammed doesn’t make the manner of the sting any less interesting. A piece in the New York Times goes into some detail on the cost of text messages to the cell carriers and concludes that it is close to zero. An SMS doesn’t even take any bandwidth away from the regular channels which carry calls:

That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted.

I never thought this would be possible but, with this news, apparently the text photos I send women of my penis are somehow worth less than I had originally valuated them at. The cost-benefit analysis of this really makes me realize that, not only is my business model foolish, but frankly, it’ll never be profitable. But sometimes you have to take a hit financially to get your message out there. Really, it’s the closest thing to charity that I do.

“It seems that everyone under 40 who dies takes their cell phone with them,” says Noelle Potvin, family service counselor for Hollywood Forever, a funeral home and cemetery in Hollywood, Calif. “It’s a trend with BlackBerrys, too. We even had one guy who was buried with his Game Boy.”

[via]

Forget about passing notes in study hall; some teens are now using their cell phones to flirt and send nude pictures of themselves.

The instant text, picture and video messages have become part of some teens’ courtship behavior, police and school officials said.

The messages often spread quickly and sometimes find their way to public Web sites.

A study last year found teens are placing more of an emphasis on image and fame than in the past. Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University who studies young people’s trends, found that teens are more confident and assertive than ever before.

“Adolescents are not known for thinking things through — that’s a generational constant,” she said. “Now, with the technology that is out there, instead of taking a picture and passing it around the classroom, it’s online, which is a whole different ball game. (Teens) don’t see it that way.”

I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out what we’re all thinking when we read this. Oh, not about about the horrors of a misinformed youth that can’t think about consequences and only focuses on getting attention. But rather the immediate instinct that I assume we all had when we read that. Which is to go “Niiiiiiiiice” and lick our lips. Uh, you didn’t have that reaction? Well, yeah…certainly…lost childhood…innocence…is…uh…not sexy at all.

Having a son would seem like it’s pretty status quo. If he’s handsome and well-endowed (like my son would no doubt be since I am a genetic masterpiece), he’s probably really reaping the benefits of this situation and I could live vicariously through him. But having a beautiful daughter (like my daughter would undoubtedly be for the same reasons listed above) would be disastrous. I mean you have to let her go to school and be social so she doesn’t die a lonely spinster whose cat ends up eating her face for weeks because no one cares about her and checked in on her.

I’d probably have to give her like a carrier pigeon or arrows with notes attached to them to communicate with her friends just to make sure she’s not taking nude photos. Then again, she could just do like Maid Marian did for Robin Hood and get paintings of herself in the nude and send them on the back of an ox or a large retarded man. See? The more things change, the more they stay the same.

A study by an award-winning cancer expert shows that cell phone use could kill more people than smoking, it is reported.

According to the U.K.’s Independent newspaper, the study, headed by Dr. Vini Khurana, shows that there is a growing body of evidence that using handsets for 10 years or more can double the risk of brain cancer.

Khurana — one of the world’s top neurosurgeons — based his assessment on the fact that three billion people now use the phones worldwide. That is three times higher than people who smoke. Smoking kills some five million globally each year.

He warned that people should avoid using handsets whenever possible and called on the phone industry to make them safer. France and Germany have already warned against the use of mobile phones, especially by children, it is reported.

Well, it’s not like it’s brain surgery! Ohh…aw.

Whatever though, so cell phones are turning my brain into a fine stew. How else can I look important when walking down the street? Or avoid looking at someone I kind of casually know by holding the phone to my ear and saying things people say on the phone like “BUY! SELL! BEARS ARE ON THE MARKET BUT BULLS ARE FOR THE BEDROOM!”

People have been getting sicknesses from forms of communication for years…it’s just kind of an accepted risk. CB Radio gives you scrotal cancer. Two cans with a bit of string? AIDS. It’s scientific fact.