Apple CEO Steve Jobs dispelled the anticipation of a second major wireless announcement at MacWorld: the prospect of WiMAX-embedded Apple notebook computer. Apple did release a new laptop, and it has a new radio interface, but the new eco-friendly MacBook Air comes embedded with an IEEE 802.11n chip, the new high-capacity, long-range Wi-Fi solution that has yet to become fully standardized.

While the new laptop is definitely a win for Apple’s environmental critics (mercury- and arsenic-free in the housing, with caustic chemicals removed from the circuitry) as well as for the Draft N sector, the WiMAX industry might be a bit disappointed. (For more details about the Air and other up-to-the-minute updates and photos from MacWorld check out Gizmodo’s live blog.) But then again, the likelihood of Apple releasing a WiMAX laptop anytime soon was pretty slim. So far Sprint has only two live networks up and running and not a single commercial subscriber online while Clearwire still hasn’t migrated its networks to WiMAX. Apple supports new technology (well, with the exception of 3G), but it also has to have a market. So we can just chalk this one up to overly high expectations.

The iPhone is another story. Jobs announced that Apple has sold 4 million of these suckers now. That’s an impressive feat, and as long as he can keep milking the EDGE device for all its worth, he probably has little incentive to come out with the highly anticipated 3G version of the iPhone. Stay tuned for Associate Editor Sarah Reedy’s podcast with the Yankee Group’s John Jackson about the wireless implications of Apple’s new wares. Also, check back with Telephony Unfiltered for more analysis of the new configurable aspects of the iPhone.

Instead of unveiling the next iPhone, Apple CEO Jobs used his MacWorld pulpit to tout new iPhone features, none of which are that earth-shattering and many of which, agruably, should have been included in the initial iPhone launch.

1) SMS: Sending messages to multiple recipients. Come on….

2) Location: The iPhone has no GPS, but it can use the mobile network to triangulate a user’s approximate position. Nifty. Apple, however, announced this capability months ago for the Java and OS versions of Google Maps. Nothing new here.

3) Lyrics Support: As Telephony Senior Editor Ed Gubbins said “So it can be like a portable, handheld karaoke [device]? My God, it is a great time to be alive…”

4) Customizable Interface: Here’s the big one if you can call it big. You can move the iPhone icons around by “shaking” the device, bringing your content to the forefront and maximizing applications you use most. Nifty, but again not earth-shattering.

Looks like there’s no new iPhone on the plate today, but we’ll see what else Jobs has in store.

The Apple store is officially down for maintenance. That can only mean one thing: CEO Steve Jobs keynote, beginning as I type, will reveal new Apple products. The question is, will we just see a batch of new iPods or is today the fateful day Apple releases the 3G iPhone? The iPhone isn’t the only anticipated wireless product. Rumors have been circulating that Apple will release laptops embedded with WiMAX chips, a move that could be of massive significance to Sprint and Clearwire. Updates to come.

When I climbed into the SUV in the Las Vegas Convention Center parking lot, Motorola Networks CTO Dan Coombes asked, “Got your laptop? Well, pop it open.” Moto and Intel had set up a demo WiMAX network around the convention center and Las Vegas strip, and they aimed to show it off. But instead of passively watching the typical demo, they invited me to try to push the networks to its limits while they carted me around the city. I love a challenge.

To set up some context, Motorola and Intel were taking a bit of a risk of here. We all know the rules of demos. Half the time they don’t work. Wireless demos are particularly cantankerous–which usually explains the Ethernet cord that snakes out from under the counter. So, to do a live demo in a moving vehicle during rush hour traffic in one of the most congested areas of the U.S. took some chutzpah.

Motorola and Intel have done this kind of thing before. In Chicago at WiMAX World, Motorola rented out a tourist boat and cruised it up and down the Chicago river, running two dozen WiMAX devices at full tilt in the process. There, however, they had a base station every quarter to half mile, each pointing directly at the wide-open murky expanse of the river. There was no way that setup wasn’t going to deliver. In Vegas, though, the situation was a bit more tenuous. Moto decided to set up a temporary network using Clearwire spectrum six weeks before the Consumer Electronics Show, and according to Coombes, they had to rig an awful lot of stuff together at the last moment.

The access points were installed about a mile apart in rough circle around the convention center. There are no 25-story casinos sticking out of the Chicago river, so in Vegas Moto and Intel had to show that MIMO really works. The modem that Moto used was its newly announced MIMO home gateway, a device that really isn’t supposed to be moving around at 40 MPH leaping from sector to sector, Coombes explained. To get it to work, Coombes’ engineers yanked off the MIMO antennas, and taped on two large plastic flanges that looked as if they had been just cut off the Venetian blinds in his hotel room. This contraption along with a Wi-Fi router was mounted behind the backseat, while the rest of the car was packed to the gills with Intel-powered gadgetry all connected to the WiMAX modem through Ethernet cables and Wi-Fi.

My hosts warned there would be dead spots, and dead spots there were. As we passed under the towering steel curtain of the Wynn Hotel–where we stayed trapped for 10 minutes–in gridlock traffic, the Internet radio stream cut off, the onboard navigation system stopped remapping and everyone’s browsers popped up error screens. Meanwhile the WiMAX modem went haywire desparately searching for a signal. But after passing out from under the Wynn’s shadow–and quick reboot of the modem–the network worked impressively.

Admittedly we were one of the only three cars on the network so capacity wasn’t much of an issue, but I did my damndest to overtax the bugger. I simultaneously played YouTube videos on my Wi-Fi enabled phone, previewing songs from the iTunes store on an iPod touch, and downloading the biggest honking files I could find on my laptop. Meanwhile the Internet radio was blaring, the in-car navigator was chirping away and live video feeds from the other vehicles were streaming over a peer-to-peer connection on another computer (Coombes, who I suspect was a bit bored after a full day of reliving same demo, was also checking his e-mail via Outlook). And during all this IP commotion, I managed to navigate my way TelephonyOnline.com without the slightest hiccup.

I figured it was time for a real test, though. YouTube is for bandwidth-challenged sissies. Could the network handle a DVD-quality stream of a feature-length movie? So I went to Netflix’s movie-on-demand page and selected a good three-and-a-half hour long movie for our in-car enjoyment. This may have been a little more than I bargained for. My computer didn’t have the proper software, so Netflix began downloading all 25 MBs of Windows Media Player 11, updated my codecs and made me restart my computer. But as we pulled in to the parking lot of convention center, the opening credits of Les Miserables began playing full-screen on my computer. I admit, I was impressed.

LAS VEGAS – Yep, after delivering the keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show eight times since 1994, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is giving up his annual role as technology seer for a life focused on his charitable foundation. If you hadn’t heard, Bill Gates is retiring from Microsoft, and he’s going out with a little humor. At CES he spoofed his rather eccentric and geeky personality with a video in which he called everyone from Bono to Hillary Clinton looking for some activity to occupy his time (to see the keynote Webcast see Microsoft’s Press Pass page).

Starting next year, we’ll have to listen to someone else’s vision of technology at CES. Maybe it’s blasphemous to say, but I think it’s for the best. Gates and Microsoft haven’t exactly been on the cutting edge of innovation of late. The company sells an awful lot of software, but the average person on the street stopped getting excited about the newest release of Windows in about 1995.

Frankly the most spectacular jumps in consumer electronics in recent years have not come from Microsoft. Apple gave us the portable digital music player. Microsoft gave us the Xbox, but only after Sony and Nintendo turned the game console into a massive global market. And in a technology closer to home, Microsoft’s probing into the mobile space has been mediocre at best–Palm invented the smartphone, while RIM and Apple perfected it for the enterprise and the consumer, respectively.

Sound like I’m Microsoft bashing? Perhaps I am a bit. But I’m not criticizing the company or its business model. It makes great products (well, some are greater than others) that people buy by the boatload. But it’s been quite some time since Microsoft came up with the next big thing. Just look at what Gates and Microsoft cohorts preached from the CES pulpit: social media, home networking, even video sharing. It looks neato, but it’s hardly a new gospel. We’ve been seeing the same stuff presented at conferences for years.

Maybe that’s the value of Gates’ keynotes. Just as Microsoft’s software might allow it to turn a cutting-edge innovation into a mass-market phenomenom, maybe Gates’ keynotes validate those innovations to the industry at large. If you saw Bill talk it up at CES, then you know the technology has legs. But maybe it’s time the keynote was delivered by a true visionary in the technology world instead of the industry’s most successful reactionary.

Keep tuned to Unfiltered this week. Associate Editor Sarah Reedy and I will be making daily updates to the blog.

The holidays were good to Guitar Hero addicts who also happen to be Verizon Wireless customers. The wireless service provider, along with mobile entertainment company Hands-On Mobile, last week announced the exclusive availability of Activision’s Guitar Hero III mobile game for Verizon customers.

The game, available on any Get It Now-capable Verizon handset, features four guitars and three venues, requiring players to hit number keys in sync with colored notes that appear on a scrolling fret board. GHIII will cost subscribers about $5 for monthly access or $12 for unlimited use. At launch, the mobile game included 15 tracks from the Guitar Hero console series, with the ability to purchase more songs made available each month.

Let’s be honest, the small screen of a mobile handset looks nothing like a plastic guitar equipped with notes and a strum key. However, for a device you can play practically anywhere, users will most likely be forgiving. GHIII-ready Verizon handsets vary in keyboard usability and screen size and quality, so the game does as well, but all come equipped with three fret keys (rather than the five on the console), a rock meter, multiplier and, of course, Star Power.

Admittedly, I can’t even pass the easy setting for the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s “Suck My Kiss” on the console (although I did complete a song on the LG Chocolate without hearing the eminent boos!), so I enlisted two seasoned GHIII pros to test the Verizon service out. Both were impressed with the display and audio quality, but had trouble with the small frets and crowded keyboard. As to be expected, the graphics were also not “stunning” as Verizon has claimed, and the download speed is somewhat slow. A claim Verizon was dead on with, however, was that the game is addictive – a trait GHIII gamer have come to accept and appreciate.

The $12 price point for only 15 songs may turn away some avid gamers, but I suspect a large GHIII customer segment – the young users who don’t pay their own cell phone bills – won’t mind the fees. After all, despite the understandably slow download speed, the game is as easy to access as a new ringtone.

It is no wonder that Verizon wants to get in on a part of the industry that multiple analysts have touted as the next billion dollar market. It isn’t the first, however. Tap Tap Revolution, a mobile adaptation of the popular Dance Dance Revolution, is already available to Apple’s iPhone users as a native app downloadable using Installer.app or iBrickr. Users keep their taps in sync with the song playing by tapping the touchscreen to beat when the lights hit a bottom line. New songs can be downloaded over the phone’s Wi-Fi connection.

So, now that we can dance and rock out on our phones, I am confident more games are to come. Perhaps Madden for your mobile? I say bring it on. This is what opposable thumbs and dexterity are really for, right?

Let’s face it. If we want to get a sneak peak at what our mobile phones and services can do a year or two in the future, we just have to look at the Helio content deck today. Since Helio launched as an MVNO over the Sprint EV-DO network, some of the biggest names of the Internet and gaming have looked to the company as a testbed for their future mobile apps. This week YouTube added its name to the list.

MySpace signed on first with a native app for Helio’s handset line that allowed the obsessed social networking masses to access their profiles. That app appeared eight months later on Cingular/AT&T’s content deck (albeit with a $3 a month a charge). Last November, Helio was the first operator to begin embedding Google Maps and integrating it with GPS on its handsets. A few weeks later, Google released Maps along with mobile versions of Gmail as Java downloads, but Google Maps didn’t appear again in an out-of-the-box handset until the iPhone was released this summer. The iPhone was supposed to give Helio a run for its for money, but the operator showed this week it can still outfox Apple.

YouTube made the Helio Ocean the showcase for its new revamped video sharing portal. It’s not that Apple hasn’t gotten any love from YouTube–the YouTube portal went live on the iPhone just as it did on the Ocean and several other smartphones around the world. But unlike Apple’s implementation, the Ocean allowed customers to upload videos to the site. And this week, Helio pulled off another coup: the majority of YouTube’s 10 million-plus video libraryis now available for viewing on the Ocean’s YouTube portal, as well as customization, community and tagging functions that were previously enabled only on the online YouTube site. I’d venture to say that this isn’t just a marketing shenanigan. Gizmodo was impressed with the service’s new functionality, and they have a special place in their hearts for the iPhone.

If you’re not familiar with YouTube’s current offering for the mobile Web, let me assure you it sucks. Try pointing your phone browser at m.youtube.com. If it works at all in your browser or on your media player, you’ll get a list of pre-sorted videos for your consumption. Try search for the “Flight of the Conchords” and you’ll get squat (Now search the Conchords through YouTube on the PC browser–you won’t be sorry I promise). The problem is YouTube renders all of its videos in the Flash format. Since Flash video isn’t supported on any current phone, YouTube has to transfer its content to another format, which it clearly wasn’t about to do to every video of a drooling children on its site. For the Helio platform, however, YouTube just did that. I’m not sure how they did it. The Ocean may be supporting Flash, though I doubt it–Adobe just released this fall the version of Flash Lite supporting video. Perhaps they’re just converting every YouTube video into alternate formats. If you know, I’d like to hear from you (That’s what the comment section is for…)

The city of Philadelphia can be generally credited with launching the muni Wi-Fi craze, and is now seeing the down side of that trend. Earlier this week, the City Council held a hearing at which the status of its ambitious municipal network was examined, given the fact that the service provider, EarthLink, has stated it will no longer invest in municipal wireless networks.

EarthLink’s grand plans have run afoul of business realities, and nowhere is that more evident than in Philadelphia. The company said it has spent $20 million to build out Philadelphia’s network, which is still substantial but not complete, more than the $12 million to $15 million expected. The original contract between EarthLink and the city and its Wireless Philadelphia not-for-profit organization was hopelessly one-sided. As noted by the MuniWireless Web site, EarthLink is expected to pay $2 million to the city, $450,000 in inspection fees and rental fees of $2 per month for each streetlight used in mounting antennas, along with 3700 free accounts for city workers to access the network. The contract also calls for 23 free zones and 25,000 reduced price accounts for low-income families that qualify in WP’s digital inclusion program.

All of that, on top of the higher-than-expected cost of actually installing Wi-Fi citywide leaves EarthLink in no position to do anything but bleed red ink. Subscribership is not likely to cover those costs any time soon, if ever. The company did not attend the hearing, sending an unsigned statement claiming confidentiality, but it’s obvious that EarthLink is between a rock and a hard place here.

In a report also issued this week, the New America Foundation blames Wireless Philadelphia for handing its network over to a private concern. I didn’t read the whole report, but here’s a blogger who did and takes issue with it, for reasons I understand.

Rather than parsing out blame, however, it seems to be that some reasonable re-negotiation needs to take place that doesn’t leave Philadelphia’s ambitious plans for bridging the digital divide in limbo but also doesn’t bankrupt the company attempting to make those dreams a reality. The municipal Wi-Fi market has come a long way and much has been learned – the hard way – in the process. Philadelphia pioneered once, and it could do so again.

I practically have RCN’s phone number memorized. When my bill was mysteriously doubled, I had to redial the cable company so many times after being hung up on that it is etched in my brain, right next to the hold music I heard for an hour each time. I even considered canceling my service, which is why I’m convinced that if a company – be it a cableco, telco, wireless carrier or Internet provider – had a solid customer service experience (not to mention allowed consumers to bypass those pesky automated menus), they would dominate the market. Customer service is paramount, arguably more so than the speed of a network, the features of a cell phone or the number of high-definition channels offered via IPTV.

At least 5,000 consumers agree with me. Forrester Research recently announced its Customer Experience Index (CxPi) for 112 firms spanning nine industries. Making up the lower echelon of the list were wireless carriers, television and Internet providers – sad news for the telecom space. In terms of usefulness, usability, and enjoyability, 5,000 consumers surveyed dubbed them failing to perform.

Perhaps even more surprising was that wireless carriers, coming in fifth, beat out TV and Internet providers. Internet providers came in third to last on the list of nine and TV service providers followed, beating out only medical insurance providers (at least they can claim that). Still, it is a dismal state of affairs when your TV brings you less joy than your phone, which in turn is also failing to live up to your expectations. I don’t think we can blame the Writer’s Guild for this one.

So, the question remains: Are consumers demanding more or is the industry delivering less? The answer may well be both. Forrester analyst Bruce Temkin, who conducted the survey, said that to some degree, the carrier and service providers tend to focus a lot on their products and the protection of their territories rather than on the needs of their customers. It can be a double-edged sword as service providers get caught up offering the latest advancements to attract customers, yet overlook the customers they already have. On the flip side, as customers hear more and more about the capabilities of IPTV, mobile handsets and the Internet, they come to expect the technologies to work more quickly, efficiently and right now.

A ray of hope from the Forrester study for telcos is that they were not included in the television space. With consumers so displeased with the eight satellite and cable companies included in the survey, a significant opportunity exists for telecom providers to differentiate themselves based on their quality of experience in this space.

And it’s not just a North American phenomenon. Increasing customer dissatisfaction is leading to higher churn in the UK as well. The solution may come from a better product or more likely from simply communicating the utility of a product, how to use it and enjoy it through stronger customer service. In terms of the overall worldwide customer experience, it might just be the one thing that service providers can’t substitute for faster speeds, cheaper prices or technological innovation.

For every customer who wants to fiddle with a phone before buying, Mobile Complete may have the answer. It launched an online handset simulator today that allows you to run your intended purchase through the motions before you shell out your cash and sign your contract–or even visit the store for that matter.

Mobile Complete is launching its beta site tryphone.com with four devices, including the iPhone, with the idea of getting its simulator embedded into retail sites, review publications and even carrier online portals all over the Web. To the right is the new Sprint LG Muziq. Try hitting a few buttons (it moves!). Admittedly it isn’t the same as tinkering with the real thing. You can’t prank call your ex-girlfriend, and not all of the functions are active, but it’s a tolerable substitute. And it certainly beats hiking down to the Sprint store and staring at powered-down phone with a cardboard mock-up of the idle screen.

For those of you unfamiliar with Mobile Complete, it runs a remote device-testing lab that allows application developers to test their products on a handset virtually, not through an online simulation, but through a sort of tele-testing engine that lets a developer interact with a live phone thousands of miles away. Controls linked to a Web portal interact directly with the phone interfaces, and the phone’s voice and data connections come from the same wireless connections as a device on the street. All the action is beamed back to the developer by wireless video feed.

The consumer test site isn’t the same service Mobile Complete is offering to developers–renting time on a specific phone in the lab ain’t cheap. But it’s an interesting approximation. Mobile Complete isn’t trying to present the phone in its marketing glory. Instead it shows the devices, warts and all. It has created a phone-version of a crawler that goes through and maps the functions of each device. It then records each interaction on digital video and renders them on the Web whenever a user hits a button. So you know just how many steps it takes it access your contacts or download a Web site. Try going to its mock-up of the iPhone and downloading one of the Web sites available in the Safari browser: There’s some waiting involved–just like the real iPhone on AT&T’s edge networks.

So is this the end of the carrier store? Will customers now eschew the pushiness of sales people and the hassle of crowds if they can both test and buy their handsets online? Well, probably not just yet. There’s no approximating the real device in your hands, and Mobile Complete has a few kinks to work out. Not all of the phone functions on the four devices on TryPhone.com appear to be mapped out just yet. But it is a beta, after all.

Mobile Complete CEO Faraz Syed said his company plans to quickly populate the site with all makes and models of phones and pair them off with the connections of their appropriate carriers. Syed’s goal, however, isn’t to create an independent review site or Mobile Complete’s own retail portal (though TryPhone.com will start collecting referral fees when it launches commercially). Rather he wants to license this technology to online retailers like Amazon and ultimately to the operators themselves, who could definitely use something more than a low-rez photo and list of specs to market their devices online. Syed even envisions the platform as a post-purchase tutorial application carriers and vendors can use to educate their customers on the increasingly complexity of their phones.