Gadgetory

t-mobile began its uncarrier initiative last year by dropping contracts and data limits and cementing itself as the bad boy of wireless carriers CEO John Legend also helped with that last night the company continued that tradition these high and mighty do opolis that are raping you for every penny you have if they could do something nice for you they would the hate you these days t-mobile is trying every possible way to get customers to try out its service the latest attempt is called test drive and it's exactly what it sounds like anyone can now go into a t-mobile store and walk out with an iphone 5s that runs on t-mobile's network and comes with the company's unlimited plan free of charge at the end of the week people bring the phone back and either sign up for the plan or return it with what t-mobile says are no strings attached and who is providing all these iphones to test-drive apple according to legend apple is giving the iphones to t-mobile for free in support of the program but Ledger's on carrier announcements didn't stop there thanks to a new partnership between the phone carrier and streaming music service Rhapsody t-mobile customers will now have free access to internet radio starting june twenty second i'll be at only customers that pay eighty dollars or more a month get it for free the rest of its customers will still be able to get access to it for four dollars per month and even non t-mobile customers can sign up for 499 a month it's a clear attempt to take on services like Pandora which claims to have 77 million active users as of last month unraid EO differs though by offering unlimited song skips offline options and no ads it may not compare to companies like spotify and rdio which offer the ability to listen to full albums consecutively or organize a library of music but unraid EO is really just a value add giving prospective customers another reason to sign up with t-mobile the company also announced a new initiative called music freedom which rids customers of data caps when using a select group of music streaming services these include the aforementioned Rhapsody Pandora Spotify iHeartRadio iTunes radio slacker Samsung's milk and the forthcoming streaming service from Electronic Music destination beatport it'll also be taking votes from customers through its website and on Twitter for other services to add to the list of exemptions well this may all sound wonderful and right in line with t-mobile's uncarrier image it's not a good look for net neutrality because t-mobile is essentially deciding which companies observe free data and which ones don't yeah you know I fear behind the verge so the mobile the music freedom thing is pretty interesting but from a net neutrality perspective I think it's problematic to treat a certain kind of data differently than other data just because it's music and I'm wondering if you guys thought through those issues and if as a as a you know data first kind of company if you think that's problem so you actually think that somebody would have a net neutrality problem with you giving it to them for free thank you kind of got it I guess yeah I I I don't agree especially since you know if you have a different service that you want and it's being used we will put it's a technical inclusion in the process it takes a short period of time to get the appropriate site get the URL figure out how to whitelist it and get it on the network so it's more so than that our idea is to give free streaming of music to everybody and i I don't I don't foresee the uncarrier issues and what we're doing with the industry being other than something that the proponents of net neutrality would really be supportive of whether that's true or not what's to stop t-mobile from withholding music freedom from services that aren't and John Ledger's good graces