Newber is an iPhone application that has GrandCentral-like call directing service. The cool feature of the application is it’s location-aware feature. Whenever you get a call, Newber will automatically redirect it to the nearest landline to your location. It also has other features such as being able to swap phones mid-call.

Unfortunately, you can’t ring all phones when called or listen in on voicemail as it’s being recorded, but hopefully they’ll be adding similar feature in the future.

The main difference is that Newber is a pay-for service that costs $5 per month and 2 cents a minute. GrandCentral is free, but hasn’t been accepting new users for a while now.

In a change of policy that’s actually customer friendly for once, as of this Sunday, Verizon will allow you to change your contract without tacking on another 2 years of being shackled to their service. Until now, if you wanted to drop down or increase your monthly minutes, Verizon would force you to resign a contract, but no more! Which is good news to me, seeing that I use 2 min a month and have a 10,000 minute plan.

I for one, have heard enough of the "maybes" and "possibles" – I want to see a city-wide wireless network in place! I don;’t even care which city. Just get it done, people!

Yesterday, Sprint and Motorola did a live demo of Sprint’s Xohm-branded, mobile WiMax service on the Chicago River.

Live video feed, even in full-screen mode, was very good and websites "loaded quickly and seemed very snappy" without any lag. The laptops used for the demonstration "all had massive PCMCIA cards" with 2x antenna while the Motorola handsets were all existing models stuffed with WiMax guts.

Here is the news we want – commercial launch is planned for April 2008 with pricing expected to match home DSL and no contracts! You do have to supply your own hardware and subscribe for as long as you like.

All 277 underground stations of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will be wired for cellphone use. New York City Transit announced the deal with Transit Wireless, which is spending $46.8 million over 10 years for the permission to install the service. Cell phone providers will have to pay Transit Wireless for their customers to be able to roam onto the subway network.

Microsoft has launched a new website for US Xbox 360 owners to track, in detail, the process of sending your Xbox 360 in for repair.

US console owners can register a box, attach a Windows Live ID, schedule a repair and track the repair status. The site will also keep keep tabs on your warranty as well as give you $5 credit towards an "Out-of-Warranty" repair just for signing up.

Anything that improves customer service is a positive thing.