If you haven’t already heard, AT&T has purchased T-Mobile, for $39 billion. What does this mean for consumers? The good: Possibly more coverage in various locations. The Bad: Less competition, and likely data caps if they merge in to one entity. The last time I checked, the best plan in my area from AT&T phone plans in terms of data usage is 2gb/month. This may seem like a lot, but I put my HTC Evo from Sprint to the test to see how much bandwidth I use. Watching videos on my phone for about two hours netted me about 500mb, which is 1/4 of the monthly allotted data usage in just one day. The video was pretty high quality, but similar programs through Netflix and other video streaming services could sure use up the bandwidth fairly quickly.

Speaking of smartphones, there’s a new phone coming out from Sprint, another evo. They won’t be making it smaller this time, but it will be glasses-free 3d. It will feature dual cameras for 3d image capture, and a 960×540 resolution, a step up from it’s current resolution.

A few days ago I read an article that talked about the increasing number of smartphone sales in the years to come. Here is the article. It might seem a little astounding that by 2012 more people will be buying smartphones than computers. Now, I don’t think the increase in sales will be quite that big, but it will still be a huge part of the design world. I think it will take a long time for many small town web designers to take this into account, leaving a lot of clients either getting something that won’t fully promote their business or spending thousands of dollars for a large professional design company. There’s nothing wrong with that if you choose to do so, but it’s always good to have some options. Now, I don’t know how many years it will be until there are very few new computer sales to the point that web designers actually build their sites from their smartphones, but until then people will have to put greater focus on cross browser compatability for smartphones. How does this affect domain names? Well, I don’t really know of the .mobi domain names will become that much more valuable, but I think short .com and .net’s will be much more valuable, even more than they increase regularly each year. That is simply because people with smartphones don’t always have the advantage of a full size keyboard, and a 5 or 6 letter domain name would be much easier for them to get to. I’m going to start developing an android app soon, which will be a tutorial program for things like HTML and CSS on the go for new designers.