Dan Hesse, CEO of Sprint, really loves having the iPhone on Sprint. Elizabeth Woyke, writes for Forbes:

The iPhone is so data-efficient, [Hesse] said, it will help Sprint keep its mobile data plans unlimited.

Good news for Sprint customers. AT&T users are still healing from the gouge wound back when AT&T was all, we can’t handle all the iPhone data, and so they held back features (tethering) and started charging more for others (data plans).

Good to know. And it sure beats shaking to undo.

David Pogue:

Windows Phone 7.5 is gorgeous, classy, satisfying, fast and coherent. The design is intelligent, clean and uncluttered. Never in a million years would you guess that it came from the same company that cooked up the bloated spaghetti that is Windows and Office.

The new Bluetooth chip that’s in the 4S is very light on power consumption:

The phone, which went on sale Oct. 14, is the first to have a new type of Bluetooth chip that can connect using very little power. The chip uses so little power that it can go into devices that are powered only by a standard “button cell” battery common in watches. The battery can last for years.

Could be a great way to give the iPod nano Bluetooth connectivity without sacrificing battery life or form factor. And I can sure think of a few good reasons to put Bluetooth in the nano.

Update: I discovered that the low energy subset of Bluetooth 4.0 (BLE) does not have an audio profile. Sigh.

(Via Ben Brooks.)

If I were in the market for a different phone, this very well would be the one I’d pick up. It’s nice to see Nokia making fun and drool-worthy devices again.

Backblaze got a pretty significant performance update today. I currently do my off-site backups to Amazon via Arq, but only for about 20GB worth of data. If you want to back up everything to an off-site location, and don’t want to pay exorbitant monthly fees to S3, I highly recommend Backblaze.

On a related note, I wrote about off-site backups and Backblaze, Crashplan, and Arq a while back.

If you’ve felt a bit out of step and missing QS on your Mac ever since Snow Leopard killed it in 2009, now is a good time to go back. Me? I’m too hooked on LaunchBar to switch back.

Steven Levy profiled Nest Labs and their new thermostat on Wired. This article answered the question I’ve been asking today: other than its gorgeous design and remote connectivity, how is the Nest Learning Thermostat that much better than my current Honeywell programmable thermostat?

(Via DF.)

Each week one of the members of the Read & Trust network writes an article for the newsletter. And tomorrow is my turn. I had a lot of fun writing this week’s piece; it’s on the history of my gadgets and it includes some hand-drawn sketches. (Fair warning: I am a lousy, lousy sketch artist. But that didn’t deter me. No. No it didn’t.)

The newsletter is $5/month. I am a subscriber (though, to be honest, I get a complimentary subscription) and each week it is always an enjoyable read.

1Password for iOS is on sale. And if you snag a copy vis this link I get a nickel from iTunes in about two months from now.

My thanks to the fine folks at Smile Software (makers of TextExpander), for sponsoring the RSS feed this week to promote PDFpen.

PDFpen is a professional-grade PDF editing tool that is easy and affordable for even the non-professional. With it you can edit text, insert images, annotate documents, and much, much more.

You can highlight text, strike it through, post your own comments, and more. This type of functionality is extremely helpful for marking up a PDF proof of a design mockup.

PDFpen lets you edit text that is embedded within the PDF file itself. Allowing you to make corrections or edits when only small parts of a PDF file need changing.

And, taking text editing to an even higher level, PDFpen has a search and replace feature. Just like you would use in a word processing program, but you can search for and replace words within the PDF. Additionally, you can search and redact. Very clever if there is a certain name, number, location, or whatever littered throughout a document in which you want all instances of it to be blocked out.

Moreover, PDFpen has fantastic OCR capabilities. If you’re wanting to create a paperless office, then PDFpen is one of the best of the bunch. When you open a photo or scanned image that has text, then a dropdown menu appears, asking if you want to OCR the whole document or just a certain page. (PDFpen recognizes 12 different languages for its OCR.)

Marco Arment, when on the hunt for a good OCR app, tried several and concluded that PDFpen was the best of the lot. Stating that with PDFpen, the image quality was maintained perfectly (many OCR apps will degrade the image quality of the documents they scan), it had very few OCR errors, and that it can even be automated with AppleScript.

In short, PDFpen is a smart and well-designed app. It’s built by the folks at Smile who have a fantastic reputation — they’re some of the good guys.

You can download a free trial of PDFpen from the Smile website, or buy it for $59.95. It’s also available on the Mac App Store.

60 Minutes sat down with Walter Isaacson to talk about Steve Jobs, based on the Steve Jobs biography, written by Isaacson, that just came out today.

If you want to watch the 45-minute show straight through, here’s the video link.

The current box-top peripheral known as the Apple TV is built as an addition to most people’s TV setups and wouldn’t work for a lot of households as the only television software and programming available. Dan’s post is a good look at how Apple could bring a TV to market that is for everyone, rather than just for geeks.

I’m with what Marco said in his Apple TV post yesterday: geeks like us don’t really “watch TV”. I’ve never had a cable TV subscription, and I probably never will.

I have an Apple TV, and I love it. It serves three purposes: playing music through our stereo, playing Netflix on occasion, renting iTunes movies on occasion. I only ever bust out the bunny ears if there is a football game on or something is especially news worthy. But as for the TV and Cable market: folks like Marco, you, and I are the exception, not the norm. Apple would need to do more than just put their Apple TV software into a TV set.

I watched the event last night and thought it was just great — especially what Jony Ive shared towards the end of the program.