Roundup: Mystery laptops, AT&T overload, Google’s fingers in everything

AT&T’s network under heavy strain from iPhone users with unlimited data plans — “They don’t even realize how much data they’re using,” Piper Jaffray’s oft-quoted analyst Gene Munster told The New York Times. AT&T’s global network operations center (pictured) displays a 250-foot-wide dashboard of just how whacked things are. The Times followed an iPhone user around to see the results:

Taylor Sbicca, a 27-year-old systems administrator in San Francisco, checks his iPhone 10 to 15 times a day. But he is not making calls. He checks the scores of last night’s baseball game and updates his Twitter stream. He checks the local weather report to see if he needs a coat before heading out to dinner — then he picks a restaurant on Yelp and maps the quickest way to get there.

Or at least, he tries to.

“It’s so slow, it feels like I’m on a dial-up modem,” he said.

[Photo: The New York Times]

Google continues to swap out its sales management — A few months ago, Business Insider reported on a quiet re-org inside Google’s advertising division. Today, BI reports that David Fischer, who has led the build-out of Google’s advertising staff since 2002, has left his job. But wait! He’ll be back in January to “lead our efforts developing some of Google’s next billion dollar businessess,” says the head of Google’s global sales.

Nokia’s netbook has a list price of just over $800 — The Wall Street Journal scratches its head at the oversize price of Nokia’s first netbook product. The most obvious explanation for the double-what-Asus-charges price tag: Nokia plans to get wireless carriers to subsidize it Booklet 3G at levels comparable to the $350 that AT&T is said by other carriers’ execs to be paying Apple for every single iPhone.

[Photo: Nokia]

The FBI investigates mystery laptops that showed up at U.S. governors’ offices — The feds suspect, duh, a brazen attempt to slip Trojan software into the governors’ offices by installing it on the HP laptops an unknown donor has shipped to governors in Wyoming, West Virginia, and at least eight other states. IDG News Service has the full report.

Google announces partnership with Coolerbooks.com to pack Coolerbooks’ library with a million-plus public domain books — Sounds great! Except to publishers, who feel Google is the new Microsoft and then some. VentureBeat has already reported on the coalition among publishers and authors, spearheaded by former anti-Microsoft lawyer Gary Reback, to stop Google from what they say is its power to set monopoly prices on books – in this case, too low rather than too high, thus undermining the publishing industry’s plans to sell e-books at a bigger markup.

[Photo: Coolerbooks.com]

BlackBerry users rejoice: TwitVid lets you tweet your mobile video to the world — My Gadgetwise role model Roy Furchgott explains how to tweet a video from your videophone to a Twitter-linked post at TwitVid. There’s about three minutes of signup and setup, after which you can post your videos to TwitVid — linked from a tweet to Twitter — by emailing your video or sending it as an MMS message. Roy’s one caveat: Check with your carrier to see if there is a limit on the size of files you can send from your phone.