Deck Your iPhone Out in Retro Apple Rainbows and Air Vents

Put your iPhone in a time machine.

Maybe you’re a child of the ‘80s. Maybe you’re an original Mac user from way back. Maybe you just like the look of Apple’s squat old-school computers. But you don’t want to give up the latest iPhone technology. You can have it all with ColorWare’s iPhone 6S Retro and iPhone 6S Plus Retro.

ColorWare customizes the looks of all sorts of technology products, from gaming controllers to headphones. Want a PlayStation done in your college team colors? Done. Here, the Retro iPhones are done up in a matte vanilla-colored exterior. Fake air vents look like they were peeled off the top of an original Apple Macintosh from the '80s.

ColorWare’s work involves the application of a custom paint finish. The crowning glory of the design is a throwback glossy rainbow Apple logo, standing out against the light background and declaring an allegiance to an earlier time in Apple’s design history.

The unlocked phones come at a premium price. The iPhone 6S Retro starts at $1,599 and the 6S Plus Retro starts at $1,699. (They ship internationally; those prices convert to roughly £1,060/AU$2,270 for the 6S Retro and £1,125/AU$2,410 for the 6S Plus Retro). Each one is limited to 25 copies.

The last time ColorWare stepped into a time machine, it brought back the MacBook Air Retro, a 2014 laptop decked out in a putty color with crisp rainbow Apple logo where the glowing Apple normally sits. The company got the inspiration for the look from the Apple IIe, a chunky desktop that first appeared in 1983.

The Retro iPhones may not be as blingy as a smartphone decked out in diamonds and gold, but it will likely attract attention from eagle-eyed Apple fans eager to reminisce over the days when beige was fashionable, long before the iPhone was a gleam in Steve Jobs’ eye./CNET.com

This article, Deck your iPhone out in retro Apple rainbows and air vents, originally appeared on CNET.com

T-Mobile allows customers to watch video without data charges

T-Mobile (TMUS) announced a new program on Tuesday to allow customers to watch many popular online video services on their phones without counting against their monthly data allowances.

The new "Binge On" service, which will include HBO, Hulu, Netflix (NFLX) and ESPNamong others, will show video in slightly lower quality, comparable to a DVD, not a high-definition TV picture, T-Mobile CEO John Legere said at an event in Los Angeles. The Binge On service starts Nov. 15 for new customers and Nov. 19 for all existing customers on monthly Simple Choice plans who pay for at least 3 GB of data per month, T-Mobile said.

Legere said the service will start with 24 partners but more will be added over time. Asked if a pornographic service could be added, Legere said: "yes, of course," adding that any legal video stream could be included eventually.

YouTube was the most prominent service not included, but T-Mobile Chief Operating Officer Mike Sievert said discussions were ongoing with Alphabet's Google (GOOGL), which owns YouTube, and others. "We're going to work with all partners that want to be in," Sievert said. T-Mobile has to be able to identify video streams separately from any other kind of content for the service to operate properly, he explained, so some technical details need to be worked out before YouTube can be added.

The lower quality picture could be a risk for T-Mobile, since the newest smartphones are capable of displaying higher resolution video, Jan Dawson, chief analyst at Jackdaw Research noted. But, the headline of "free video" will be "hugely appealing for customers," he said.

T-Mobile executives insisted that the differences in video quality were indiscernable on a phone. Much online video is streamed at high resolutions dubbed 1080P,  which offers 1,080 horizontal lines of pixels per screen, and 720P, which offers 720 lines, to look good on big screen TV sets. T-Mobile's service will drop down to 480P, or 480 lines of pixels.

Similar to Music Freedom

However, the Binge On service will automatically default to the normal, higher resolutions if a user shifts their phone onto wifi from the mobile network. And customers can use a T-Mobile app to turn off the service to watch higher resolution video, if they so desire, which would then incur data usage. The lower quality 480P picture reduces the amount of data needed to transmit video by about two-thirds from a 1080P picture, Grant Castle, T-Mobile's vice president of engineering, said in an interview.

The Binge On service is similar to T-Mobile's "Music Freedom" service that lets customers use most popular streaming music services on their phones without counting against monthly mobile data allowances. Unveiled last June, Legere said T-Mobile customers now listen to 200 million songs per day without any data charges. That service started with just a handful of partners but has steadily expanded and now includes Apple (AAPL) Music, Google Music, Sirius XM (SIRI) and Rdio.

The announcement was part of the 10th iteration of Legere's "Uncarrier" strategy that started back in 2013 when the carrier stopped making customers sign up for two-year contracts.The company also doubled the amount of data included with most of its monthly plans as part of Tuesday's announcement./Yahoo finance