Sprint said prepaid brand Virgin will no longer offer its “Inner Circle” service plan, which offered one-year unlimited plan for $1 to users who bought an iPhone and ported their number to the new plan or upgraded to the plan. Current Virgin iPhone subscribers can stay on their Inner Circle plan, a Sprint spokesperson emailed. “Because we are bringing back Android devices and Inner Circle is an iPhone-only plan, we now offer Unlimited Data with benefits plans starting at $35/month,” she said. “Any new Virgin Mobile iPhone or Android customer will pair their smartphone with one of Virgin’s Unlimited Data with benefits plans.”

The six associations that earlier agreed to launch a Hearing Aid Compatible (HAC) Task Force are seeking applicants for administrator. In 2016, the FCC unanimously adopted rules aimed at making all wireless handsets HAC within eight years (see 1608040046). The FCC also established a task force that will report back by the end of 2020 on whether the eight-year goal is feasible. The Competitive Carriers Association, CTIA, the Hearing Loss Association of America, National Association of the Deaf, Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing and the Telecommunications Industry Association are working together on launch of the task force. “The Administrator will lead the HAC Task Force process as it assesses technical and market conditions to make a final recommendation to the FCC,” the groups said Wednesday, in a release emailed the following day. “The Signatories seek applicants with relevant technical, legal, administrative and policy expertise to manage the process, which will carefully weigh the needs of consumers with hearing loss, the wireless industry, and other industry participants.”

GCI customers can now receive wireless emergency alerts on mobile devices, the carrier said. GCI launched an alerts app in 2011 and did a test Aug. 15 that confirmed subscribers in WEA service areas can get alerts. “For the past year, GCI has been working to implement network and device updates that will enable Alaska customers to receive enhanced messages directly to their device through the national WEA system,” GCI said Saturday.

Wireless provider C Spire announced a $300 trade-in offer for consumers who preorder the Samsung Galaxy Note9 until Sept. 13. Customers who order within that window can also get Samsung’s bundle offer: a pair of AKG noise-canceling headphones, a Fortnite Galaxy skin with 15,000 V-bucks ($150 retail value) or both offers for $99. C Spire pricing plans for the Note9 start at $41.25 monthly for the 128 GB model and $51.67 for the 512 GB model for 24 months with a contract, it said.

Smartphone demand in Europe, the Middle East and Africa "continues to lose steam," said IDC Wednesday. Though the Q2 shipments of 44.9 million phones in the total EMEA market were only "marginally lower" than in Q2 a year earlier, "in the core European Union market the picture was less promising," said IDC. Most countries in Western Europe had lower smartphone value than in the same quarter of 2017, "though the picture was mixed, as France and Italy showed an increase," it said. One area for optimism among smartphone OEMs "was that European consumers are moving quickly to embrace wider screens," said IDC. "This is a reflection of how much video they are now watching on their devices." Nearly all Android smartphones sold in the EU a year ago were 16:9, but by Q2 this year, that declined to just over half, it said: "The categories growing fast are 18:9 and 18.5:9," with screens up to 19.5:9 "appearing on some models," it said.

Near-field-communications “tapping behavior” on Android smartphones for digital wallet payment and other services is far outpacing that of iPhones even with deployment of the latest versions of the iOS 11 operating system, said Davor Sutija, CEO of NFC components supplier Thin Film Electronics, on an earnings call last week. Sutija estimated 80 percent of the NFC tapping activity is emanating from Android phones, “even in markets where the percentage of iOS is significantly higher,” he said. He blames the lag in iPhone NFC engagement partially on the need for iOS users to download an app and open it “to have the NFC experience,” he said. “Many in the industry believe this usability will become better as apps get deployed among users more widely and potentially with improvements in usability and future releases.” There’s growing momentum in the use of NFC for payments, and that’s “driving recognition of the importance of consumer behavior,” he said. But for NFC deployments on smartphones to be successful, they need to be “as frictionless as possible,” he said. Apple didn't comment.

Enough testing has been done to show existing z-axis location technology “can provide floor level vertical accuracy of within 3 meters for at least 80 percent of wireless calls,” said NextNav, which makes such tech and is headed by SiriusXM Radio ex-Chairman Gary Parsons. Parsons and other executives met Tuesday with staff for FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and the Public Safety Bureau, said an ex parte posted Friday in docket 07-114. The company disagreed with CTIA, which said in an Aug. 3 letter to the FCC that questions remain after test results (see 1808080016). “The public safety community has clearly communicated its desire for floor level vertical accuracy in major cities, and the body of independent test results over the past five years demonstrates that such accuracy is clearly achievable,” the company said. CTIA didn’t comment.

Representatives of the Administrative Council for Terminal Attachments told the FCC the group is making progress on registering hearing aid compatible-compliant equipment in ACTA's database. “ACTA has made significant progress in modifying its procedures,” the group said. It “will request the same information and use the same processes for the registration of HAC-compliant” equipment as it has in place for other equipment, ATIS filed in docket 13-46.

The BBC is working with American startup Spritz to experiment with “how science and speed-reading technologies” can help consumers better cope with the inundation of emails, text messages and online news stories, blogged Cyrus Saihan, BBC head of digital partnerships, Friday. “The average UK adult now spends more time online and consuming media each day than they do sleeping,” said Saihan. “We wanted to see what new technologies could be applied to make this overload of information easier for our audiences to manage.” The standard way of reading text is “moving your eyes across a page as you read each sentence from left to right,” he said. “It is thought that the eye movement required when you move your eyes across a line in a sentence can take up as much as 80% of your time spent reading.” In the BBC experiment with Spritz, each word shown on a screen “has one letter that is highlighted red, to draw your attention to that point in the word,” he said. “That letter is the optimal recognition point in the word and helps your brain quickly process the word, with as little eye movement as possible.” Consumers are “reading more and more on mobile phones, but the screen sizes and text sizes of mobiles are smaller than what we have traditionally been used to with books and magazines,” said Saihan. “Technologies such as this therefore have the potential to make it much easier for us to read on mobile phones. This way of reading could also possibly be useful on devices such as smart watches, which have even smaller screen sizes.”

Comments are due Aug. 23 on the FCC's tentative findings for the agency's biennial report to Congress required by the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, said a public notice Thursday. The report itself is due Oct. 8. Among those tentative findings, the FCC said various smartphones can deliver accessible telecommunications and advanced communication services (ACS) to a wide range of people with disabilities. It also said the wireless industry continues to exceed agency minimum hearing aid compatibility requirements for wireless handsets. But it said gaps remain for accessible low-end non-smartphones, and little to no recent progress has been made on accessibility of non-smartphones used for telecommunications and ACS for blind or visually impaired individuals.