Jeff Schuster

During AT&T’s third-quarter earnings call yesterday, AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets President and CEO Ralph de la Vega first trumpeted the company’s third-quarter iPhone activations (3.2 million, the highest number ever) and then downplayed the company’s reliance on the iPhone by saying that the iPhone was just one part of the firm’s smartphone portfolio. This mixed message from de la Vega exemplifies AT&T’s tenuous relationship with Apple–on one hand the carrier has benefited greatly from its exclusive Apple relationship, but on the other hand it has suffered tremendously from the network constraints that iPhone users’ demand for data has generated.

But that love/hate relationship between AT&T and Apple may soon be over. De la Vega implied that the carrier’s exclusive deal with Apple to carry the iPhone in the U.S. could end. When asked about the exclusive relationship, de la Vega didn’t provide any specifics, but he did say that if AT&T loses that exclusivity it will still offer a better iPhone 3GS than potential competitors because the device runs on the company’s HSPA 7.2 network. “The iPhone will work better on our network than on anyone else’s network,” he said.

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Mozilla is now testing yet another technology to try and help us all integrate the various messages we all generate everyday.

The new Raindrop effort comes from the Mozilla Messaging division as a way to help unify conversations.

“Raindrop uses a mini web server to fetch your conversations from different sources (mail, twitter, RSS feeds), intelligently pulls out the important parts, and allows you to interact with them using your favorite modern web browser,” the Mozilla Labs Raindrop site states.

Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that Raindrop at this point is browser agnostic. That is, it is supposed to be able to work on Firefox, Safari or Chrome (sorry IE).

Kinda/sorta might maybe be similar to Google Wave in some ways. Mozilla Labs also has its Snowl effort which brings in conversations from multiple streams as well, though it isn’t tightly integrated with email — instead Snowl is a Firefox add-on.

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Google Wave Screenshot

Google’s new collaboration tool, Wave, runs smoothly inside the iPhone’s Safari browser and feels like a native App Store program, thanks to the so-called “app mode” that kills Safari’s UI.

Google Wave, the new collaboration service that aims to re-invent email, runs inside the iPhone’s Safari browser in a borderless “app mode” that removes the browser’s UI controls and buttons entirely. As a result, the web-based application feels snappy and natural, almost like the native App Store program.

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Google will launch an e-book store called Google Editions with a “don’t be evil” twist. Unlike Google’s biggest competitors Amazon and Barnes & Noble that rely heavily on restrictive DRM, Google will not be device-specific — allowing for e-books purchased through Google Editions to be read on a far greater number of e-book readers that will flood the market in 2010.

Google’s e-books will be accessible through any Web-enabled computer, e-reader, or mobile phone instead of a dedicated device. This will allow content to be unchained from expensive devices such as Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader. However, as democratizing as this sounds, it’s still unclear how many people are ready to curl up with a Google Editions title on their laptop or smartphone, instead of the traditional paper format?

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