Tired of high mobile phone bills? Looking to reduce those text message fees? Are you German? If you answered yes to those questions (especially the last one), the German carrier E-Plus may have the solution for you.
Communications Tech Firm Alcatel-Lucent announced that they will be providing hardware to E-Plus to allow them to integrate advertisements into their mobile phones. Customers have the option to select service with advertisements for reduced service fees.
While further details about how the advertisements will be presented are not available this could be a great way for other carriers to offer more affordable plans to their customers. However if it becomes intrusive and disruptive you won’t likely be seeing people running to get 2 cents off of a text message while having to sit through a 20 second ad.
Hopefully they will come up with a solution that provides customer and advertiser with good service and simple advertising which doesn’t make you want to toss your phone in a lake.
In an effort to make your phone even more important in your life there are developments being made to introduce RFID (radio frequency identification) into your mobile to allow it to act as your credit card, for easy purchasing.
Håkan Djuphammar, of Ericsson (the more bashful half of Sony Ericsson), spoke to delegates at the Business Innovation Forum in Stockholm saying that “A year from now, basically every new phone sold will have [near field communication]. It’s a two-way, bio-directional RFID communication link that makes this device work as a tag or reader.”
The hope is to use RFID chips to integrate into your phone so that using your credit card won’t even require a card. The radio frequency will transmit all of your information to a payment receiver and then automatically charge your account.
The technology is not only limited to commerce either. There are also moves to use the RFID of your phone as a key or a personal remote control for your home.
While security is still a large question in the development of all of these technologies, the developers have ensured us that serious steps are being made to prevent nefarious use. This involves closer monitoring of the use of the services to ensure no fraudulent activity is occurring and also easy ways to deactivate your phone remotely in case of loss.
So what do you think? Do you want the convenience or is it not work the risk?
A few months ago we reported on an initiative that was being undertaken by European companies to standardize mobile phone chargers to cut down on waste and bloated production of accessories.
The European Commission announced that they have decided to adopt a standard microUSB charger for all devices. Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung and many other major manufacturers have agreed to start manufacturing phones next year that will be using the standardized charger.
Once the charger has entered the market, phones and chargers will be sold separately, so chargers used with previous handsets will be compatible with brand new hand sets. There is currently no specified amount of time for when the items will be sold separately, but it is estimated that it will take at least a few years before it is fully implemented.
Whether this will do anything to reduce the huge amount of waste created by cellphone consumption is yet to be seen, but the effort appears to be appreciated.
Now the question is: When are we going to see this on our side of the pond?
iPhone 3.0 has a lot of things going for it. MMS, cut-copy-and-paste, Find My iPhone, so on and so forth. Another big addition is Push Notifications. This system will give you notice of email and IMs without having to have the app open on your screen.
With this ability only officially making it to the Apple iPhone last week, there are still few apps out there who are taking advantage of the new feature. One of the first however is the classic instant messenger Aol Instant Messenger. If you download the new version of AIM you will have the ability to set-up the app to notify you of any IM messages that you receive while you’re connected, even if you don’t have the app open on your home screen. It can buzz, ring, display an icon or any combination of those whenever you receive a message. So now you can be on a different screen and the app will automatically notify you when a message is received.
Initial tests indicate that the response time is very good. We still haven’t heard any word on how this Push notification affects battery time or data rates, but we’ll probably find that out soon.
Hopefully this means that other apps are working push notification and background capabilities into their options.
Check out the new feature by downloading the free version or the pay version (no advertisements) of AIM.
Have you been wondering why it is sometimes costing you 25 cents to send a text message or have you been surprised by a twenty page bill caused by your teenage daughter trying to break a text message record? Well you’re not the only one.
Democratic Senator Herb Kohl of Wisconsin is making an attempt to figure out what is going on with why those 160 character texts cost so much. Next Tuesday representatives of Verizon, At&t, Sprint and T-Mobile will be getting grilled by a Senate committee on why such a small amount of transmitted data can cost so much.
Depending on your plan you can be paying $19.95 per month for unlimited texts, but if you’re on a pay as you go plan, sending and receiving a text message can be costing you up to 25 cents. Text messaging has jumped with 17 billion texts recorded in 2000 to an astonishing 500 billion texts in 2004 and it doesn’t seem to be slowing. With use jumping up so much, Senator Kohl is wondering why prices aren’t changing.
So we’re generally not in favor of our guvs going after our businesses around here, but I wouldn’t mind getting a bit of relief from my daughters’ LG KS360 bills. Who new she could type so fast?
I love new technology which takes me back to 1996. The Palm Pre has fulfilled that love and some smartie pants out there have loaded the classic Doom onto the newly launched “iPhone Killer.”
Check out the short demo and hope that someone out there will give us a simple step-by-step explanation of how to get this onto our phone.
This isn’t the biggest surprise, but considering the recent legal battles between Palm and Apple over some multi-touch patents, it’s still nice to see that to mobile giants can get along.
We received confirmation that the Palm Pre will be able to fully sync with iTunes without any problems. This is good news for Mac users and iTunes lovers alike. It will make transferring videos, pictures and especially music to your new smartphone in the blink of an eye. The only restriction will be to digital rights protected songs that are oh-so touchy about moving from one device to another.
So just a few more days before this baby hits the streets and until we hear cries from worshippers and detractors. What do you think about this whole rigamarole? Will it hit big or fall flat?
Skyfire announced today that version 1.0 of the mobile web browser is now available for download to the public. The Skyfire browser made waves and has been gaining popularity due to its versatility and basic ease of use. The browser gained notoriety for being able to handle plug-ins such as Flash, Silverlight, Java and more all on your small device.
Previously only available for Windows Mobile devices the 1.0 version is now available also to Symbian S60 smart phone users. So you can load up Skyfire on your Nokia 5800 XpressMusic to have a great web browsing experience. The 1.0 version also addresses many speed and fluidity issues that people were experiencing in earlier beta versions.
Unfortunately the people who are still left behind are the Blackberry users who are in desperate need of a more versatile web browser. Skyfire stated that they are currently developing a version to be compatible with the Blackberry OS, but it still isn’t in the immediate future.
Check out and see if Skyfire will work with your mobile.
The Authoritarian Venezuelan leader, Hugo Chavez has been causing some spit-takes with the new national phone, the “Vergatorio.” Why is this a big deal? The first two syllables in Spanish are slang for penis. The last three syllables? It’s not really clear, because the word altogether doesn’t seem to mean anything. Originally blogs and news sources were reporting that the word meant penis when apparently they didn’t have access to any online Spanish-English dictionaries. The word has been newly invented and supposedly means “excellent.” Think of it like the Integra, but for a mobile phone.
Chavez denounced the criticism of the name on his TV show saying that detractors were ignorant and that it means no such thing.
The phone is a device which is being marketed at $15 and is meant to give mobile phone access to people who couldn’t normally afford it. This is just one of the small steps Chavez has been taking in his so-called “Socialist Revolution.”
The mobile phone is planned to be manufactured for export by 2011 after all local demand for the device has been satisfied.
