Phones

This free software allows PalmOne Treo 650 & 600 smartphones, Sony-Ericsson’s Walkman phones, Nokia’s XpressMusic and Samsung MP3 phones (with hard keys to control playback) to be synchronized with iTunes.

2) Email/PIM—currently, I use Novell Ximian Evolution and like it fine, but have had trouble getting my Treo 650 to sync with it under (Redhat) linux, and am not wedded to it. Oh, and I wish I had the ldap object class defintion for the contact manager in Evolution.

2. Skype. Jackholes. The Treo 650 is the reigning king of smartphones on the market right now. It does what people want and a hell of a lot more and looks nice too. There’s a very good reason why it kicks the living shit out of the slew of dogcrap Windows Mobile phones that feel like a hot brick when you jam it into your pocket. Anyway, Skype wussed out a long time ago on doing a Palm client. They think they’ll be fine if they wait for Palm/Linux to come out next year…but here’s the thing…if someone, anyone comes out with a VOIP client that works halfways well before they do, they’re going to miss out.

There’s only one major problem with ProfiMail. Because it’s so non-standard, it doesn’t use T9 for text inputs. Ooohhh NO!! It has a nice little pop-up like on the Sony Ericsson phones which tell you which letter you’re keying is, but there’s no predictive text at all. That makes using ProfiMail for composing email pretty much a non-starter. I need my T9!! Hopefully the guys at Lonely Cat Games will see this major flaw and do what they can to add it in the next rev.

This doesn't solve the problem at all! She never addresses that the first CSR was wrong in telling me account info over the phone. I should have told it to her for verification, not the other way around. Also, she doesn't address the fact that the second CSR didn't call into question why I was changing area codes and not mailing address to match. Besides, if I was a thief spoofing the phone number I wouldn't have cared if the CSR changed the phone# on the account or not. I just would've made the caller ID match it. Even if you take the CSR's completely out of the equation it's still a problem. If the thief has my card number he's got my name. A simple reverse phone lookup will show what my phone number is in most cases. One spoof and he's got it. Granted that makes it a little harder, but that's only if the CSR's aren't quite as "giving." So, I guess I now have to guard my phone number as closely as I guard my social security number. That's ridiculous!

I have learned to not ask questions of the girls who are desperately searching for fishnet stockings. . .and to be helpful but internally disapproving of the girls frantically looking for short plaid skirts and children’s size white button-down shirts. I am not sympathetic to the girls that come in chatting on their cell phones and make me feel like I am interrupting them while they are asking me for help. And I try to be as helpful, low-key, and friendly as possible with the guys making their first foray into the wild and frighteningly complex world of women’s hosiery. Because, after all, it has always been my experience that the closer that a holiday becomes, the ruder women become and the kinder men act. Woo-hoo…go men!

But wait, enter Gizmo. It has the same download, ease of use of Skype, but it is based on the standard SIP architecture, and they chare for phone company access in dollars (cheaper than Skype for US calls, more expensive for Europe calls). They will give you a regular phone line dial tone for incoming calls for $5/mo plus usage charges, plus free voice mail (which you can use without a computer, just with a SIP box, as I do with VoicePulse).

Verizon and Samung announced the availability of the new Samsung SCH-a970 cameraphone. This is one tricked out multimedia phone with tons of features including:

In the interview, Mr. Wittenschlaeger says that Raptor's distributed network architecture, which provides very fast service at affordable prices, could have a huge impact on the video, voice and high speed access industries. "We offer performance and price that could cut bills by up to 50 percent while more effectively serving new technologies such as IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) and Voice Over IP (VoIP)," said Raptor Networks CEO. "We believe we can change the competitive landscape of this entire industry."

this went on for a while… until I realized… its the Vonage line!!! The whole analog to digital back to analog thing meant the box could net get it’s initial update (which would allow me to connect a broadband connection).

The recently introduced Verizon FiOS is a step in the right direction in my opinion. Sadly, not many places offer availability. For the same price, I can get 15mbps. Damn! More so, I would LOVE to have the 2mbps upload capability. Seriously, I don’t know why the US just doesn’t create more affordable high-speed connections.

As part of the hell-freezes-over initiative taking place in the tech world, owners of Treo 650s can look forward to using Blackberry push email on their units beginning sometime early 2006.

I also finally got the Bluetooth DUN to work on my powerbook and treo 650 so Sara got to check email on the drive home from LAX. I will post a boring how-to post soon.

But here among the thistles, large providers such as local phone company Qwest Communications International Inc. see little profit potential. So wireless entrepreneur Fred Ziari drew no resistance for his proposed wireless network, enabling him to quickly build the $5 million cloud at his own expense.

You heard me right. I surfed the web over the weekend and looked for my next mobile phone since my first year contract with Cingular ends next week.

I’ve finished my review of the Samsung SCH-A950. Released for Verizon Wireless a few days ago, the A950 is among a handful of MP3-capable cell phones in Verizon’s portfolio. No doubt gearing up for the upcoming holiday season, the A950 now joins to the LG VX8100, LG VX9800, and Motorola E815 of VCAST enabled EV-DO, multimedia superphones.

So, this train wreck of a situation is pissing me off. I do understand where Level 3 is coming from, but I wish they’d have given some warning or at least taken into consideration their customer base. I think Time Warner (RoadRunner), Comcast, and Verizon are some of the bigger names effected by this.

In other news, the venerable Verizon Wireless called last night and invited me to a job expo next week! Can you imagine? 4 million people in this state and they called me! :-D Well, I’m going. The shareholders of my company —which shall remain unnamed— voted to have Verizon purchase us today anyway. May as well see if I can beat my colleagues to the punch! Seriously though, this is the first ‘real’ opportunity I’ve had since August. I’ve interviewed with Verizon twice in my life already, but it’s never worked out on either side. They just keep coming around! Maybe this one will stick.

I blogged previously about trouble commenting on BusinessWeek blogs. Turns out that my ISP (which is SBC) has been blacklisted for some nefarious activity. Trying to submit a comment redirects me to a horrible page

His second argument is a false restriction of users options to only two: mobile phones and wired landline phones. I would have had to agree if this restriction was accurate and users would have to have both wireless phones and landline phones. However, there is a new class of UMA hybrid phones that will allow users to keep their beloved mobile phones as their only phone, while also allowing them to take advantage of commodity VoIP services using WIFI. When this class of device arrives, users will begin to drastically reduce their usage of expensive wireless minutes in favor of commodity WIFI minutes when and where WIFI is available. Even if convenient WIFI access is only available in users homes and possibly at their offices, that is still the largest chunk of phone use scenarios that the average mobile phone user experiences.

I must have been out of the loop, because somehow I missed last year’s panic-inspiring news about a cell phone directory. The assurances were that this was an "opt-in" program only. Don’t know about that, but somehow our private cell numbers got out in the open. Regardless, I took the extra step to put both our numbers on the national Do Not Call List.

Overall, the Linksys CIT200 is a great wireless Skype solution that is a perfect alternative to your typical Skype headset solution. It has excellent range, very good battery life, and most importantly you can access your Skype contacts from the phone itself so you’re not chained to the PC for dialing or taking calls. It’s worth mentioning that most people are not using Skype as a landline replacement though many are using broadband VoIP providers such as Vonage to replace their landline. Part of the reason is that Skype requires your PC to be on all the time and you have to be at your PC to initiate dialing. However, if you take the Linksys CIT200 and add in a SkypeIn PSTN number along with pay-as-you-go SkypeOut minutes, and the ability to make outbound dialing away from the PC, then the CIT200 could be the perfect home landline replacement.

We don’t have long distance phone service on our phone. Instead we use calling cards from Costco. They only cost 2.8 cents per minute. Our home phone still works for 800 numbers and we could dial a long distance call in an absolute emergency if we lost our card somehow (it will cost a fortune). But our long distance costs are minimal when you can talk on the phone for 30 minutes for 84 cents!

Of course we will listen to the same people mutter the same old constraints as with VoIP. Bandwidth, saturation, the network is not ready. The cable companies won’t let it happen. Nobody wants the content to be distributed in that way.

I got my first real Voip phone a week ago. I two ATA boxes to connect my old wireless phones, but I wanted to try out a real IP-phone. It’s a nice enough phone, feels a bit cheap (which it is), but I guess you can’t get everything for $100. Connecting it to my Asterisk server was a no-brainer. It has a web interface for setup, but you can do basic setup like ip-numbers from the phonepad. It’s great to have an message-waiting led on the phone. Then you just press the MSG button to listen to your voice-box messages. There’s support for up to 11 line indicators (with an additional key-module) but I think I’ll do fine with four. The only thing I haven’t got working is the Conference button, but it’s easy to just transfer the calls to a conference number. You also have 7 quick dial buttons. To configure them, just go to the web setup for the phone and enter the name and number.

Philadelphia has selected EarthLink from among 12 vendors that bid on implementing a citywide wireless network. Key to the city’s choice of EarthLink, said Dianah Neff, CIO of Philadelphia, was the company’s proposal that it fund all of the infrastructure for and management of the network. Critics of the city’s planned municipal network, including Verizon, which offers similar services locally, had argued that taxpayer money should not be used for projects that compete with incumbent businesses. EarthLink’s proposal sidesteps that problem.

My broadband phone service, which is purchased through Vonage, is better than ever after they recently sent me a new Linksys terminal adapter to replace the old Motorola one. Turns out that old device was wreaking havoc on call quality and reliability (big time). It even prevented my non-voice traffic from working reliably. But with the new hardware in place, all is well.

They’ll be blogging from the trip, thanks to Lee’s trusty Treo 650. And no doubt they’ll be spreading the word about TWINF as they go. I’ll be looking forward to seeing how this unfolds … especially if, in addition to reading about Lee and Sachi’s experience of the world, we hear a little from the world about its experience of Sachi and Lee.

Over the last 7 months that I've had my Treo 650(Cingular model), I've noticed little things that didn't work. Immediately out of the box, I spent two hours on tech support with Cingular regarding how to get the "Voicemail" button, or simply hitting autodial 1 to work. Lately, more and more I notice that it locks up on a constant basis. Now, considering its also a pda, theres a little leeway(at least in my book) for a lockup every once in a while, but the last two weeks or so has been at least once a day, and it seems to only be when someone calls the phone. There has already been one firmware upgrade for the Cingular phones, and I had hoped that the every-once-in-a-while lockups would be in the days past. Unfortunately this wasn't the case, and they got worse.