Phones

16) Companies like Comcast and Sprint/Cingular will show signs that they’re becoming more comfortable with the fact that they’re simple data pipes and that people want bandwidth, not bundled content or services that only work with “their network.”

iBasis, Inc., a player in international long distance, VoIP, and pre-paid calling cards, announced that Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL), the national carrier of Pakistan, has interconnected with The iBasis Network for international VoIP services. The interconnection will enable PTCL to route international voice traffic over The iBasis Network, a global VoIP network, as well as complete calls for iBasis over its extensive network in Pakistan.

Currently supported devices are the TX, Treo 650, LifeDrive and Tungsten E2.

It is time for me to get a new phone, so last night Sabrina and I went to the Sprint store. I saw the a900 and liked it. I think I can write J2ME software for the a900 to sync with my PowerBook, so I wanted to give Sprint a shot.

Ich habe mich während der Feiertagen der Softwareentwicklung mit J2ME beschäftigt. J2ME ist die kleine Schwester von Java und heisst soviel wie "Java 2 Micro Edition". J2ME Anwendungen oder besser gesagt sogenannte Midlets laufen eigentlich auf allen modernen Handys natürlich auch auf meinen neuen Motorola V3 RAZR.

I just recently purchased a new black RAZR cell with a blue tooth ear piece to go with it. I can totally attest to the ability to consintrate more to what’s going on outside the car, rather then who I’m talking to.

Over on the GoogleTalk blog today, they announced that their extension of XMPP to include voice has become a public standard. They are encouraging the community to develop and connect to their systems so that they can handle voice between the GoogleTalk client and other Jabber/XMPP clients like Psi, gabber, Trillian and GAIM.

The new application allows users to find a cafe in any unfamiliar location by launching the Caffeine Finder application from a BlackBerry handset, picking a cafe from a "Nearest List," selecting Caffeine Finder for a map, directions, a review, and the address. Nextel network users, can take advantage of the automatic GPS location functions built into the BlackBerry 7520™ and the new BlackBerry 7100i™.

Cingular's whole 3G strategy has confused me for a while. First there were phones but no network. Now there's a network and services but no phones. C'mon, guys, get it together. Announce everything at once. Competition is good, so I'd like to see Cingular put as strong a product out there as they can. I'm hoping to see them put their real 3G game face on at CES, the big trade show in January.

The N series is without a doubt the flagship range of Nokia phones and this is obvious from the amount of features crammed into these new handsets. Nokia certainly has been busy and with each of the N series adding a little more to the game, we can be sure of some exciting developments in the coming months.

I'm not exactly sure if this is something that too many people would be interested in given the screen size and battery issue, but it is pretty big news. Some Sprint Nextel customers will soon be able to watch full-length movies on their cell phones. Sprint Nextel has teamed up with MSpot and for $6.95 a month, customers will be able to download unlimited shows and movies.

Frustrated, Herring contacted Madison River Communications, the rural phone company that provides his digital subscriber line (DSL) connection. The company said it was blocking calls from Internet phone companies. Outraged, Herring and Vonage complained to federal regulators.

Well, tonight we’re in Eureka Nevada - s till 7 hours from Sacramento. Weather has been kinda scary and we didn’t realize how much mountain driving there would be. My first appointment is 11:30 Tuesday so we have some leeway. Cell phones have had no signal here. More tomorrow night.

VoIP has become the hot topic for businesses and individuals alike. Many people are switching to this technology as an alternative to long distance communication. I know in our office we are looking to install this feature in order to cut down on cost of communicating with offices that are outside of our region.

I ranted at BellSouth a while ago and now it’s time to do something about it. It took me 4 months to get things almost straight with BS and I have begun a solution. (These things take time.) VoIP, Voice Over IP, or “Internet Phone,” may be my solution. Nicky Smith, CEO of Carolinanet, brought a VoIP phone for me to try out for a few weeks. They’ve been selling VoIP for a couple of years, methinks. And I like personal delivery.

Rick finally got to do something he’s always wanted: have a seat on the board. We’re talking billboard of course. At a remote Saturday, Rick climbed up the sign to broadcast from the big billboard that looms large on the east side of Richmond. Not just a photo opp, but a marketing coup. A Sprint remote, on a Sprint phone, from a Sprint billboard, over a Sprint store.

The piece in that episode is in fact Chopin’s Prelude #15, Opus 28 in D flat (known more colloquially as “The Raindrop Prelude”). As a bonus, I’ve decided to make available the edited version I made specifically for use as an “alarm” (if it can even be called that). Click here to download. (In the actual piece, there’s a loud, boisterous fast bit in the middle that wasn’t appropriate to the use I intended for it.) As before, it is recorded at a low volume to accomodate the fact that alarm sounds become progressively louder on cell phones as they are allowed to play.

From December 1 through December 31, customers of Cingular, T-Mobile and Sprint can download Mistletoe wallpaper from Modtones.com, so they can take it along for unlimited kissing. How? By holding the phone over your head or over the head of the person you wish to kiss.

Ya lah ya lah i very fickle minded lahh! Instead of a Motorola RAZR V3 in Pink, i bought a ROKR E1. Few reasons, the M1 guy keep saying how pathetic the V3's memory space was a exclaimed that the ROKR had a spanking amount of 513 MB blah blah blah with iTunes (duh! i know! Madonna told me herself!) and in the end, he told me, "Sorry, Pink V3 no more stock." KAO! But i die die oso must get a phone that night, so i chose a ROKR and bought it at $168++. And i THANK GOD for not letting me buy the Pink RAZR cos XiaXue has one already. People are already saying what a copy-cat i am already. With the phone, it'll only make things more complicated. UGH!

On a somewhat tacky geek side note I can say that despite the fact that they shut off the power my webserver and network stayed online uninterupted on UPS power for over 2 hours. My vonage line even had a dial tone since I threw the cordless phone on one UPS. That’s it for now. I’ll post pictures of the front of the building tomorrow.

So when the Pink RAZRs landed in this same sunny island, it was obvious I would rush out to get one of the most awesome phones in the world. The first time I saw this was when Geoffrey Frost (who passed on) showed it to us at GBF2004. It was sleek, gorgeous and cost a thousand bucks. After which the price dropped and dropped whilst I saw people turn up in various phones, but apparently Nokia is still the market leader although its share has dropped from 70% to 33%.

Well it is done. It went a lot smoother than I expected, due to some fairly professional installers who deemed my advice worthy of their time. Thank heaven for that. This post is hitting the site via my brand spanking new 15 megabit UTOPIA fiber to the premises connection. And when they say FTTP they really mean it. The fiber comes right through my kitchen wall and into a CPE that is screwed to the wall. From that thing a piece of CAT5 goes back out through the wall, over the door and window and through the wall again into my computer. The only unfortunate wiring they did was the connection for the phone, which goes all the way from the CPE to the other end of the building and into Qwest’s wiring.

Orange SPV C600 is the same phone as the upcoming Cingular 2125, and it’s reviewed by CoolSmartPhone.com.

I really can’t say enough good about this phone. The signal quality is great. My provider roams on CellularSouth and Verizon Wireless towers where applicable, so my 1000 minutes are used whereever I damn well please. There’s no more AMPS on this phone, so analog is a thing of the past for me. The v710 would frequently drop to AMPS whenever I was driving from Hattiesburg to Jackson… now that doesn’t happen. It drops over to CellularSouth for it’s roaming when it loses ‘true’ Alltel.

Probably in the meantime I need to look and see if there is some easy way of getting to a Comcast engineer. Worthless script monkey CSRs are not going to be able to help me with this issue, as there is something really “odd” going on with my connection. I’ve got mounds of information at this point and hopefully someone with access to the Comcast network can take it and look at what is going on once it enters their network and figure out WTF is going on. At this point I’ve just been leaving my laptop hooked up to the VPN at my Dad’s house so I have some upload or using the Verizon air card I have. Sad part is, both work better at this point for doing anything (besides straight download) than my straight Comcast connection. Here at home my Verizon card is getting 222K Down and 115K Up. Absolutely pathetic when your wireless card is faster than your cable connection.

Now I travel a lot and in terms of miles I am often further away. But in The Bahamas I was not reachable by cell phone. That was the worst part. I could and did call home from my sister's house. They have a Vonage phone and that was great. But it wasn't as if I could just on the spur ofthe moment call home. Nor could my wife call me if something went wrong at home. Which it did. She was able to handle it fine of course. But it would have been nice if we could have talked about it. This is something I am going to have to look into - international cell phone service - should I travel outside the US without her again.

Well it’s been about 2 years since I purchased my last phone, the SonyEricsson P900. I did a lot of research when I brought my last phone and 2 years ago, it was years ahead of all of the other smart phones on the market. 2 years later, the rest of the phone market has just about caught up with the capabilities of the P900. This coupled with the beating my phone has taken over the last few years has prompted me to begin the search for it’s successor. I’ve considered several phones, including a , the Motorola Ravr V3 and the Treo 650, to name a few. All of these are pretty good, but then, low and behold something caught my eye…

So I finally broke down and got myself a new phone. I had become addicted to the QWERTY goodness of the Treo 650, but the constant crashing was becoming more and more of a liability. I ended up getting an HTC Wizard, although on of the European imports - the Qtek 9100.

If you are an IM’er (Instant Messenger), you probably face the same problems that I face. You have too many client applications to run at one time (skype, msn, AOL, Yahoo, Google Talk, Meetro, etc…). Second, when you are away from your base computer, you may not be able to access the software needed to run IM.

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So today was supposed to be the big “Boom” day for the Zip Feed Mill here in Sioux Falls. I was up on the 8th floor of the Qwest building with my Digital Camera and I managed to capture a sequence of frames of the building going “down”. The moral of this story is, use more TNT.