Phones

Have you looked at your bills and said “God I hate paying so much!?!” Well if you have a regular landline phone get either VoIP or just cancel your phone service and use your cell phone. VoIP is a lot like your regular phone service but is MUCH cheeper. Only catch is you need to have high speed cable internet. Consider this MCI current unlimited calling plans start at $49.99; while Vonage.com is offering the same plan with more features for $24.99! That’s twenty five bucks by just switching to VoIP and you can still keep your old phone number. Do the research and you will see the value. Save your money for something like a down payment on a new car or even better put it in your online savings account!

Well this news has been popping up around the net today and it’s HUGE! You might remember, probably do, that Skype some time ago made all outgoing calls from its software in Canada and US free and unlimited? Ha, well guess what? Its competitors just did! All outgoing calls around the WORLD are free! Oh yeah, that’s right GIZMO just made all outgoing calls free!

I end up switching back to adium because it’s just reliable and use skype for calling.

I peeked in on my napping daughter the other day though I was miles away in a mall parking lot. I was testing the remote capabilities of the LukWerks Digital Video Surveillance System, using Palm Treo 700w and Motorola Q smartphones to access a video camera pointed at her crib.

On May 24th I took a test for a Verizon job and, at the time, their machine for doing the grading was not working so they had to mail out the tests to get graded. We were told that we’d hear back within two weeks. So I waited…

Sony Ericsson release the latest UIQ series of Sony Ericsson phones - P990i, the second UIQ 3g phone.

Ebay should be criticized on its strategies. While competitors such as Google and Amazon constantly innovate with the releasing of new services, Ebay remains pretty static and slow in terms of innovation. When was the last time Ebay launched a new service? - exactly! Ebay’s business model has changed very little for, well, the last 4 years. Yes Ebay did try to expand its business to VoIP with the purchase of Skype for a whopping $2 billion something but little did change on Ebay auction pages. Skype still remains only a little banner at the footer of Ebay pages as a separate business entity. Skype is awesome on its own and Ebay is missing out big time in capitalize the potential of Skype for its auction business. Or is Ebay so busy with squashing out phishing that it has forgotten to innovate?

Mobile phones are quickly becoming platforms and two of the best that we’ve seen recently are the Motorola Q and the Palm Treo 700p.

Interesting how we’re so caught up in the frenzy to preserve memories that we snap and snap away at everything and anything we see — in the process of trying to archive something so evanescent we distort it so that the emphasis is on the preserving rather than the memory itself. I counted 5 Sony Ericsson phones with 2.0 megapixel cameras, mine included.

Last week Verizon Wireless announced a brand new service, entitled “Chaperone”, which is intended to help parents keep track of their children. The new “chaperone” service works by tracking the child’s phone by using the GPS technologies, which the majority of new phones have. This service goes a step further by plotting their child’s location on a real-time map which is accessible either from Verizon’s website or from the parent’s phone.

If I were truly hip or lived in Southern California, I would have been one of the first people on the planet to own a Motorola RAZR V3 cell phone. Having neither qualification, I waited until Motorola fixed some issues with the phone and picked up what is, essentially, v1.2 – the RAZR V3i. Apparently, this phone is scheduled to be offered by Cingular, but for some reason is still not available through them. It is readily available, however, in unlocked form from many vendors on eBay and I’m sure through other dealers as well.

Speaking recently to someone who claimed to be a representative of the company I managed to extract the following: there are no official plans to release Motorola LZZR, nor there are similar plans concerning Motorola VZZR or Motorola UZZR models. The marketing practice of inventing silly and embarrasing names that started with Motorola RAZR (especially Pink edition) and continued with Motorola PEBBL, Motorola ROKR and Motorola SLVR (Motorola SLVR Red in particular) will however continue.

Even with a 1 year contract, I spent less on the phone (by about 50%!) than I was going to at Nextel, and my monthly plan? 1500 anytime minutes for 39.99. I’m a happy camper. Only trouble is I know my i730. I know all the hacks, and now I have to relearn them all for the Razr. Fortunately, I already found a few good forums, and by the end of the weekend, it should be tweaked just the way I want it. (which, in addition to other things, means my ringtone needs to be 5150)

After a full 5 minutes, he issues one last blast. “Get it?!” he yells, and slams the phone down. There is a small pause. He takes a breath and, like a butterfly suddenly reverting to caterpillar status, he turns to me a little sheepishly and says, “That should give ‘im something to think about. What time is dinner?” And just like that, he’s my sweet business pal again. Within an hour, word comes over the BlackBerry that the matter has been resolved in our favor.

I have an ongoing love-hate relationship with the Canadian mobile industry—mostly due to the fact that we don’t really have one yet (harsh words I know.) Digging up information about what’s going on here is painful at best. The local media still calls mobile ‘wireless’ or ‘cellular’, still thinks that ‘mobile’ exclusively refers to iPods and Blackberry devices, and most consumers have fallen madly in love with the ‘ultra-cool’ Razr (…bad UI, hobbled Bluetooth, non-existant battery life…enough said.)

The paper does stand by the assertion that the NSA Program exists and the AT&T and possible MCI participated. I’m gonna sound a little Red State here but MSM has been VERY sloppy lately.

And this may just make it irrelevant. Do they call it a Palmberry or a Blackeo?

Like switching to Vonage. The Vonage phone commercials have always irritated me: First of all, they stole the theme song from the 5,6,7,8's recording in Kill Bill Vol. 1, meaning that every time I watch that magnificent movie, I have to think about the idiotic Vonage commercials. On top of that, the videos they show are obviously staged (think back upon them and ask yourself if it makes any sense that someone would actually be filming these things on home video while not expecting anything to go wrong).

Also, don’t think I’m just talking about video files here! Anyone got a Vonage line? Yeah, Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) is F’ed if this goes through. Think about it, the companies pushing for these laws are the PHONE companies. They’d just love to force you back to paying ridiculous rates for local and long distance calling!

Senators and Representatives may have been a little surprised by the amount of heat the net neutrality issue has been generating. Both chambers of Congress have seen extensive lobbying from pro and anti-neutrality groups. The pro neutrality lobby is an odd collection of bedfellows. MoveOn.org, the Christian Coalition, Gun Owners of America, Microsoft, Google and a host of others have all signed on to keep the common carriage rules in place — that is to maintain the open-access-for-all model that we have now. The anti-neutrality lobby is comprised primarily of big telcos –- AT&T, BellSouth, Cingular and Verizon –- that want the FCC to allow packet prioritization, which would introduce a new pay-to-play internet.

The Q excels in its hardware specs and capabilities. The 2.5 inch screen features a 320×240 resolution at 65k colors contained in a 2.5 inch wide and 0.45 inch thick housing weighing only 4 ounces. At 2.5 inches wide, the Q feels a little awkward to hold at first. As one reviewer put it, using the Q can feel like you’re talking to a piece of bathroom tile. However, the Q is much more tolerable than the brick form factor of the Treo 700. There is a mini QWERTY keyboard with adequately spaced out keys, allowing me to pump out enormous text messages in a fraction of the time it would take on a regular cell phone. Yet, the send/end keys above the keyboard feel a bit mushy, are awkwardly placed and lack sufficient tactile feedback.