Mobile Web News, Week of September 24, 2007

What Do You Do With Your iPhone When Your 2-Year Contract Expires?
Your iPhone is locked into the AT&T network….  and right now Apple is saying it will not let you unlock from it. So  does that mean that after two years, to keep using your $400 iPhone, you have to renew with AT&T???

Read an interesting article about this issue on ZDNet.
 
*****************
 
O2 Introduces Flat Rate Mobile Data Package in the UK on Oct 1
Finally…  and 18 months after T-Mobile did it! The service is called the “O2 Web Bolt-On”, is available to prepaid and monthly customers and includes 200 MB of data download (equivalent to nearly 1,400 web pages). This service costs GBP7.50 per month.

Be advised that T-Mobiles prices give you  more bytes per buck. You’d be the best judge as to whether it’s worth chucking O2 just for this…
Source: trustedreviews.com
 
*****************
 
Japanese Mobile Web Usage Leaves the Rest of Us in the Dust
Bored in Japan?  Just click on a small barcode on a poster or in a magazine and bang, your mobile phone downloads a novel and you can start reading it.

Japan’s mobile internet technology is called i-mode, introduced by NTT DoCoMo in 1999, and the country’s 100 million users (out of a total population of 127 million) simply love it. Japan is way ahead of other countries in mobile web applications and is always the test bed for hot new mobile technologies. For example, they’re moving into 4G when other countries are struggling to get 3G out to market!
Source: GuardianUnlimited
 
*****************
 
AT&T Subscribers Can Control Kids’ Mobile Usage
Worried has that Junior’s accessing the Playboy site on his mobile phone? Well now you can stop him doing that. AT&T has introduced a service that limits access to bad sites, talk time, instant messages and text messages. The service is called Smart Limits For Wireless and costs $4.99 a month.

This will only partly solve the problem of juvenile cell phone abuse, but as I always say, something is better than nothing!
Source: it-director.com
 
*****************
 
Blackberry Now Works with WiFi
Blackberry has introduced two new models that do this: the 8820 and the Curve 8320. Both are available exclusively from AT&T with or without a service contract (8820: $200 with, $500 without; Curve, $250 with, $450 without).

Technorati Tags: iphone, japan, at&t, smart limits for wireless, blackberry, mobile web, the magnum group

Mobile Web News, Week of September 17, 2007

iPhone Set To Hit Germany on November 9th
Germans can now say, “Nyaah to the UK, we’re getting it too!” The chosen carrier is Deutsche  Telecom (who, incidentally, owns T-Mobile). The price will be 399 Euros ($553), which is even more expensive than in the UK, but that’s thanks to Germany’s value-added tax of 19%.

***************************

The iPhone to Arrive in Britain Soon
If you’re in the UK, you can breathe normally from November 9th, ‘coz that’s when Stevie Jobs says he’ll be shipping the iPhone out there. O2 will be the exclusive carrier to offer the phone just like AT&T is in the US, and O2 will fork out 10% of it’s iPhone-based revenues to Stevie.

Simple solution: move to the US!


 

Mobile Web News, Week of September 10, 2007

Click on the player at left to view the week’s major news about the Mobile Web.

Bittersweet iPhone Rebates
If you bought an iPhone last month, Apple now gives you a $200 rebate; if you bought earlier, it’s $100. This afterthought on Apple’s part has turned off a lot of people. However:

1. Who asked you to rush and buy one? Next time wait and watch for 90 days
2. Some rebate is better than no rebate
3. Re-evaluate your opinion of Steve Jobs, he might be taking you a little too much for granted.

Source: Businessweek

********************

Google Mobile Ads Hit Town
… instantly making all other mobile ad networks scavengers. Google now places your Adwords campaigns on mobile websites free until November 18, after which you will have to pay normal CPC prices.

Source: Search Engine Land
 
********************
 
Hooray, Cheap Broadband in the Air, at Last!!
Imagine being able to surf the web from your airplane seat, without running up charges of $200 million per second! GigaOm reports that an Israeli company, Starling Advanced Communication Ltd., has developed an antenna that makes it possible. And sure, you can even make VOIP phone calls using Skype.

We are no longer limited to in-flight entertainment packages… now we have near infinite choice… what a blast!
 
 
Buy Stuff With Your Mobile Without Premium SMS
The big 5 UK mobile operators (T-Mobile, Vodafone, Orange, O2 and 3) have launched a payment mechanism called PayForIt, by which users’ payments are collected through their phone bill. If you are selling through WAP, it’s actually mandatory!

Technorati Tags: iphone, adwords, broadband, payforit,

Mobile Web News, Week of September 3, 2007

Click on the player at left to view the week’s major news about the Mobile Web.

Yo, Access Your Many Computers From Any One of Them
There’s this new free service called WeBot reported by GigaOm that enables you to stream multimedia files from any of your computers to the other. You have to download WeBot’s program into each one of them for this to be possible.

And the cool thing is that you can even download the files into your iPhone!

This is moving users in the direction of a personal file system spread over the Web… what a distinct Web 2.0 aroma’s in the air!

**********************
 
Even SMS is Free Now
I kid thee not, now, as announced by MobileCrunch, you can send free SMSs from your Yahoo Messenger desktop program. And guess what, there are no ads! (I tried it out myself).  Another cool thing is that the service does not exclude a whole lot of countries, which is what other services like Teleflip do… the only thing is that the people you text should have agreed to be on your Yahoo Messenger contacts list…

**********************

More Googlephone Details Revealed!
New specifics have come to light about the Gphone, as described in an article by Scott Kirsner for the Boston Globe
and reported by GigaOm:

1. The Googlephone will run a Linux variant as its operating system
2. It will run Java applications
3. The user interface will be implemented in Java
4. The operating system is already running on prototype devices, most probably one by HTC, as I reported earlier in this blog
5. The phone will have a physical QWERTY keyboard

Something tells me the Gphone is around the corner…