T-Mobile: Fought with Twitter, Made Up with Twitter?

I’ve already chronicled how some carrier networks have assumed the right to censor your surfing. T-Mobile recently joined this infamous bandwagon.

If you tried to Twitter on T-Mobile, you were met with the message: " …Twitter is not an authorized third-party service provider… ".

And if you got furious and wrote to T-Mobile threatening to cancel your contract, you might be have been swiftly pinned down by:

"T-Mobile would like to bring to your attention that the Terms and Conditions of service, to which you agreed at activation, indicate "… some Services are not available on third-party networks or while roaming. We may impose credit, usage, or other limits to Service, cancel or suspend Service, or block certain types of calls, messages, or sessions (such as international, 900, or 976 calls) at our discretion." Therefore, T-Mobile is not in violation of any agreement by not providing service to Twitter. T-Mobile regrets any inconvenience, however please note that if you remain under contract and choose to cancel service, you will be responsible for the $200 early termination fee that would be assessed to the account at cancellation."

These are verbatim quotes from the reply Robert Mertz got when he protested the censorship to T-Mobile.

Subsequently there was a public outcry (and therefore a PR disaster) for T-Mobile, spearheaded by the following sites (as chronicled by Rob Mertz):

• AlternaGeek’s post regarding this incident
• CNet’s Post
• Blog Post @ ZDNet (all about me, wow)
• Anohter Blog @ ZDNet
• Mashable’s Post
• TechCrunch’s Post
• Post at Digg
• Buzz Out Loud Forums
• Post at Center Networks
• Snippet at Truemors
• Post at TechBlorge (Australia)
• Post at Vanderwal
• Deep Jive Interests

Now it appears that T-Mobile has relented and resumed transmission of Tweets, but the picture is still murky. More soon…

Source: valleywag.com

Mobile Web News, Week of November 26, 2007

Duuuha! … New Format from Now On
I’ve realized rather late in the day that these news clips will be more visible to search engines if each were a separate post.

So that’s how it’s going to be from  now on!  

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1,000,000 Downloads!
The Opera Mini 4 browser, designed for your cellphone, has chalked that statistic up since its release in November 2007.

It’s a good browser, no doubt. However, I find the native browser in my Nokia N73 smartphone provides the same features PLUS it does not reduce the fidelity of images like Opera does.

But if you don’t have a Nokia, you might want to try out Opera, it might well be worth it…

Source: http://www.phonemag.com/

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Killed by His Cellphone?
He was found dead with a melted cellphone in his pocket.  The suspicion was that the Korean quarry worker’s cellphone battery had exploded and killed him.

But he also had broken ribs, a broken spine, lung injuries and heart damage, and the final verdict was that a cellphone could not have caused all this.

The autopsy will take 15 days, after which we’ll know more. In the meantime, you can tell the bomb squad to postpone checking out your cellphone

Source: MobileCrunch.com

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Firefox on Windows Mobile 6 Devices
Firefox,  of the world’s most popular web browsers (100 million downloads including mine) now has a mobile version. It’s not been publicly launched, but it’s somewhere out there, installed or waiting to be.

Source: cellular-news.com

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University Courses on the Mobile Net… in Japan, of Course
As mentioned before, Japan is the frontrunner in mobile web usage: it is light years ahead of most other countries (the US is so underdeveloped in this area that it is not even allowed on the racetrack).

Japan’s Cyber University opened in April 2007, has 1,850 students and is empowered to confer Bachelor’s degrees. It is Japan’s  only university to offer all its classes over the internet and has now started offering them over the mobile internet. Cyber University is 71 percent owned by SoftBank, a mobile carrier company.

Source: Mobilecrunch.com
 

Mobile Web News, Week of November 19, 2007

Mobile Phones: America Slowly Emerging from Stone Age
The US is primitive when it comes to mobile phone usage. Most people just talk and email, whereas in the frontrunning company, Japan, subscribers read books and watch TV on their phones.

The heartening news is that in the third quarter of 2007, 165% more smartphones were sold than in the corresponding 2006 period.

One of these days the US will acquire modern mobile telecom, might take a while, but it’ll happen…

Source: intomobile.com
 
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AOL Subscribers Allowed Out of Walled Garden (A Little)
Are you an AOL mobile subscriber? 
Hot-diggety, there’s a new web bowser you can download from the AOL
website. The browser makes it easy for you to place various AOL website
features on the browser’s page, and even will serve you banner ads from
people advertising with AOL! Aren’t you fortunate, now!

But in all fairness, the browser also allows you to type in any
web address and view that page. The web page being viewed will be
resized by AOL to fit neatly into your phone window. There are even
tabs to have several pages ready for viewing simultaneously.

The good thing here is that you are no longer limited to viewing
only the pages that AOL permits you to view. There’s nothing like
freedom… kudos to AOL for the move!

Source: bigmouthmedia.com
 
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 Google and 700MHz: An Update
Google is gearing up to bid by itself on the 700 MHz wireless spectrum being auctioned in January 2008 by the FCC.

Only trouble is, Google isn’t a wireless carrier, and wireless is a separate kettle of fish altogether. Without pouring in an immense amount of money and attention, and consequently diverting its purpose significantly, Google will not be able to operate a mobile network.

The mobile carrier space is also domicile to several deadly inhabitants: Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, to name a few. They will not, by any stretch of the imagination, allow their billions of dollars in investment be poached by a non-industry player.

Which is why the grapevine says that Google is trying o partner up with certain mobile carriers. Hope this is true, else the giant whom we know so well will be in for a hard time!

Source: newsfactor.com
 

Mobile Web News, Week of November 12, 2007

Comcast Screwed Because it Blocks Websites
Comcast is one of the insecure or arrogant service providers that presumes it canblock websites it doesn’t like, for example Bit Torrent. This is a kind of censorship.

Well, it is now the recipient of a kingly slap from the free world, in the form of a class-action lawsuit.

Serves it right for trying to meddle with the neutrality of the net.

Source: arstechnica.com
 
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Google’s Android Set to Rearrange Mobile Telephony’s face
Google sees the mobile web as the next new Internet frontier, and is wasting no time panning for gold there.

The Internet behemoth has now released a system design kit (SDK) to enable developers to write applications for Android, which is a sort  of operating system for mobile phones.

They have set aside $10 million in prizes for developers who write the best apps.

Gotta figure out how to get a hold of some of that money!

Take a look at an excellent video on the subject by Sergey Brin himself…

Source: GigaOm.com
 

Mobile Web News, Week of November 5, 2007

Get Pandora on AT&T
Pandora
is a renowned Internet radio station now available on your AT&T
mobile for a 5-day free trial and $8.99 a month thereafter, provided
you have one of these phone models: the Samsung SYNC, a717, and a737;
the Motorola V3xx and RAZR 2; the LG trax; and existing LG CU400 or
CU405 models.

Pandora started its mobile radio service with Sprint in
May 2007. For Sprint, it worked on FUSIC phones by LG, A900 and A920 by
Samsung, and 7500 and 8400 by Sanyo and all Sprint Power Vision phones.
Sprint offers a free, 30-day trial and a $2.99 a month subscription
thereafter.

Sadly, because of licensing hassles, Pandora is now available only in the US.

Source: appscout.com

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Sony Moves Towards the Mobile Web

Sony Ericsson is
out with a mobile web-savvy instrument, the K660. It works on superfast
HSDPA networks and has some neat features for mobile web access, such
as light-up access keys.

Source: mobileburn.com

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Google’s New Android
Google has just announced it’s long-awaited operating system for cellphones: Android.

Android will be made available under an open-source license, and a system development kit will be made available later this week for developers to create applications for Android.

Google has signed up many partners for the cause, albeit few
of them are majors: T-Mobile, HTC, Qualcomm, Motorola (MOT), Sprint
Nextel (S), Telecom Italia, NTT DoCoMo, Broadcom (BRCM), and a phalanx
of other mobile-related companies.

The kicker is that handsets with Android will appear only in the second half of 2008, which makes industry experts speculate that the announcement was primarily a PR exercise!

Source: GigaOm.com

Technorati Tags: pandora, att, k660, google, android

Mobile Web News, Week of October 22, 2007

Blackberry Users: Facebook in the Near Future

(a) Are you a Facebook regular??
(b) Are you a Blackberry user??

If you answered ‘yes’ to both the above, then read on.

Otherwise please find something gainful to do and do it!

Coming back to the subject, the facility will be available “later this year”.

However, seems like you can download it right now from the Blackberry site (oxymoron?).

Source: switched.com
 
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Sync Desktop and Mobile Bookmarks with Opera Link
Using the Opera browser?
Using the Opera Mini 4 Beta browser on your mobile? 
Wanna sycnchronize the bookmarks on both of them?

Well now you can, with the “Opera Link” service provided by Opera software. Open a “MyOpera” account on Opera.com and from your desktop Opera choose “synchronize bookmarks”. Then open Opera Mini 4 Beta on your mobile and choose the link of the same kind.

Shazam, your bookmarks are synced on your mobile and desktop!

Source: brighthand.com
 
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Japanese Women Fight Gropers… Shyly
Much to my surprise, Japanese men grope women in Japanese trains.If it had been the US, said women would scream, stop the train and file a sexual harrassment suit. But the Japanese (and other Asian) women are non-protesting to men by nature.

Now there’s a anti-groping mobile app by Takahashi the games developer that quickly displays a protest message on the woman’s screen for her to unobtrusively show the groper. The message can be one of the following: “Excuse me, did you just grope me?” “Groping is a crime,” and “Shall we head to the police?”

Something is better than nothing, I guess!
 
Source: MobileCrunch
 
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Instant Comparison Shopping with mShopper from Verizon
You’re in a store and you want to buy that exercise bike. How do you know the price is good?

Simple. Launch mShopper on your cellphone, enter the first two letters of the brand and model number. Bang! The best price on the market appears. If you like the merchant who offers that price, you can buy from them with a single click.

mShopper is available from Verizon’s Mobile Web 2.0(SM) service for $5 per month.

Source: CNN-Money

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Instant Mobile Video Sharing with aFLIX
Heard of aPIX?  That’s the paid mobile service to which you can upload and share  pictures taken on your mobile. Now its creator, FunMobility, has launched aFLIX: take videos with your mobile, upload and share them immediately. 

The service also enables rating videos straight from mobiles, and flashes the highest-rated ones on your mobile screen.

FunMobility offers carriers the service and does not sell to subscribers directly. $4.99 per month is all it takes (on the average), depending on who your carrier is…
Source: Marketwire

Technorati Tags: facebook, blackberry, mshopper, verizon, japan, groping, opera, video sharing

Mobile Web News, Week of October 8, 2007

Skype and 3 Working on Free Internet Cellphones
Looks like soon UK Skype users will be able to phone other Skype users without call charges. The calls will be made the usual Skype way, i.e.  over a broadband Internet connection.

Users will, of course have to pay for their broadband connection usage, but this will work out a lot cheaper than making a conventional voice call.
Source: msnbc.msn.com

 
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Hooray, Mobile Firefox is Here!
…and it will be shipped out in 2008, according to Mozilla’s VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer.

Reducing the footprint of Firefox’s Gecko 1.9 rendering engine is one of the things Schroepfer and his team are working on to make Firefox fit into the small memories of typical smartphones.

Compatibility with ARM processors is another goal that Mobile Firefox will achieve, thanks to the fact that ARM Ltd. is sponsoring part of the development.

I’m personally a Firefox fan, and this news brings untold joy to my heart, especially since it’s Friday!
Source: linuxdevices.com
 
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Google Buys Jaiku
Jaiku is a small, relatively new mobile social network based in Europe and founded by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen.

Source: GigaOm
 
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Technorati Tags: Google, Jaiku, ARM, Mozilla, Firefox, mobile, gecko

Mobile Web News, Week of October 1, 2007

“When You Get to Mount Everest, Call Me on Your Mobile”
This is what your friends will be telling you next time you scale the peak. This is because China Mobile has contracted with Huawei Technologies to set up a solar-powered GSM base station there by the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The base station will link to the rest of the world by satellite.

Be sure to  upload pictures of the summit to your Facebook account through the mobile web…
Source: MobileCrunch
 
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Verizon’s Voyager: Thank God Almighty, We’re Free at Last (to Browse)
Verizon has finally seen the light:  it no longer seeks to limit mobile web surfers to a few web sites of it partners. With the new Voyager phone (made by LG), you can go anywhere you want on the web.

The Voyager has a physical keyboard as well as a touch screen, which one might say puts it ahead of the iPhone. And of course you have to surf using Verizon’s 3G wireless broadband network, but so what. IMHO Verizon is getting real and moving in the right direction!
 
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A Flash Player For Your Mobile Phone
How many times have you been frustrated that you can’t view a Flash presentation on your cell phone? 10? 20? 230?

Adobe has come out with the Flash Lite 3 Player that solves the problem. It works with several mobile operating systems, including the Symbian OS of Nokia,  Qualcomm BREW 2.x/3.x and Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.

Can’t wait to get it down to my Nokia N73!!
Source: Infosyncworld

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.
 
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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
 
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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
 
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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
 
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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%.

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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!