Mobile

Things that aren’t static

StealthText: Self Destructing Text Message Service
A UK company is introducing a “StealthText” service which sends self-destructing mobile phone text messages.
Messages sent via StealthText will vanish after 40 seconds onscreen with the company, Staellium UK, hoping that the service will prove popular with business executives dealing in sensitive information. We can think of a host of rather more dodgy applications for the service too – how about the thousands of people having affairs via SMS?
The company is claiming that their ‘Mission Impossible’ style auto-destructing texts have already picked up interest from financial services companies, the Ministry of Defence, celebrity agents.
The Stealth Text service requires both sender and receiver to sign-up by texting STEALTH to 80880. This provides a link to download the StealthText applet via a WAP connection. Ten self-destructing messages will cost £5.
Users signed up to the service will receive a text notification showing the senders name and providing a link to the message.
The recipient must open the link and read the message within 40 seconds (tough luck, slow readers!) before it vanishes into the ether forever, leaving no trace in the phone’s memory.
“The ability to send a self-destruct message has massive benefits for people from all walks of life, from everyday mobile users, through to celebrities and business people, but this is just the start,” said Staellium CEO Carole Barnum, adding that the company intends to extend the service to include self-destructing email, voice and picture messages in spring 2006.
Currently only available around the world for users of UK SIM cards only, the company plans to make the service available across Europe, in the US and Asia next year.
Seeing as they intend to be dealing in highly confidential information, we have to say that their truly awful Website hardly inspires confidence – it looks like something knocked up by a spammer in a hurry.
Ever heard of using style sheets to provide a full Web experience for people on PCs as well as a bare-bones WAP version, guys?
Staellium
12 December, 2005
Pocket PCs Are For Blokes Survey Finds
Pocket PC software company SPB ran a survey of its users during November 2005, and discovered that a staggering 96% of those taking part were blokes.
Proof indeed that women have got far better things to do with their time than fill in long, geek-tastic surveys, the research also revealed that the majority of those responding were (surprise, surprise!) in a computer related occupation (18%), followed by students and engineers at 9% and sales/marketing/advertising coming in fourth with 5%.
The Dell Axim x50v came out as the most popular handheld (12%), followed by the iPaq 4700 (8%) and the Fujitsu-Siemens Pocket LOOX 718/720 (5%).
The majority of users (22%) said that they had been using Pocket PCs for between 1-2 years, with 20% owning the devices for between 6 to 12 months.Just 11% claimed to be Pocket PC old-timers, with 4-5 years of use on the clock.
As for accessories, memory cards, unsurprisingly, were the essential purchase for 85% of respondents, with 69% forking out for screen protectors.
Cases were the next most popular purchase (63%) followed by styluses (40%), GPS (36%), extra batteries (30%), keyboards (23%) and wi-fi cards (18%).
SD (SecureDigital Card) memory cards were the most popular format at 88%, followed by CF (CompactFlash Card) 40%, MMC (MultiMedia Card) 11% and Mini SD with 10%.
With Pocket PCs increasingly becoming multimedia devices, storage requirements are going up, with over half of respondents owning 1 gig memory cards, followed by 512, 256 and 128 meg cards respectively.
The vast majority of Pocket PC users (85%) connect to the internet with their machines, with 72% browsing the web, 65% checking email and 35% using instant messaging.
We must point out that the results of this self-selecting survey, although interesting, should be taken with a Matterhorn-sized slab of Saxa as the SPB website comes loaded with a crateload of caveats.But it’s worth a look: SPB Software
12 December, 2005
PetCell: A Teenage Take: Don’t Be Daft
All too often articles about the things teenagers are interested in are written by people old enough to be their parents. Teenage thinking isn’t represented. Lawrence Dudley gives you a point of view that you won’t find in other publications. You see, Lawrence is a teenager.
Woof … I mean, Hello?
There’s loads of relatively serious articles on media and technology all over the Internet nowadays. This isn’t one of them.
Mobile phones are reaching into all sorts of new markets, often, not just reaching but forcing, with operators seemingly desperate to reap more profits. There’s the mobile for kids, the Firefly, and the mobile phone controlled kettle.
Of course, this can’t possibly be enough… and come on, the dog feels left out when you go to Carphone Warehouse and there isn’t a Carphone Kennel to match. The answer to this is, of course, the PetCell.
Come on, admit it: When your dog is late, possibly because it is busy peeing against a tree somewhere, don’t you wish that you could give it a quick ring to check it’s OK? Yeah, didn’t think so. Nevertheless it exists, so I guess some overly-pet-protective marketing drone somewhere decided that it was a viable product.
From what I gathered, the device lets you set a fixed area in which your dog is allowed to be. If your dog goes outside this area, the unit sends you a text message. I personally think that this is kind of like shutting the door after the horse (or dog) has bolted.
I mean, you notice your dog’s missing, and, look at that, how helpful, your mobile phone confirms it! What a useful bit of technology!
Of course, it only does this while the battery isn’t flat or the dog has decided to go for a swim. I’m guessing that it will be marketed as waterproof when it is released in 2006, but as with all “waterproof” devices, I seriously doubt it really is.
I’m guessing that there will be different models too, so that the dogs with the cool phones have something to show off to their mates. The mocked-up image at the top of this piece is what I imagine two cell-phone equipped dogs to act like, shown on an advert for Carphone Kennel.
I’m sorry if I sound a little negative this week, but I am sick of these tacky technologies coming out which serve no particular real-life purpose. And this is coming from someone with a passion for gadgets, don’t forget.
I mean, who’s really going to call up their dog to find out which lamp post he’s peeing on? And I guess those people who would, probably also wouldn’t mind paying an outrageous monthly subscription for the service, which is no doubt how the service will be paid for.
Now if only one of these could be invented that’s small enough to be fitted on valuable items like my laptop, or my wallet. Now that would be useful, and save me looking for either of them when they get stolen. And when they do get stolen, I will know where they are and possibly who stole them.
The problem with that, of course, is that this would constitute genuinely useful technology, something which the gadget industry has an extremely bad grasp of.
Shame really.
9 December, 2005
Virgin Mobile Fishing For Extra Cash – Vodafone and FT Interest
Both Vodafone and France Telecom are now considering a rival bid for Virgin Mobile, following a “unanimous” decision by the Virgin board to reject the starting offer from NTL. Financial sources say both companies have asked to look at the Virgin Mobile books.
This means that if NTL wants to buy the brand and put it on all NTL products, it will have to come up with a bigger offer. NTL, waiting for the Stock Exchange to open before making any announcement, is going to have trouble finding the money after its big takeover offer for Telewest, say finance analysts.
It also means a nasty gap in the future of T-Mobile, which provides the network for Virgin as a virtual network; neither France Telecom nor Vodafone would renew that contract, and the loss could be crushing, following T-Mobile’s defeat in the contest to buy O2.
Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson has told reporters he is sure the deal will go ahead.
From Australia, Forbes quotes Branson as saying that the new company will be formed and will be called Virgin TV – all it will take, he added, is a small increase in the offer. He said the current offer under-valued the company in the eyes of his fellow directors, but that “the difference between what they’ve asked for and what NTL has offered is not considerable in financial terms.”
According to the Times, the difference is between the current offer of £817 million and a hoped-for bid of £891m – increasing the bid to 345 per share while the Guardian thinks the extra needed is rather less at 340 pence.
Guy Kewney write extensively, and quite brilliantly, in lots of places, including NewsWireless.net
8 December, 2005
LG-SB130: Pause Live TV On Your Mobile Phone
Say hello to the LG SB130-KB1300 handset, a clever-clogs, do-it-all device that can do play and pause live TV as well as deal with every multimedia-type task you can lob at it.
The LG LG-SB130 claims to be the first in the world to be able to pause a live television broadcast playing on its screen so that users could, for example, take an incoming call, and then pick up where they left off once the call is finished.
This piece of technical jiggery-pokery is achieved courtesy of LG’s ‘Time Machine’ feature, which can record live TV transmissions to the phone’s 80Mb internal flash memory.
This memory can apparently fit up to an hour’s worth of broadcasting before it starts writing over the oldest bits with new content.
The all-in-one device (also known as the KB1300 ) can also can play back video (DMB), play back music (MP3) and snap two megapixel pictures courtesy of its built in AutoFocus camera.
But no amount of technical prowess and enthusiastic grinning from obliging Korean models can detract from the fact that’s the phone’s a bit of an ugly fella.
Looking like a mutant Transformer, you half expect the thing to cunningly fold up into a robot shape, but there is a method to its madness, with the oddball swivelling screen making it ideal for holding the phone and watching TV.
The aerial’s a bit of a beefy affair too, but we doubt if the geeky market the phone’s aimed at are going to mind.
Naturally, we’ve haven’t the faintest idea when – or even if – this weird looking gizmo is ever going to be released in Europe, but we definitely like the idea of watching – and pausing – live TV on the go.
Babelfish afficiandos can find out more about the phone at LG’s Korean site.
7 December, 2005
Funky SH902i FOMA Handset Launched By Sharp Japan/NTT
Japan Sharp and NTT DoCoMo will be launching the SH902i FOMA, their funky new 3G clamshell phone in Japan this week.
The sleek swivel-flip phone is dominated by a hefty 2.4-inch, QVGA (240×320) screen which incorporates Advance Super View (ASV) technology.
This limits the viewing angle of the screen to keep nosey Parkers from getting an eyeful of your personal SMS or emails – handy if you like to plot the premature death of your boss in the staff canteen.
As ever, there’s a veritable feast o’multimedia bolted on board, with the all-swivellin’, all-flippin’, shiny handset coming with an impressive 3.16 megapixel autofocus camera, an MP3 Player and the highly rated NetFront Web browser.
For expansion, there’s a miniSD slot available that can read cards up to 1GB.
Because the phone is aimed at the hip’n’groovy crowd, it comes in a range of colours with the usual daft names (Carbon Red, Leather Black, Shell Blue and Glass White).
The phone goes on sale in Japan on December 9th with no date set for us technology-starved folks in Britland.
If multimedia-tastic whirring Flash animations in Japanese are your thing, you can find out more about the phone – and spin it around to your heart’s content – on the 902i Website
6 December, 2005
NTL Bids For Virgin Mobile: 1st Mobile Quad Play?
NTL is currently in talks to merge with Virgin Mobile in a deal that would create a potential rival to the now broadband-enabled BSkyB.
Virgin Mobile’s official word?
The Board of Virgin Mobile Holdings plc confirms that it has received an approach from NTL Incorporated that may or may not lead to a formal offer being made for the Company.
Shares of Virgin Mobile immediately climbed to a record high after NTL/Telewest announced its £835m ($1.44 billion) takeover bid.
If the bid is successful, it will create the first media group to serve up mobile and fixed-line telephony, broadband Internet access and pay-TV.
(Ed: It has a similar resonance as the deal between 3 Italia and Canale 7)
We’ve found that getting straight numbers of subscribers for each separate business is difficult. The figures that the Guardian are quoting for the merged Virgin/NTL/Telewest uber-company are impressive too, accounting for 10m customers, 3.3m television customers, over 5m mobile phone users, 2.5m broadband Internet customers and 4.4m fixed-line telephone accounts.
NTL/Telewest do have to do something pretty radical as they feel the pressure from other previously unrelated business getting in on their main business areas.
The new company will go under the Virgin brand, and would become the biggest Virgin-branded business in the world, outstripping the music retail business which launched Branson’s career and the Virgin Atlantic airline business.
In a fiercely competitive market, cable companies on both sides of the Atlantic are looking to outflank their satellite and phone company rivals by adding mobile phone services to their portfolio of voice, Internet and TV services.
NTL is the UK’s number two pay-TV operator after BSkyB’s Sky and is also the second-largest residential telephony provider after BT Group.
Long seen as a juicy takeover candidate, Virgin Mobile is the fifth-largest UK mobile phone carrier. The company operates on rented capacity on T-Mobile’s UK network.
Virgin Mobile current 4 million users (source Virgin Mobile) in the UK, puts them at less than a third of the UK market leader, o2’s, who have 15 million users.
NTL and Telewest have notched up around 5 million subscribers combined, next to BSkyB’s 7.8 million digital television viewers.
If the deal goes through, it won’t be the first time the two companies have worked together – in 1996 they launched the Internet service provider Virgin Net, which had an original owner ship of NTL with 49% and Virgin, 51%. The enterprise was fully taken over by NTL in 2000 but still trades under the powerful Virgin brand name.
Virgin Mobile
NTL
5 December, 2005
SPH-V6800 Wi-Fi Multimedia Handset Announced By Samsung
With a passion for creating new phones that is beginning to border on pathological, Samsung’s overworked designers have just revealed yet another new hi-tech handset, the SPH-V6800.
Revealed to the world by an obligingly smiling model, the SPH-V6800 looks to be a very tasty number indeed, offering a ton of multimedia functionality, a pocketable form factor and built in Wi-Fi.
Sporting a familiar sliding keyboard design, the black and silver handset is dominated by a bright 320×240 pixel QVGA TFT display, packed into a two inch display.
There’s also a 1.3MP digital camera onboard with MPEG-4 video recording and MP3/AAC audio playback.
There’s also voice recognition built in, video-on-demand, TV-output, EV-DO, and the bit we really like, the built-in Wi-Fi wireless (802.11b, 11Mbps) LAN.
We used a Wi-Fi card with our chunky i-Mate JAM phone extensively on our travels to New York, and loved being able to send off email and surf the web on the move.
With the Samsung packing in wireless connectivity into its tiny 96.8 x 47 x 24.5mm dimensions, we could well be seduced by SPH-V6800 (if it ever makes it to these shores, of course).
The SPH-V6800 will be made available to Korean subscribers for around $477 (~£275 ~€402) and ambitious readers can try and make sense of the press release page in Korean here (we gamely ran it through babelfish, but the results sounded like an acid casualty reading a tech manual).
Samsung
29 November, 2005
Teenagers Don’t Like Retro
All too often articles about the things teenagers are interested in are written by people old enough to be their parents and teenagers thinking isn’t represented. Lawrence Dudley gives you a point of view that you won’t find in other publications. You see Lawrence _is_ a teenager.
A Whole New Meaning To Retro
As a teenager, retro is your dad when he insists on playing his absolutely appalling Cher records. Not that my dad listens to Cher, of course, unless he only does that in secret, which I wouldn’t blame him for. Anyway, so retro is anything but cool as a teenager. In fact, most people my age that I know are very technology-conscious, and new phones, games etc. are common playground talk. What isn’t talked about is all that old stuff that dad’s seem to always talk about. You can imagine then that I almost choked when I read about people in China hacking old Motorola DynaTAC 8000x phones to feature colour screens and GSM-compatibility.
The 8000x was one of the first mobile phones around, and had quite an impressive feature set: A whole 30 minutes of talk time and 8 hours of standby along with a price tag of $4,000. They’re also the size of a house brick. Why on earth then are the chinese fitting these antiquities with colour screens? Well… The original Engadget entry for the story had a link to the original article, sadly for us, it was in Chinese. Using the Babelfish translation engine, I gleaned a vital piece of information from the nonsense-filled, automatically translated page. The following quote surely explains everything: “However, everybody could not forget it the standard use: Defends self the person!”.
Ah ha! So that’s it: These “mobile phones” are actually weapons. Guess that means the end of taking my phone on the plane then! Still… The smiling Chinese man talking on his glorified, colour LCD display-equipped brick does look so innocent!
While this article is not intended to be taken entirely seriously, it does highlight the weirdness of some of the stuff people do and how stuff like that spreads as a result of the Internet.
While I accept that some strange people might want their phone to look like a car battery with buttons, I can only hope that no-one attempts to resurrect Cher, because let’s face it: There’s no reason to.
Ed: We’ve got a few of the old Motorola Bricks around the Digital-Lifestyles office, that we picked up at DefCon seven years ago. We’d love to them converted for current use. But then again, we some of us remember them the first time around.
28 November, 2005
Mobile Phone Sales Worldwide Soar 22% In Q3
Market analyst Gartner reports that mobile phone sales have soared 22 percent compared to the same period last year.
In the third quarter, manufacturers shifted a mighty 205.4 million mobile phones, with Gartner predicting that mobile phone sales could total 810 million units this year.
The report observed that consumers are still slow to warm to 3G, but growth is expected in the fourth quarter.
Finnish mobile giants Nokia increased their market share during the third quarter to 32.6 percent, up from 31 percent a year earlier.
Motorola’s hip’n’happening RAZR phone helped increase their market share to 18.7 percent, letting the company leapfrog their rivals Samsung Electronics into second place.
Now sat glumly in third place with 12.5 percent of the market, Samsung’s fading performance was put down to the company failing to address emerging markets as effectively as their rivals – in particular Motorola, who introduced a winning range of basic, very-low-cost phones.
In the US, new customers were thin on the ground but there were mobile phone sales aplenty (36.3 million units) with customers switching operators (“churn”) to get a better deal.
In the Latin American segment, sales were up 46 per cent compared to last year, totalling 26.1 million phones units, while in Western Europe, big sales of 40 million phones were driven by customers upgrading their handsets.
Gartner’s report curiously lumped Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa sales together, arriving at a total of 39.7 million, up 40 percent compared to a year earlier.
The main movers in this area were Nigeria, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Turkey and Ukraine.
Across Asia, sales zipped up to 52.2 million units, up 27 percent compared to the last year’s quarter with China and India contributing strongly to the growth.
Meanwhile, figures were far less rosy in the Japanese market, registering a minuscule growth of 0.6 percent, to 11.3 million phones.
The Gartner report predicts full-year sales of up to 810 million phones, which may even reach 820 million if suppliers and distributors are able to fully meet consumer demand.
Gartner
23 November, 2005