Siemens says US mobile could shift to GSM

Mobile News,US -Siemens believes North American telecoms operators could shift to the GSM mobile standard from the rival CDMA system, a senior company executive said in an interview published on Thursday, reports Reuters.

"CDMA (code division multiple access) technology was invented by San Diego-based Qualcomm and the company delivers virtually all chips needed in CDMA networks and mobile phones used by some 500 million consumers mostly in the Americas and Asia.

The rival European-invented Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) has 1.6 billion users globally, according to the GSM Association."CDMA is losing market share globally as the new mobile phone users live mostly in the areas where GSM is the leading technology," Catselitz was quoted as saying."

source: textually.org

In Praise of...TEXTING

Mobile News,UK - "The SMS revolution has opened up an entirely new layer of communication between people with its own codes, language and conventions.It is one of the fastest-growing consumer products ever and all the more remarkable because it was never intended to happen.

Mobile phone owners discovered they could utilise a part of the phone reserved for engineers to communicate with each other. The rest is history. Not all texting is benign. In Australia texts were recently used to orchestrate racist meetings and in China, the world's biggest cellphone market, there are reportedly 2,800 surveillance centres to monitor traffic.

Overall, though, texting is a force for good, expanding the freedom to do things including cross-generational conversations, dating, voting in game shows, writing poetry, alerting passengers to aircraft delays, launching marketing campaigns or simply adding a little extra to the everyday joys of conversation. Even when the text news is bad, we should not simply blame the messenger."
source:textually.org

Vonage now has a VOIP Phone

VOIp News,US/Jamaica - The race already is on with VOIP here in Jamaica- We have Caribbean Net Talk,Netstream Global,Cable & Wireless's Net Speak,Televoice,Netvoice and Merit Communication's triple play called Flow. SO my question is, now that Vonage has launched is VOIP Phone, where you can use cell phone looking device to use their service to make calls once you can hook up to a public wireless hot spot-who will bring that service here first.

Vonage launched its F1000 handset manufactured by UTStarcom on Tuesday December 13, which will offer Vonage's voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service over any public 802.11b network. The phone is configured to let customers use existing Vonage call features, such as three-way calling, caller ID and voice mail. Handsets will have ring options including silent, vibrate and various ring tones. Customers will also be able to configure and save Wi-Fi profiles to ease connectivity. The F1000's battery offers about five hours of talk time and 50 hours to 100 hours of standby, Vonage said.

For your info: Wi-Fi phones combine two hot technologies: Wi-Fi and VoIP, which lets Internet connections double as inexpensive phone lines. Typically, VoIP subscribers use a wired phone line, whether a home phone or any number of phones in an office.
But what may hamper adoption in th USA and also here in Jamaica, is that the phone works only with public Wi-Fi hot spots, which means that people wandering into a public hot spot where they're required to pay for network access won't be able to use their phones. And second, the mobile nature of the device makes it nearly impossible for emergency operators to automatically get the location of callers using a Wi-Fi VoIP phone away from home.

TextPayMe -What It Sounds Like

Mobile News,USA- A new mobile payment system has been launched. TextPayMe allows people to send money with an SMS. It works like this: Someone signs up to the service, they then SMS "PAY (amount) (phone number)" to SMS@TextPayMe.com. They receive a phone call which will require them to enter a PIN (for security) and the money gets sent from a credit card or an account that has been preloaded.

The receiver (who doesn't have to be signed up) can get the money deposited into a bank account or have a check mailed. The initial deposits, withdrawals and transactions are all free - which leads me to assume a fee based structure is part of the business plan,but I haven't seen it. At the moment I'm not sure how useful this is, since it seems to be an alternative to PayPal.

True, you don't need to be at your computer to make a payment, but most purchases that require that kind of payment are on the web. However, if the system can be linked to mobile content it may find a ready market - especially if it works out cheaper than the cut operators take for supplying a payment system.Can we get an AMEN!
Source:textually.org

Yahoo To Launch VOIP Service

Telecom News,USA - Yahoo will launch a VOIP service soon...the "Phone Out" service will let people dial regular phone numbers using their computers or receive calls from conventional phones. Pricing: lower than Skype: regular and mobile phones for one cent per minute in the U.S. and two cents a minute to about 30 other countries, including calls to Argentina, Australia, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Korea.

According to Newsweek: For $3 a month or $30 a year, Yahoo will also give users a personal phone number for their PCs, which will let them receive calls from regular phones on their computer. They can pick their area code, so U.S. users with relatives in London, for example, could choose a London phone number and allow their relatives to enjoy local rates when they call. source:paidcontent.org

Why send, when you can simply share it.

Mobile News, Kingston, Jamaica- Yep MiPhone is at it again.A few inventive Jamaican programmers have created a share credit feature for MiPhone. Say you have $500 on your phone and your friend has none, you can using a code and text feature take some of yours and transfer it to theirs. Now how inventive is that.

But I worry about MiPhone, they are being quite inventive, but they don't have the market share or revenues to show for it at this time. And it has been easy for the bigger guys in the game- Digicel and Cable & Wireless to poach their ideas, put marketing muscle behind it and almost make it theirs.

But is the Jamaican market paying attention? Are they seeing that these first mover features - chat between two or more people unlimited for a low monthtly fee- earn credit on your phone when u receive when you get calls rom other networks- are they seeing them as important to their mobile lifestyle and coming from MiPhone. Some wonder if MiPhone can become the Apple of Telecom to the Microsoft of Digicel and Cable & Wireless. Only time will tell.