US yawns at Wi-Fi enabled phones
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Wake up, operators Ovum reckons that only one US mobile phone subscriber in 50 will have a Wi-Fi enabled phone by 2010.â¦
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An analyst rants Opinion Let me begin with a warning that am about to get on one of my hobby horses. This one has to do with the notion that modern wireless and mobile technology is largely about enabling people to become more mobile in the way they live and work, as if they were previously chained to one location and magically liberated by the latest gadgetry and connectivity. The notion seems to be that having access to email and other applications while mobile means that people are getting out and about more.â¦
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What might your mobile future look like? Sitting at the airport, you pull out a laptop or personal digital assistant and watch TV, delivered through Wi-Fi. Perhaps you'll grab an MP3 player instead, but rather than listen to downloaded tunes, you check out Internet radio. Or maybe you'll just make a call but thanks to the headset into which you are speaking, the person at the other end can make out your voice and not the blur of jet engines taking off at the same time.Each scenario is already possible, as evidenced last week in La Jolla, Calif., during the sixth annual DemoMobile conference. The gathering is a showcase for promising wireless technologies targeted at people on the go. Three dozen companies participated, many start-ups, representing more than &#36;142 million in cumulative venture funding.Consider the scope: Luxembourg's Skype Technologies demonstrated free software that lets consumers make voice calls over a Wi-Fi-capable Pocket PC.Handmark of Kansas City, Mo., showed off Pocket Express, a wireless information service for smart phones. If a phone has "location-based" capabilities, Handmark can provide listings of nearby restaurants or theaters, and map the fastest route to that spot.Xora in Mountain View, Calif., lets companies track the whereabouts of mobile employees via its GPS TimeTrack offering. And EverNote in Sunnyvale, Calif., has software that lets someone organize notes on a PC, then synchronize them with portable devices.OurPictures unveiled the OurPictures Mobile service. With a single click, consumers can send photos taken with a camera phone to designated PCs, TVs, printers or a local photo processor. And games publisher Sorrent showed off a new way to punch in your vote: its Bush vs. Kerry Boxing cell phone game. The results of every Bush/Kerry rumble on every portable phone are scored on a pugilist poll posted at Sorrent's site; as of Wednesday, Kerry was out-pointing Bush by about 2,350 votes. Other would-be knockouts:&#8226;Couch computing. The &#36;800, 2.3-pound wireless Pepper Pad 2 from Pepper Computer in Lexington, Mass., lets you browse the Web, do e-mail, play videos and games and more. Due in January, it has an 8.4-inch display, Bluetooth, an SD card slot and 20 GB hard drive. It also has a directional game pad and small lighted qwerty keypad that is split so that half flanks the left side of the screen and half, the right.&#8226;Making a motion. Synaptics is behind the track-wheel on Apple's iPods and the touchpads on several notebook PCs. The new MobileTouch platform is Synaptics' foray into cell phones. You'll be able to scribble on the screen or scroll by using your fingers to lightly make small gestures across a keypad (or other interface), just as you do with a touchpad. I was wowed even more by technology out of Oulu, Finland, where F-Origin originated a "motion control solution" called Iris. Consumers using a phone or computer with F-Origin's software will be able to control the orientation of the screen by merely tilting and moving the device. What you see on the display corresponds to the angle in which you rotate the gizmo. F-Origin takes advantage of gravity sensors.&#8226;That's (mobile) entertainment. ViewSonic's new Wireless Media Gateway and Wireless Media Adapter (&#36;799 packaged together, and coming later in the year) represent the company's move into wireless networking. The product line is designed to deliver digital videos, music and pictures to any monitor or TV in the house, at better-than-DVD quality. The company says it can stream video to a single TV at up to 10 megabits per second or two different streams at 5 megabits. You can also print from the gateway devices and take advantage of 80 or 120 GB storage capacities.Watching TV on a handheld is the idea behind WiFi-TV from OnAir Entertainment in Sunnyvale, Calif. OnAir is working with hot-spot providers to deliver TV or video-on-demand at public places. Consumers can access an interactive programming guide and pause live TV. OnAir is conducting a free trial at the Austin airport, though the company expects people to eventually pay about &#36;5 for a day pass.Meanwhile, another Silicon Valley start-up, AudioFeast, is focusing on Internet radio for portable music players. Its virtual broadcasting network delivers refreshed content from A &amp; E, BBC Radio, NPR and Sporting News Radio, among others. You download software onto your computer, then choose the channels you want to sync with a compatible MP3 player. A one-year AudioFeast subscription costs &#36;50. Contact my phone. Is there anything more tedious than entering hundreds of phone numbers into a phone? Palo Alto, Calif.-based Vazu has come up with a suite of services that lets you automatically transmit selected contacts, as well as such Web data as driving directions or movie schedules, to a phone. Vazu's Internet Explorer plug-in places a small "V" icon next to a phone number on a Web page. When you click on the icon, the contact name and number are sent to your phone. What's more, users of Outlook, Outlook Express, Apple Mail and Linux Evolution can dispatch contacts via Vazu to their phone's address book. Lose a phone? Vazu can serve as a backup to your data. &#8226;Now hear this. Logitech, Plantronics and Aliph submitted headsets for a Sound Off challenge voted on by conference attendees. The winner was Aliph's Jawbone, based on military-grade technology. To prove that this funky-looking &#36;150 "adaptive" headset can suppress background noises while keeping a caller's voice audible, Aliph conducted a crowd-pleasing experiment. First a caller had a noisy blender behind him. When Jawbone's technology was applied, the person could be heard clearly, not the blender. Aliph successfully repeated the exercise with a boombox. The coup de gr&#226;ce: The caller could be heard over a weed whacker. It is made possible by a sensor that feels vibrations on your cheek. Jawbone works with phones from Motorola, Nokia and Sony Ericsson.&#8226;Mobile marketing. Intrigued by the Armani, Gap or Toyota ads in the September issue of Jane? Snap a picture and e-mail images to the magazine. You'll get back text messages with tailored promotional offers. It's part of a promotion based on technology from conference demonstrator Mobot.The Waltham, Mass., company was but one demonstrator to give a hint where mobile marketing is heading. MediaTile of Scotts Valley, Calif., delivers point-of-sale digital signs. Digimarc in Tualatin, Ore., places invisible digital watermarks into banner ads. When a consumer takes a picture of, say, a movie ad, they might see a trailer on the phone or directions to the nearest theater. Another demonstrator, DRM Labs of Dallas, uses text messages to send digital coupons called Voupons. For these schemes to pan out, consumers must "opt-in; privacy must be respected."This is just the tip of the iceberg for many of the companies exhibiting at DemoMobile. Indeed, I expect to explore some of these technologies in future coverage. After all, what could be more mobile than the pace of change?E-mail ebaig@usatoday.com
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Tired of listening to travelers yakking on their cell phones in the airport lounge? You may have to put up it with in the cabin too, as regulators consider scrapping rules that ban use of most wireless devices in flight. By Joanna Glasner.
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Dry heaving Twitterites For several days, many Twitter users in the US were unable to digitally vomit with their T-Mobile phones.â¦
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If a handheld device doesn&#39;t have voice capabilities, a growing number of users around the world aren&#39;t interested, according to IDC.
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Handsets better for cooking than talking
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NEW YORK - About one-third of Internet users in the U.S. have used a wireless connection to surf the Web or check e-mail, according to a survey released Sunday.
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BARCELONA, Spain, Feb. 12  /PRNewswire/ -- From trend-setting twenty- somethings to jet-setting road warriors, there is a Wi-Fi(R) phone for everyone.
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Years from now, your children will laugh about how you had to "stay in range" of a Wi-Fi signal to stay connected to the Internet when you were young. From Crave, CNet's new gadgets blog.
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AT&amp;T&#39;s wireless data networks in the Southeast and Midwest U.S. are down, causing BlackBerry and iPhone users to be without data services.The EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution) and UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) services in those regions began having problems around 6:30 a.m. EST this morning, said Mark Siegel, an AT&amp;T spokesman. Voice calling has not been affected, but people trying to use wireless data services might have &quot;difficulty,&quot; he said.Several users of a BlackBerry newsgroup have reported being unable to receive data to their handsets. A systems administrator in Kansas reports that BlackBerry devices there are displaying a message that says &quot;data connection refused.&quot;AT&amp;T is still looking into what exactly caused the failure, but technicians have found a solution to the problem and expect the service to be restored by around 3:30 p.m. EST, Siegel said.The iPhone runs on the EDGE network, so users of the phones, as well as any other mobile device that receives data from either of the networks, will have problems using data services.In early 2007, Research In Motion implemented a software upgrade that caused its systems to crash, resulting in a BlackBerry service outage that started in the evening and lasted through the night. This time, the problem appears to be with AT&amp;T&#39;s network and not with RIM&#39;s infrastructure.
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Cellphone services are gearing up for a fight with handset makers -- and it's all about Wi-Fi
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A study by the American Hotel &amp; Lodging Association says half of US hotel rooms now offer broadband Internet access. By Eric Chabrow.
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The fat phone book, a fixture of the urban American household in the last century, is losing some of its girth as more people give up their land lines for cellphones.
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No one every said Wi-Fi was perfect. It suffers from difficult setup, questionable security, interferences from appliances, and doesn&#39;t always stretch its signal as far as advertised.
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Prague OK too, with modifications The EU has ruled that Wi-Fi deployments in Wales and Prague do not constitute state aid, as neither will compete with commercial hotspot deployments.â¦
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AT&T's wireless data networks in the Southeast and Midwest U.S. were down today.