Dumped by Text Message -- Just a Sign of Digital Times?
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Kevin Federline has company; 15% of those surveyed say texting is the latest way to leave your lover.
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Young people are more likely to vote when they receive a text-message reminder, according to new research.
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Blog: A reflection on a firey response to my 4th of July posting about the dangers of defaulting one's way through the iPhone activation process.
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Dan Farber: "It's not hard to imagine a contextual ad showing up every time you Twitter something. Twitter 'I am drinking beer with friends' and a Budweiser ad shows up. Now imagine the Twitter revolt." Oh yes there would be quite a revolt, a powerless one, unless there was an alternate service we could all switch to and then assuming we could get off our asses and actually switch. Yeah, we're good at screaming, but not too great at acting, here. I'm a bit of a Twit, myself, and I'd find it revolt-worthy if they tried to interrupt or punctuate discourse with product placements, but then Twitter's destiny is, imho, to be acquired by a phone company and sold as a feature that gives users a reason to use one brand of phone over another. Not as a way for advertisers to hitch their "messages" on our discourse. We've seen how well that has (not) worked with advertising on email. Not likely to work much better on Twits. Imagine if Nokia offered a cell phone with Twitter built-in, a checkbox for SMS users (default on?) -- "Do you want to send SMS messages to your buddy list?"  Don't you think the kids would go for that? (Maybe they can already do it, it's likely that I'm that cluelss.)
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CAIRO -- The Cairo woman stared in disbelief at the text message in her cellphone inbox.
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The word "smartphones" is misleading, inexact, confusing and obsolete. The general public doesn't know what "smartphone" means, the experts disagree and vendors can't use it. It's time to drop it.
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Phone fury (and carrier cringes) Letters After my piece lamenting how Nokia's high end phones had lost their ease of use and reliability, we got a letter from reader Brendon McLean. "It's not just Nokia!", wrote Brendon - "but an industry-wide problem". And he encapsulated his complaints very succinctly. So we invited him to expand a little, which he did here yesterday.â¦
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OSLO, Norway - With young Norwegians more likely to send a mobile phone text message than a post card, the postal service Tuesday revealed text message theme stamps in a bid to draw them back to letter writing.    A new 6-kroner ($0.88) stamp features the smiley face, :-), that mobile phone users often send with their text messages to friends...
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The second lengthy&#160;BlackBerry outage&#160;in less than a year has one consulting company advising clients not to rely solely on the popular smart phones for critical e-mail messages.Enterprises that really need e-mail responses in less than eight hours to run their businesses should have a backup for the BlackBerry, Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney said Tuesday, in the wake of a crash that lasted about three hours on Monday. They should also set up an independent system to notify them whether an important contact has received or replied to an e-mail message, Dulaney said.Late Tuesday, RIM said the outage was caused by a problem with an internal data routing system in the BlackBerry service infrastructure that had recently been upgraded. That upgrade was part of an ongoing expansion of the network, and this type of change had been done previously with no problems, it said.Monday&#39;s failure followed&#160;a longer outage in April 2007&#160;that RIM attributed to a problem with a minor software upgrade and a subsequent glitch in a failover process.There are about 12 million BlackBerry users worldwide, on a variety of mobile carriers. The crash Monday affected users throughout the U.S. and Canada, preventing them from sending or receiving e-mail or carrying out some other functions, though&#160;no messages were permanently lost, according to RIM.Gartner&#39;s Dulaney had harsh words for RIM, saying he had given the company a break after last year&#39;s failure.&quot;This does not appear to be a mission-critical system with the highest service-level agreements, and therefore, to entrust ... that a message will get to the end point is being a bit foolhardy,&quot; Dulaney said. He advises enterprises that are worried about dependability to ask RIM for details of its backup system and make their own decisions.After last year&#39;s outage, RIM said it would enhance aspects of its testing, monitoring and recovery processes.&quot;RIM has made significant investments to improve its system recovery infrastructure and processes over the last year, which enabled service levels to return to normal quickly,&quot; the company said Tuesday.&quot;They obviously didn&#39;t do as deep a dive as they needed to on disaster recovery issues,&quot; Dulaney said. But he acknowledged the failure could have been caused by something completely unexpected.The BlackBerry, which RIM introduced in 1999, quickly became the most popular tool for mobile &quot;push&quot; e-mail that automatically comes to a portable device with a wireless network connection. All current BlackBerry models are also phones, and the company now offers a wide variety of handsets with consumer-oriented features such as cameras, Web browsers and social-networking capabilities. But to get to and from the handhelds, e-mail messages traverse a complex system involving mobile operator networks, RIM&#39;s network operation centers and BlackBerry Enterprise Servers within companies.Adding consumer features and keeping up with rapid customer growth, such as adding 1.65 million users in the quarter ended last Dec. 1, have probably made it harder for RIM to keep its network running smoothly, said Albert Lin, an analyst at investment bank Sooner Cap. But users accept some level of risk if they want such complex services at reasonable prices, he said. The only truly reliable system is the public switched telephone network, and it has limited functionality, Lin said.&quot;When it comes to reliable push e-mail ... it&#39;s still hard to find a solution that works better than BlackBerry,&quot; Lin said.Gartner&#39;s Dulaney acknowledged that competitors, such as Visto and Good Technology (now owned by Motorola), are probably not significantly more dependable.It wouldn&#39;t be impossible to make the RIM network more reliable, the analysts said.&quot;They have the technical capability to spend more and make it more reliable, but is that what their owners and shareholders really want?&quot; Lin said.Google, for example, has a more highly distributed network, but that would take money and time, and many customers wouldn&#39;t want to pay for it, Dulaney said. In the future, RIM may choose to create a higher-end service with greater service assurances and a higher price, he said.
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U R dumped -- one in seven say they have suffered the same fate as Britney Spears' ex-husband and been told it's all over via text message or email, a survey said on Friday.
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By MAY WONG  Instant messages. Text messages. E-mail. Voicemail. Blogs. Online social networks. And the good ol' cell phone. If you thought there were enough ways to communicate with others and express yourself, think again.
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Hamilton, Ontario -- Fun technology coupled with economical pricing fuel young adults' burgeoning use of text messaging, according to new research conducted by the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University.Worldwide users send over 1 trillion text messages each year.
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Research In Motion acknowledged&#160;an outage&#160;left users in the Americas without access to their BlackBerry e-mail service on Monday, but said no messages were lost during the incident.The outage started at around 3:30 p.m. Eastern time and lasted for about three hours, causing &quot;intermittent delays&quot; for data services, RIM said in an e-mail statement released hours after normal BlackBerry service had been restored.&quot;No messages were lost and message queues began to be cleared after normal service levels were restored,&quot; RIM said, adding that voice and SMS services operated normally during the outage.RIM offered an apology to users affected by the outage, but did not offer an explanation of what happened. The company only said it &quot;continues to focus on providing industry-leading reliability in its products and services.&quot;Monday&#39;s outage echoed a similar disruption that took place on April 17-18, 2007. RIM blamed the earlier service disruption on the introduction of a new software routine meant to optimize system cache memory. The problems caused by the introduction of the new routine were exacerbated by the poor performance of back-up systems, RIM said at the time.After&#160;the April 2007 outage, RIM promised that aspects of its testing, monitoring, and recovery systems would be enhanced to prevent a recurrence of the incident.&#160;
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Having trouble staying in touch? Try the old phone trick: 'Did you get the check I sent?'
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More heated debate Well, we're back! Thanks to those who registered and responded to last week's debate and workshop on mobile email. You can see a round up of this here, but meanwhile, we want to pick up on the question of mobile security and the need for device management.â¦
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Second outage in a year BlackBerry users got some time yesterday to smell the flowers and talk to their families and friends - the company's email servers went down just after 3pm Eastern Standard Time.â¦
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Malicious programs that can delete address books. Junk messages that flood a cell phone&#39;s inbox. Stealthy code that uses Bluetooth wireless technology to sneak onto handsets.