photo credit: cwgoodroe

One of the final hurdles preventing Europeans from talking on their cell phones while flying through European airspace has been cleared.

I can’t say that I am thrilled by the prospect of getting on a plane and having to listen to the other passengers talking loudly on their phones but the following questions immediately to mind (call them practical difficulties if you will) :

1) What telephone network will you be using if you’re up in the sky? Will you be bounced from network to network as the plane flies at top speed across Europe? If so, what does that do to the quality of the call? Will you be able to hear the other person over the noise of the plane engines?

2) More importantly, what does that do to the COST of the call? Would the call be considered a national call? An international call? If you suddenly get bounced to another mobile phone network, do you get surcharged? If the plane crosses a border, what then? Will you get a huge bill for calling your mum?

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Technorati Tags: aviation, cellphone, mobile, planes, technology

photo credit: incurable_hippie

I do a lot of texting on my mobile phone, either to my girlfriend, to my family back in Britain and even to clients. I also do a lot of Twittering when I am out and about. This can lead to a lot of SMS’s being stored up in my phone and some phones impose a limit on how many messages can be stored before you have to start deleting. In this situation, a good solution might be TreasureMyText.

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Technorati Tags: cellphone, mobile, online, phone, SMS, social, storage, text

Here are 10 phone numbers that could save your life in an emergency - but they are all American numbers though. So anyone outside the US will have to use the old-fashioned method and phone the operator! Or find a phone book.

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Technorati Tags: lists, mobile, numbers, telephone

A post I wrote for Make Use Of- Get notified by SMS when you get Pidgin IM messages.

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Technorati Tags: IM, mobile, pidgin, SMS

After a long and rocky start, I am happy to announce that Twitter and I are now going steady.

It wasn’t always destined to be this way. When I first heard of Twitter, my immediate reaction was “Oh God how horrific!”. Horrific both in the terms of privacy implications (Big Brother encouraging you to monitor your every move) and also “Man, has the internet sunk to a new low?”. I was prompted to think this by reading Twitter profiles which read “just got out of bed” or “man I have an itchy ass today!”. Reading comments like that made me wonder the value of Twitter and if there was anything truly to be gained by it. I mean,who gives a flying monkey if you’re sitting there contemplating whether to eat Weetabix or Crunchy Flakes? I don’t care and you don’t have to broadcast it online like it’s CNN Breaking News! As Bill Maher once pointed out, we have turned into a bunch of manical attention-seekers - we threw privacy out of the window years ago.

So I dismissed Twitter as just JAAW (Just Another Annoying Website) and moved onto a website with videos of dancing cats instead.

How wrong I was to dismiss them.

Instead of reading over the coming months about how Twitter crashed and burned, I instead read posts about how great Twitter was. I read how it was gaining strength and attracting new followers every day. My will wavered a bit and I thought about trying again but I decided not to. I was still convinced that Twitter was on a short life-span.

So what finally turned it around for me?

A combination of things. I guess it was mostly that I was finally starting to admit there might be something to this Twitter thing after all. I was starting to see that people were using Twitter for a variety of uses and not all of them were discussing their naval lint. Bloggers were using Twitter to publicise blog posts, others were using Twitter as “flash blogs” where they made thoughts that didn’t warrant its own full blog post. Some others were posting links to news stories. Fans were building Twitter apps by the dozen. You could even do “Ego Tweets” by searching for yourself or specific subjects on Twitter posts.

But what finally started to fascinate me was Twitter’s integration with instant messaging programs and mobile phones. With the IM programs, Twitter was re-defining the role of an IM program. Pre-Twitter, IM programs were for teenagers discussing who snogged who, old ladies exchanging cookie recipes and older men hitting on younger girls for tittie pictures. But Twitter came along and showed that you can use IM for other things, more productive things, such as getting relevant information pushed to your desktop. You can have the news headlines passed to you as a basic example. Steve Rubel touched on this in one of his blog posts in which he utilises both Twitter and Google Talk to have information flooding into his Gmail inbox.

And then the mobile phone. I have always been hesitant about combining a mobile phone with the internet because huge bills inevitably follow. When you mix the net with a phone, it’s like flushing big wads of cash down the toilet. It has always been a big mystery to me why mobile phone companies here in Germany do not drastically lower the charges to get online. Instead I am paying the equivalent of $2-$3 a minute if I want to get online with my mobile phone! Why the hell the phone companies can’t figure out “OK, if we lower the cost of getting online, we’ll get more customers who will surf the net more with our phones which means more cash for us”. I didn’t go to business school but even I can see that it makes sound business sense that if you lower the cost of something, more customers will come as a result. But everyone here seems to have graduated from the Kamikaze School of Business and Economics.

So when Twitter rolled out mobile integration at the cost of a SMS message to the United Kingdom, I was sold. Before, I would sit at social events and be bored witless. I would be building towers out of wineglasses and mentally undressing the waitresses. Now I just Twitter! I now sit there with my mobile phone under the table and I Twit about anything going through my mind at that given moment (internet / tech related). I can use the mobile SMS to switch my Twitter notifications on and off, send direct private messages to contacts (and have them directly contact me back). The only downside is that my hands are now extremely active under the table keying the next SMS and my girlfriend’s 80 year old grandfather naturally assumes that I am up to something disgusting down there that will get me prosecuted under the state’s obscenity laws. But it’s easier to let him think that than explain what Twitter is! He’s still in shock over the demise of the typewriter and we’ve only just got him understanding the concept of a mobile phone.

However, there are some really stupid Twitter apps. The one that truly took the biscuit today was My Tiny Jesus in which a small Jesus figure spouts random Twitter posts at you. Which really goes to reinforce the point that some people really do have too much time on their hands.

Here are three of the better Twitter apps that I have recently found on my travels :

• Get help with crosswords and scrabble with Wordbot.
• Add events to your Google Calendar using TwitterCal.
• Read the first lines of books twice a day with TwitterLit.

I am using my Twitter profile at the moment to mainly post interesting news stories that I come across while I am online. These links appear in the sidebar of my blog and I am looking at other ways to push the content. I will also be promoting blog posts with Twitter as well as Twitting on my mobile when I am out and about.

But don’t worry - when my ass itches, I won’t inform you on Twitter.

Technorati Tags: IM, mobile, phone, rubel, SMS, Twitter

Skype has finally given out an official announcement about the Skype phone. It will be in UK stores on Friday on the 3 network.

No word yet on a German release date!     GGRRRRR!!!!

The design is quite nice (I also saw a picture of a black model) and according to Skype, the phone “lets you make free Skype-to-Skype calls and send free Skype instant messages from anywhere. Not just from the desktop, not just from the office. From anywhere.

And it works the other way, too. That is, if your friend in the US runs Skype on her desktop and calls you over Skype, your Skypephone will ring. And the call won’t cost either of you a penny.”

To quote Cartman : “SWEET!”

See also the posts by Skype Journal :  Here and Here.

Technorati Tags: , 3, phone, Skype, skype phone

Just when I thought that I had my next mobile phone choice all locked down (the Google phone), along comes news of the upcoming Skype phone which has got me in the unique position of considering having two mobile phones at once.

I use Skype every day and I have accumulated a lot of Skype contacts. I also spend an absurd amount of Skype credit every month on personal and business phone calls. So on one hand, getting a Skype phone would be good, financially speaking, because then I can pay the small monthly charge to the phone company and then the Skype calls will be free (provided the other person has a Skype ID).

But on the other hand, the Google phone has its attractions too - connection to the net which means IMAP access to Gmail, and access to other Google services such as Docs and Calendar. Oh and it can make phone calls too.

But I will have some extra time to think about it as the anticipated release of the Skype phone at the end of this month is only expected in the UK, Italy, Hong Kong, and Australia. No word yet on a German release date.

I suppose the delay will be good in monitoring user reviews of the Skype phone to see if it is a magnificent wonder worth having or a huge metal turkey that should be avoided at all costs. I mean, look at all the complaints from iPhone users. Sometimes it’s good to hold back a bit and wait until all the dust and hype settles.

There’s even speculation that a successful Skype phone will do wonders for the fortunes of Skype’s owners, eBay. If the Skype phone is a huge success, that could pave the way for eBay to start promoting the idea of paying for eBay items through the phone, using a mobile version of Paypal.

Plus a successful Skype phone has the potential to cause a major earthquake through the mobile phone industry worldwide. Why should I pay the equivalent of 20 cents a minute using an ordinary mobile phone when I can ask my contact to set up a Skype ID and I can call them for free? Or if I have to pay normal Skype rates to call a non-Skype user, the rates involved are a fraction of the normal cost of a mobile phone call. So the mobile phone industry is going to have to slash their prices in order to stay competitive - which will be wonderful for everyone.

But what is really curious is the lack of advertising for both the Skype phone and the Google phone. As my girlfriend pointed out last night, in the runup to the launch of the iPhone, we had saturated television advertising announcing the iPhone. But for a Skype phone that is supposedly due out in a few days, Skype has been strangely quiet about trumpeting the great news. And has Google said anything or advertised anything about their phone?

Or are both Skype and Google both hoping that word-of-mouth will be enough?

Technorati Tags: cellphone, eBay, Google, IMAP, mobile, paypal, phone, Skype