Category: Mobile Phones

The citizens of Monterey Park in the northeast of Calgary in Canada are engaged in a fight to stop a cell phone tower being built in their community – for the second time. Homeowners in the neighborhood are outraged by plans by Shaw Communications to erect a twenty five meter high cell phone tower in the parking lot of a local church.

I guess some Chinese citizens just cannot wait. The iPad 2, which has just been launched here in the USA, is already being sold on the Hong Kong grey market at double the price.

According to Zokem, a mobile analytics company, people who use Android and iOS (iPhone) spent as much time using their applications as they do sending text messages. The average user uses 15 apps per month; with 95% of Android/iPhone owners visiting their respective apps stores to download an average of 2.5 apps per month.

I have been reading about a project being undertaken in Japan. Takashi Minato, who works for the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International and a team of consultants from NTT DoCoMo (mobile phone company), the Osaka University, and a few other unnamed companies, have created a prototype of a new cell phone that is shaped like a person and feels like one too.

To people who throw away their old cell phones when they get a new one, that cell phone is just junk. But, to others, they’ve just thrown away a valuable commodity.

Plans to erect a Celus cell phone tower on Hammond Bay Road in Nanaimo in Canada have been nixed by the Directors of the Regional District following a public outcry. The forty-three meter tower was supposed to be put up near the Greater Nanaimo Pollution Control Centre, with the cell phone company offering twenty-four thousand dollars to be allowed to do so. The local community, however, was unimpressed, particularly given that the tower’s proposed location was situated so close to the local Hammond Bay Elementary School.

In the wake of the buzz around the new Google tablets featuring Android 3.0 OS, Apple has spoken up and said that it too has something new to show – the iPad 2 (or, as it has been officially nicknamed, the iPad Too!).

Two men have been arrested over the murder of nineteen year old Jonathan Clements, who advertised on craigslist wanting to buy an old cellular phone. Twenty three year old Alexander D Lyons was arrested and arraigned on Friday evening for the crime and was jailed without bond, only for a second man, nineteen year old Lamar DeAngelo Clemons, to be also be arrested and arraigned on Saturday morning, who was held in lieu of a two million bond. Police say that the murder was part of a planned robbery, with neither of having any intention of ever selling Clements a phone.

This week saw the Mobile World Congress 2011 taking place in Barcelona. Bigger than ever before, there were over 200 countries and 1,400 mobile industry-related companies represented, including Twitter, AT&T, Google, Intel, Qualcomm, and Yahoo!

Users of wireless cell phones in the United States of America are being hit with record taxes which account for almost twenty percent of their actual cell phone bill. PCMag.com says that those living in Nebraska, New York and Washington are being particularly slugged in fees and taxes. A report published in the magazine entitled “A Growing Burden: Taxes and Fees On Wireless Services”, was compiled over a period of no less than five years by tax experts from KSE Partners, who spent that time monitoring the local, state and federal taxes being imposed on wireless cell phones customers. In the three year period between 2007 and 2010, those taxes and fees jumped upward by more than three times that of the retails sales rate.