Category: Mobile Phones

The Blackberry Playbook is finally being released in the United States on the 19th of April after many months of increasingly tiresome speculation. The Playbook will be the first such tablet device from Research In Motion. The Playbook should, considering some of its specifications, be a reasonable enough contender in the marketplace, yet Research In Motion have taken what appears to be a worryingly slapdash approach to some of its features – namely, native applications.

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse and senior vice president of government affairs Vonya McCann are not impressed by the proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile and are saying that the company intends to fight in the courts to prevent it from actually happening, but does he have a leg to stand on? Hesse reckons the merger will hurt consumers by reducing competition and certainly, Sprint makes some good points in their official statement on the matter.

Apple’s new and much anticipated iPhone 5 may not be being released until fall, according to speculation. Take it with a pinch of salt if you will, but it seems the rumour mongers have been in overdrive thanks to the fact that Apple’s iPad 2 event, which was held earlier this month, featured not so much as a mention of the iOS 5. Rumours then circulated that a preview of the heavily hyped device would finally be given sometime in April, but the people at TechCrunch are now claiming that the first look at that device will now not be given until the summer, probably in June. If that turns out to be the case, then it would seem the actual release date for the item would not be until the fall.

A bill, which is currently being drafted by Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, will, if accepted, apply local privacy protection to a person’s geo-location information.

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.