Mobile Phones
This is where you will find all the pages tagged Mobile Phones.
Why your next camera phone will know its place
I think one of the most exciting and useful cell phone features of the near future is the automatic geotagging of photos on camera phones. People won't fully understand how powerful, useful and fun automatically geotagged photos will be until they start taking them.
You can't hide; 'geotagging' will find you
Polyphonic business is dead
"The polyphonic business, which used to be thriving, is pretty much dead," says Scott Jensen, vice president of global business development at Zingy. "It's now master ringtones and full-song downloads."This change in format was a disaster for ringtone companies. In the polyphonic age, they licensed the music and created the ringtones, and sold them on wireless operators' networks and phones in return for a cut of the sale.
But with master ringtones, carriers wanted it all. Operators began striking licensing deals and revenue splits directly with record labels, and sold the new ringtones on their own.
"Everybody just got blindsided," says Bryan Biniak, former chief operating offer of YourMobile. "We just got pushed to the side."
Ringtone pioneers branch out to survive - Yahoo! News
Truly mobile computing
Why, then, can I not plug in a little keyboard and screen into it (a phone) and use it as a computer when I'm on the move? Word-processing and e-mail can't possibly require more power than a typical modern mobile phone can provide.Today's computers are wildly over-powered by any measurable standard. Two and three gigahertz PC? Come on. Unless you're messing around with enormous media files, there is no reason for such a machine.
Digit - Blogs - Design of the Nation - Truly mobile computing
Web Browsing on Mobile Phones - Characteristics of User Experience
Browsing the Web with a small mobile phone may sound absurd at first. The increasing importance of the Internet means, however, that a person should be able to access Web services even when not sitting in front of a computer. Since there are approximately three times more mobile phones than computers in the world, a mobile phone may provide the only way to access the Web for many people.Technically, it has been possible to access the Internet on a mobile phone for several years already, but the mobile browsing experience has often been cumbersome for ordinary people. Understanding the user needs in different use contexts is the key to improving the user experience and thereby popularizing device independent access to Internet.
In her dissertation research, Virpi Roto has interviewed users of mobile browsers in several countries, and identified characteristics that help improve the mobile browsing user experience if taken into consideration. In addition to user and use context, all the system components should be taken into account: device, browser, network infrastructure, and web site. A partial outcome of the research is a visualization method called Minimap, which has gathered publicity as the first practical way to view Web pages on a mobile phone. The method has been used in Nokia S60 phones since 2006.
NRC - Web Browsing on Mobile Phones - Characteristics of User Experience
LG signs up Prada to design a new mobilephone
LG is not to be left out of the couture-designer tie-in, and has announced a partnership with Prada in the development of a new mobile phone model.The companies are taking a slightly different approach to, for example, Motorola and Dolce and Gabbana, who merely released a different-coloured and rebranded model of the Motorazr.
Prada and LG have apparently “jointly explored and developed all aspects of this new phone”, and not just the exterior at that.
LG signs up Prada to design a new mobile - Pocket-lint.co.uk
Mobile calls allowed on half of all airlines by 2008
Almost half of all airlines plan to offer in-flight mobile phone connectivity for passengers by the end of 2008. The figures in the annual Airline IT Trends survey show an appetite for a range of in-flight passenger communications, with 59 per cent of airlines also planning to offer internet and email access by the end of 2008. The in-flight use of mobile phones by passengers on short-haul airlines in Europe is expected to be approved by telecoms regulators by the end of this year and UK airline BMI has already signed up for trials of a satellite-based technology for in-flight mobile calls next year, along with Air France, Portugal's TAP and Ryanair. Airbus is already planning to replace the out-dated illuminated 'no smoking' signs above passenger seats with 'no mobiles' to prevent their use during take-off and landing.
Mobile calls allowed on half of all airlines by 2008 - silicon.com
History of mobile phones
Mobile rigs were the beginning of mobile phones, along with taxicab radios, two way radios in police cruisers, and the like. A large community of mobile radio users, known as the mobileers, popularized the technology that would eventually give way to the mobile phone. Originally, mobile phones were permanently installed in vehicles, but later versions such as the so-called "bag phones" were equipped with a cigarette lighter plug so that they could also be carried, and thus could be used as either mobile or as portable phones.
What was possibly the first real mobile phone, in the sense that it was connected to the telephone network, was tested by the Swedish police in 1946 for use in police cruisers. A half dozen calls could be made before the police car's battery ran out. Radiophones began to be publicly available in the US at the end of the 1940s, though the distinction between such phones and a two-way radio becomes blurry since special systems are required to "patch" into the phone network with the assistance of human operators.
In December 1947, D. H. Ring, a Bell Labs engineer, proposed hexagonal cells for mobile phones. Phil Porter, also of Bell Labs, proposed that the cell towers be at the corners of the hexagons rather than the centers and have directional antennas that would transmit/receive in 3 directions (see picture at left).
Recognizable mobile phones with direct dialing have existed at least since the 1950s. In the 1954 movie Sabrina, the businessman Linus Larrabee (played by Humphrey Bogart) makes a call from the phone in the back of his limousine.
The first fully automatic mobile phone system, called MTA (Mobile Telephone system A), was developed by Ericsson and commercially released in Sweden in 1956. This was the first system that didn't require any kind of manual control, but had the disadvantage of a phone weight of 40 kg. MTB, an upgraded version with transistors (weighing "only" 9 kg), was introduced in 1965 and used dual-tone multifrequency signaling. It had 150 customers in the beginning and 600 when it shut down in 1983.
For a discussion of the history of the Mobile Radio Service (MRS), and Improved Mobile Radio Service (IMRS) prior to the cellular mobile telephone AMPS in the US. Because of the long waiting time to be issued an MRS or IMRS radio telephone in the 1960's and 1970's, "autopatch" telephone conversations became popular among amateur radio operators with the advent of FM repeaters. Because of Federal Communications Commission rules concerning the Amateur Radio Service, business conversations were prohibited from such calls.
One of the first truly successful public commercial mobile phone networks was the ARP network in Finland, launched in 1971. Posthumously, ARP is sometimes viewed as a zeroth generation (0G) cellular network, being slightly above previous proprietary and limited coverage networks.
Dr. Martin Cooper of Motorola, with the DynaTAC 8000X, first unveiled in 1983. Dr. Cooper made the first analogue mobile phone call on a larger prototype model in 1973.
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Dr. Martin Cooper of Motorola, with the DynaTAC 8000X, first unveiled in 1983. Dr. Cooper made the first analogue mobile phone call on a larger prototype model in 1973.
On April 3, 1973, Motorola employee Dr. Martin Cooper placed a call to rival Joel Engel, head of research at AT&T's Bell Labs, while walking the streets of New York City talking on the first Motorola DynaTAC prototype. Motorola has a long history of making automotive radio, especially two-way radios for taxicabs and police cruisers.
In 1978 Bell Labs launched a trial of first commercial cellular network in Chicago using AMPS.
History of mobile phones - Wikipedia
Top 10 mobile phone design classics
The good, the bad and the ugly...?
A photo series showing the best and worst of mobile phone design since 1984.
Photos: Top 10 mobile design classics - PDAs - Breaking Business and Technology News at silicon.com
Mobile phones great for killing time
However, on close inspection (i.e peeking) at what some people do with their phones, the fiddling is a kind of mindless playing around – poking, changing, reverting back, going up and down menus, swapping settings back and forth, and so on – plain fiddling about. We like to tell kids not to fiddle with things – the remote control, the car controls, the radio, the computer. We often then go and do it ourselves…I wonder, have we fully embraced this fiddling-thingy within mobile design, or are we treating it as an exception?
Wireless Wonders: Mobile fiddling
Mobile e-mail heading for the masses
ccessing e-mail from a cell phone is no longer just for corporate bigwigs. New services are arriving that make it easier and more affordable for everyone, from soccer moms to college students, to check and send messages from regular mobile handsets.Experts say that two things have limited the adoption of mobile e-mail: ease of use, and price. Most consumers don't even realize they can access e-mail on their phones. Anyone with a WAP browser on their phone, which is pretty much anyone who has bought a new phone in the past two years, could access personal e-mail from a WAP-enabled site such as Google, Yahoo or Hotmail. But accessing e-mail this way is cumbersome and requires users to type a mobile address and click through several menus to access the e-mail service.
Mobile e-mail heading for the masses | CNET News.com
Windows Live Messenger comes to Taiwanese cellphones
Far Eastone Telecommunications has begun offering MSN/Windows Live Messenger to users of i-mode mobile phones, one of just a handful of companies offering the service globally.The launch of the service also makes Far Eastone the first company in Taiwan to offer MSN/Windows Live Messenger, the Taiwanese company said Wednesday. Users will be able to send instant messages over their mobile phones via the service.
