Smartphone Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

"Last week, I offered advice for existing wireless customers on getting the best price for a new smart phone. One option I didn't mention is switching service providers, and that's what I ended up doing. I switched from Cingular to Sprint when I wanted to upgrade to a Palm Treo 650 but not pay the full price. I'll explore that option this week. Why did I make the switch? I had a couple reasons...So I paid $300 for a Treo 650 from Sprint. Given that I was still under contract with Cingular, however, that carrier hit me with a $150 early termination fee. Thus, I paid a total of $450 for the Treo 650, which is $75 more than what I'd pay if I'd stayed with Cingular."

The author goes on to say that by switching to Sprint and the $10 a month plan for web/email, he'll save in the long run. Have any of you switched wireless carriers to save money? Or do the devices available on a certain network lure you away? In this case the Treo was available on all the networks, but with Windows Mobile devices that's often not the case - if you want the Treo 700w, you're going with Verizon.

"Budding Canadian film makers looking for a big break may want to think small -- about 2 inches by 2 inches to be exact -- organizers of Canada's first mobile film festival said on Wednesday. Mobifest producers are looking for bite-sized films that are up to 60 seconds long and produced for viewing on cellphones and other handheld devices. "The big picture is that there's a billion (mobile) phones worldwide and an increasing percentage of them are playing back video," said Duncan Kennedy, president of Nownow Corp., which is producing the contest. "It's a new distribution channel for independent film making." Similar festivals, for what is dubbed "short attention span theater", have been launched in Portugal and Asia. Industry executives recently gathered at the Sundance Film Festival to predict the future of the small screen."

There's definitely some room for quality, short-form content on our devices. The big concern currently would be bandwidth - is the market of people paying $60+ USD a month for flat-rate EVDO really that big? Because those are the two things you'd need everyone to have for this to succeed - a fat download pipe and no concern for how much it might cost. Perhaps not, but it can't hurt for content creators to get ready for when the time comes. My real fear is that the carriers, in their never-ending fight to avoid being mere bit-pipes, will try to monetize this directly and expect people to pay $5 for a 60 second video clip. :roll:

I would have thought that a service like this would be illegal. However, for a price, LocateCell.com will provide you with Reverse Cellphone number lookup, current Cellphone number, or the call history of that cell number. 8O I'm sure that there are some legitimate uses for this service, but I think the majority of people using it are doing so with questionable intentions. So much for our privacy.

"In a bid to draw the young and tech-savvy into its restaurants, McDonald's has begun pilot testing a new ATM-style device called the Blaze Net, which allows customers to buy music, ringtones, print photos and surf the Web at the restaurant."



Seems like an interesting move by McDonalds. I wonder if they are hoping to add another revenue stream, or if they just plan to use them to get people into their resturants hoping that they will have a Big Mac with their ringtones. I can just hear it now... "Would you like a McRingtone with that combo, sir?" :lol:

:really mad: I'm ready to throw my E200 out the nearest window. Here's the scenario: I took Thursday and Friday off for a little "work on the house and yard with my wife" vacation, so my email accounts have gotten very full. I was at a family gathering tonight, and with some downtime I checked my Pocket PC Thoughts email accounts - 72 new messages. Email triage time! One-handed email triage with a Smartphone is an awesome thing. When it works that is, and this is what my rant is about. :evil:

I opened up my email account on Pocket Inbox, Smartphone 2003 version, and did a SEND/RECIEVE. It took a while, but eventually all the messages were downloaded onto the phone. I went through all 72 of them, deleting spam, responding to a few, and deleting the messages I didn't need to act on. I then did another SEND/RECEIVE to process the changes. No new messages showed up, so I was done. The first problem is that I shouldn't have to do a SEND/RECEIVE to process the changes. When an email client makes a connection to an IMAP server, it stays connected as long as the TCP/IP connection is available. When you open Outlook and switch to an IMAP email account, is connects up to the server and downloads the messages - and it stays connected. If you move/mark a message for deletion, it's moved/marked for deletion immediately because it's connected. It doesn't disconnect until you shut down the software. That's the way email clients are supposed to work with IMAP.

So why am I so angry? Because when I sat down at my computer tonight and opened Outlook, all of the messages I had processed where downloaded from the server, fresh and marked as unread. That's right, it's like my email triage never happened! I wasted my time and have to re-do everything. I've seen this before with the Pocket PC email client, and the only way to avoid it happening there is to connect to the email account, do the email traige, do a send/recieve, then press the connect icon to disconnect. That usually works, but why should I have to resort to such voodoo to process my email? The problem that makes this scenario worse is that there is no CONNECT function on the Smartphone Inbox client - just a SEND/RECIEVE. It's like the Microsoft software developers don't know there's a difference between POP and IMAP.

The Smartphone client works perfectly my Exchange account, but for me it's highly problematic with IMAP accounts. Frankly, at the moment I'm livid that once again Microsoft has released software that works great with their software, but is completely dysfunctional with what the rest of the world is using. If you can't make an email client that can process email via IMAP, what's the point of saying it can do email? There's some serious room for improvement here, because right now the Smartphone Inbox application is at the rock bottom of functionality if it can't do something this simple.