Engadget Mobile Gallery

Coalition of carriers, manufacturers settles on voice standard for LTE

by Chris Ziegler posted Nov 4th 2009 at 11:41AM

As much fanfare and support as it's been getting over the past couple years, LTE's dirty little secret is that there's been no unified stance on how to ferry voice services over the technology; the concentration has been on data alone so far. Sure, the occasional carrier has raised concerns -- and a variety of solutions have been proposed, ranging from VoIP to repurposing legacy networks for voice alone -- but until now, voice has been an afterthought that everyone's been procrastinating on solving. Fortunately, a veritable who's-who of industry players from both the manufacturer and carrier sides of the fence have congealed this week to announce the One Voice initiative, which basically just hand-picks existing 3GPP-defined standards for voice and SMS services over LTE. Strangely missing is T-Mobile, one of the loudest voices in demanding a voice standard for LTE up until this point -- but considering that AT&T, Orange, Telefonica, TeliaSonera, Verizon, and Vodafone are all on board along with Samsung, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and others, we think they'll have no option but to fall in line in the long term. For consumers, this means we can all breathe a sigh of relief that LTE handsets won't be arbitrarily compartmentalized by supported voice standard, so it's a big win any way you slice it.

BlackBerry Messenger 5 now available, we go hands-on

by Jacob Schulman posted Oct 8th 2009 at 4:20PM

BlackBerry Messenger: it's the holy grail of the BlackBerry platform, and, for many, the only real reason why they don't make the jump to another smartphone. Well, RIM has finally gone ahead and released the latest and greatest version upon the world (in an official capacity at least), and we're definitely pleased with the added functionality and other updates that they've cooked in to the app to make it even more useful and better. Read on after the break for a full breakdown of what's hot, what's new, and what we think of it all.

Continue reading BlackBerry Messenger 5 now available, we go hands-on

iPhone MMS is now live!

by Paul Miller posted Sep 25th 2009 at 1:33PM

All you've gotta do is plug that iPhone 3G or 3GS into iTunes, run the teensiest of updates, restart the phone, and you can at last make that fashionably late entrance into the 21st century you've always dreamed of. That's right folks, MMS on the iPhone is live on AT&T at last.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

AT&T slips some iPhone MMS rollout details for Friday

by Chris Ziegler posted Sep 23rd 2009 at 3:48PM

We've just heard from AT&T that new carrier settings for the iPhone 3G and 3GS will be available "late morning" Pacific Time (which would be early afternoon Eastern) this Friday, September 25, which will finally enable MMS support. Owners will have to tether up to iTunes to grab those settings, so fish out your cable (as if you don't have it permanently attached to your machine already) and make sure you've got some solid time in front of the computer to check for the update over and over (and over) again, alright?

[Thanks, Frank]

Tata DoCoMo launches per-character SMS pricing, and this headline just cost us close to a rupee

by Chris Ziegler posted Sep 10th 2009 at 7:36AM

Never mind "nickel and diming" -- Indian joint venture Tata DoCoMo is now rupee and paising (a paise is a hundredth of a rupee) customers who sign up for its new "Diet-SMS" messaging plan. Unlimited and ultra-high-allowance messaging plans are now commonplace in some parts of the world, but on the other end of the spectrum, Diet-SMS is actually a regression from the old practice of charging by the message -- you get charged by the character. The good news is they don't charge for spaces and characters are just a single paise each, which works out to about two-hundredths of a US cent at current conversion rates -- but still, the fact remains that a 160-character SMS costs Tata DoCoMo exactly the same to handle as a 1-character one. What's worse, you just know this is going to give rise to a new ultra-efficient shorthand notation that makes "LOL" look like a novella.

[Via textually.org]

AT&T rolling out MMS to iPhone on September 25, tethering 'in the future'

by Chris Ziegler posted Sep 3rd 2009 at 2:09PM

AT&T has just announced that MMS -- a much-ballyhooed feature of iPhone OS 3.0 -- will finally be hitting AT&T on September 25. There's still no date for tethering, though the company is holding the line that it'll be offered "in the future." Expanding on the logic behind the tethering delay, they're saying that "by its nature, this function could exponentially increase traffic on the network, and we need to ensure that some of our current upgrades are in place before we can deliver the expanded functionality with the excellent performance that customers expect." We're no network engineers, but "exponentially increase traffic" and "AT&T" are two things we don't typically like to hear in the same sentence -- let's hope the 850MHz, 7.2Mbps, and backhaul upgrades they're cranking on right now go a long way toward sorting that out. As for MMS, they're acknowledging that the release "does indeed fall a few days past the official end of summer," arguing that their support of more iPhone customers than any other carrier in the world made a positive launch experience a bit of a challenge. Of course, virtually every other phone AT&T sells (and has sold for the past several years) supports the same tech, so this feels like a pretty active admission that iPhone users blaze through data-rich features at a pace that the carrier has been ill-equipped to handle.

Texting makes kids dumb -- science fact!

by Vladislav Savov posted Aug 13th 2009 at 2:03AM

Ready for your daily dose of wildly speculative extrapolation and unfounded fear-mongering? Predictive texting is the latest suspect in the ongoing war against things that make children dumb. A new study from Australia's Monash University has shown that predictive texters finish their exams faster and with more errors than others, because of course, when your mobile finishes your words in a text, you expect it to finish your sentences in a test. We jest, and there may be a sliver of truth to this contention, but let's be forthright here -- you could probably do more damage to your brain with a good night's alcohol intake than you can with a lifetime of texting.

[Via Switched]

Senators to introduce legislation banning texting while driving

by Donald Melanson posted Jul 29th 2009 at 11:51AM

It's already been banned by a number of states and the District of Columbia, but a group of Democratic senators led by New York's Charles Schumer are now set to introduce legislation that would ban texting while driving throughout the United States. That, as you may be aware if you've been watching the news this past week, follows a study from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, which found that truck drivers that texted while driving were 23 times more likely to get into an accident than non-texters -- to say nothing of several calls for a ban from major safety groups over the years. While complete details on the proposed bill are still a bit light, it would apparently withhold 25% of the annual federal highway funding from states that did not comply with the ban, and would reportedly be modeled on the way the national drunken driving ban was introduced.

[Via Phone Scoop]

New Nokia Messaging beta adds IM capabilities, E75 gets first dibs

by Chris Ziegler posted Jun 30th 2009 at 5:29AM

Nokia Messaging represents Espoo's premiere email experience -- so premiere, in fact, that the company eventually plans to charge for it on some of its devices -- and to help makes it just a little bit more awesome than it already is, they've now started adding in instant messaging capability. The new Nokia Messaging - E75 IM Beta (yes, that's the full official name) offered by Nokia Beta Labs rocks compatibility with Yahoo Messenger and Ovi -- more services are expected to be compatible in the future -- and appears to serve up pretty much all the features you'd expect of a modern mobile IM client, including background notification, multiple conversation management, status control, and chat log save capability. So far, only the E75's compatible, but Nokia's imploring folks to stay tuned to Beta Labs for updates on when they'll open it up to other devices.

Stock-looking MMS support hacked onto 2G iPhone

by Chris Ziegler posted Jun 29th 2009 at 11:50AM

Way back in the heady days of 2007, there was an iPhone without 3G data (hard to believe, we know, but trust us -- we were there). This iPhone, though revolutionary in some ways, was marred by the love-hate relationship its users suffered for missing out on some very basic features that they'd grown used to on mobiles of yore. One of those missing features, of course, was MMS -- and now, some two years later, here we are with a truly integrated MMS experience courtesy of the all-powerful hacking community. Granted, there have been MMS apps available for ages, but there's a difference: this is the same action 3G and 3GS owners are getting in conjunction with OS 3.0, which Apple curiously decided to hold back from original iPhone owners. As you might imagine, getting this going on your own phone is marginally more complicated than downloading from the App Store, so here's the question, you non-upgraders: just how badly do you want it?

[Thanks, Paul]

PhonePoint Pen application is a hand-talkers' dream come true

by Tim Stevens posted Jun 11th 2009 at 6:57AM

Know someone who talks with their hands so expressively that you have to step back or risk catching a wayward exclamation point in the face? The video after the break will make their day. Students at Duke University have come up with a way to use phone accelerometers to capture gestures with surprising precision, allowing them to pipe those motions through a character recognition algorithm and, hey presto, turn flapping hands into letters and numbers. The prototype app is called PhonePoint Pen, and while right now the process looks painfully slow, with large, precise motions required, with a few months or years of refinements you might just be able to jot down a quick text to a friend while running between terminals, all without putting down the double latte that just cost you $8 at the airport food court. The future, dear readers, it's closer than you think.

[Via Yahoo! News]

Continue reading PhonePoint Pen application is a hand-talkers' dream come true

Nokia Messaging graduates to S60 5th Edition

by Sean Cooper posted May 31st 2009 at 6:03PM

Well, if you're the ~~proud~~ owner of a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic -- which runs S60 5th edition, in case you don't keep up with that jazz -- you can now join the mobile pioneers using this free -- at least for now, for some -- service. So, if you've never heard of Nokia Messaging, it is an email aggregator that will connect to 10 different webmail accounts and put the mail all in one place on your handset. Nokia Messaging support thousands of email providers, includes support for HTML, Windows Live Hotmail, and can be configured via the app on the phone or from the web. So far, so fantastic, and it is a grand thing when a beta app graduates to the real world. Congrats Nokia, and congrats to all you 5800 owners out there, follow the read to get at it.

[Via UnwiredView]

Keepin' it real fake, part CCXV: HiPhone Nano meets Aura in a knock-off of modest proportions

by Joseph L. Flatley posted May 29th 2009 at 4:43PM

The Egs HiPhone Nano F210 borrows some of the aura of... well, the Aura. And why not? Half the fun of the KIRF scene is the way that these bandits mix and match aspects of devices according to whatever crazy whim they might be experiencing at the moment. (The other half of the fun? Exploding batteries, of course.) Along with the stylish and quite possibly functional iPod click wheel, this bad boy features: tri-band GSM, a 1.4-inch screen, VGA camera, Bluetooth A2DP, FM tuner, and some sort of media player. As China Grabber puts it: "This is tailor-made for small girls in mobile phones, will the pursuit of individuality, culture, dare to do you a taste of delicacy!!!" Yours today for $139.99. If you're feeling lucky (or you've done something wrong in your past) hit that read link and see for yourself.

[Via PMP Today]

Accelerometer-dependent text entry patent from HTC sounds like more trouble than it's worth

by Chris Ziegler posted May 14th 2009 at 5:18AM

We're all for closing the gap between our desktop and mobile WPMs, but this might be a step in the wrong... direction (keep reading to understand why that was a miserable, unforgivable pun). HTC has filed for a patent that would have your phone determine which character you meant to type by analyzing its current tilt at the time you press a key, the idea being that a single key could be responsible for entering as many as five different letters and numbers. It seems like that'd make entering a text more like a game of Labarynth than an actually enjoyable (or efficient) process, but hey, we guess some people are really good with their wrists.

[Via pocketnow.com and wmpoweruser.com]

California girl claims to have burned through over 300,000 texts in a single month

by Chris Ziegler posted May 7th 2009 at 5:47PM

A 217,000-message record attempt nearly cost one dude $26 grand, which probably would've really bummed him out had he realized that the record attempt was going to be shattered -- seemingly -- just a few weeks later. A California teenager by the name of Crystal Wiski has apparently sent and received a mind-numbing 303,398 texts in a single month on an iPhone, and the most amazing thing about it is that she doesn't seem to have been gunning for a record on purpose. Her reason? "I am popular, I can't help it." It's not totally clear to us how 300,000-plus texts is biologically or technologically possible for a human / iPhone combination, especially without sending meaningless, one-letter texts to random contacts -- but then again, teenagers do strange, amazing things. Live the dream, Crystal.

[Via CNET]