NotePage SMS, Texting and Messaging Blogs

The cost of calling, texting and accessing the Internet via mobile phones while abroad is about to get cheaper for European residents, following an agreement Tuesday among lawmakers over the shape of a new mobile roaming law.

Members of the European Parliament and representatives of the 27 national governments reached an informal agreement to cut prices from July 1. The compromise they struck must be rubber-stamped by both institutions, probably in April, but the hard negotiating is over, said Adina-Ioana Valean, a Romanian member of the European Parliament involved in the negotiations.

AOL has launched its Shortcuts.com coupon service on mobile phones, MediaPost reports, in an effort to let customers get discounts while in the grocery store or otherwise on the move.

Shortcuts.com members can select coupons from their handsets, which will then load them onto grocery store shopping cards. Later, when the shopper swipes their discount card at the check-out machine, the system will recognize the coupon and deduct its amount from the total bill.

The recession has prompted consumers to re-think their cell phone plans, whether it is ditching contracts for pre-paid options, cutting back on extras like Internet service and texting, or cutting mobile phone service entirely, according to a Thursday report from the New Millennium Research Council (NMRC).  

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Two members of Congress on Tuesday re-introduced a bill that would prevent states and local jurisdictions from imposing new taxes on cell phone service.

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The number of people using mobile devices to access the Internet more than doubled from January 2008 to January 2009, according to comScore, a provider of Internet tracking. Internet users have been using smartphones for personal use and to conduct business, similar to the way they would use a laptop or home computer.

At least 26 percent of households are now cell-only in Oklahoma and Utah, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated. That rate was at least 20 percent in nine other states — Nebraska, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, New Mexico, Texas, South Carolina and Tennessee — and the District of Columbia.

Microsoft on Wednesday revealed it will pay developers 70 percent of sales for applications they develop and sell on a Windows Mobile application marketplace introduced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last month.

Microsoft also has released tools to enable developers to build applications for the Windows Marketplace for Mobile, which will be offered on Microsoft's Windows Mobile 6.5 software and allow developers to sell thousands of applications to users of Windows Mobile devices. Handsets running Windows Mobile 6.5 should begin shipping in the second half of the year.

The Windows Mobile marketplace is Microsofts answer to the App Store of iPhone applications Apple offers as part of its software for the iPhone, which popularized the idea of buying and downloading mobile applications from the devices themselves.

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Chinese group ZTE unveiled the worlds first low-cost solar-powered mobile phone targeted at the worlds poor on Wednesday and said it would go on sale in June for about 40 dollar or about 32 euros.