NotePage SMS, Paging and Messaging Blogs

Swedish-Finnish telecoms operator TeliaSonera presented a medical monitoring system using Sweden's mobile phone network so hospitals can keep track of out-patients' health developments.

"It's a wireless system. Information on the patient's health is sent to the hospital via the mobile phone network," TeliaSonera spokeswoman Maria Strohle told AFP.
Patients who require regular check-ups but not necessarily in-hospital care can thus be equipped with sensors that transmit details of their medical condition to a small box the size of a mobile phone. The information is then transmitted to the hospital, she said.

Microsoft has launched a video download service that offers daily television programming, entertainment clips, and other digital content for viewing on Windows Mobile-based devices, it says.

The MSN Video Downloads service draws on content from Microsoft partners such as CinemaNow, MSNBC.com, and TiVo, allowing subscribers to watch video on their smart phones, Pocket PCs, and Portable Media Centers.

Cingular and AT&T Wireless were the subject of the largest number of consumer complaints lodged against wireless carriers last year with the Federal Communications Commission, according to information obtained by Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports.
The two wireless carriers merged late in 2004 to create the largest carrier in the U.S. However, the Consumers Union said in a statement that AT&T Wireless would have had the worst complaint record even if it hadn't merged with Cingular not only for 2004.

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The new CD single "Baby" from rapper Fabolous allows UK consumers to choose which part of the song they want to use as a mobile phone ringtone, a feature that Warner Music said on Thursday was a first for the industry.
Until now, the 30-second ringtone clips packaged with singles have been pre-determined by record companies.

As discount "family plans" become the top growth area for U.S. cell phone service providers, investors should keep a sharp eye on customer cancellation rates in coming years, according to industry watchers.
Since 2003 U.S. providers have stepped up efforts to take on more customers through family plans, which let people add additional phones to their cell phone accounts for fees that are often four times lower than popular individual plans.

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U.S. Internet services provider EarthLink Inc. and South Korea's largest mobile communications company, SK Telecom, on Thursday said they had completed a joint venture deal in which the companies will enter the U.S. wireless market.

They said the new entity, called SK-EarthLink, will resell mobile phone services and wireless handsets. It will be funded with $440 million of partner investments over the next three years.

The science remains unclear on whether the radiation emitted by cell phones poses a health hazard, but a number of lawsuits alleging the risk have been given new life.

Despite wireless industry efforts, those cases may now be heard by state courts after the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (news - web sites) revived last week five class-action suits, returning them for trial in the states where they originated.

T-Mobile USA confirmed Wednesday that it has stopped selling a PDA/phone device from Hewlett-Packard because of unspecified problems.
"T-Mobile USA has suspended sales of the HP iPAQ h6315 Pocket PC," the company said in a statement. "We are currently working with HP to implement a software upgrade that will deliver an improved customer experience."

Wireless equipment maker Ericsson said Wednesday it is suing Britain-based mobile phone company Sendo for allegedly infringing its patents covering GSM and GPRS technologies.

The Swedish company said it is seeking an injunction against the continued sale and marketing of Sendo's mobile phone products and unspecified monetary damages.

Getting a better deal drives most people to buy a new cellular phone in the U.S., with only a minority of consumers considering the enormous impact throwing away the old phone has on the environment, a study released Friday showed.

In a poll of 20,000 consumers in 20 of the world's top economies, nearly 8 out of 10 said cost savings and more favorable contract terms was the most important reason for upgrading their mobile phones, according to Global Market Insite Inc., which does market research for businesses. The same ratio applied to U.S. consumers.

Less than 1 out of 10 U.S. consumers, however, considered the environmental impact of tossing away the old phone, Seattle-based GMI said. In the United Kingdom, the percentage was 12 percent. In Asia, the numbers were better, with 20 and 26 percent of consumers in India and China, respectively, saying environmental reasons could prohibit them from upgrading.

Complete Article or read our recent article about Recycling Cell Phones

A quarter of American adults who have cell phones have used the devices' text-messaging features within the past month, a new study finds.
Usage correlates with age: 63 percent of cell phone users ages 18-27 have used text messaging compared with 31 percent for ages 28-39 and 7 percent for those over 60.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project also found that 28 percent of people who text message have received unsolicited commercial messages that way.

Text messaging allows cell phone users to receive and send short messages to other cell phone users or e-mail recipients. Services also are available to receive news alerts and other information through text messaging.

Also known as SMS, for Short Message Service, "texting" is highly popular in Europe and Asia but only starting to catch on in the United States.

The Pew study was based on a random telephone survey of 1,460 cell phone users Jan. 13-Feb. 9. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Market growth and market confusion typically go hand-in-hand, and the business-to-business (B2B) wireless voice and data market here in the United States is no exception.

Currently, the use of mobile devices (cell phones, notebooks and others) is significant within businesses of all sizes. More than 70 percent of companies use cell phones, more than half use notebooks/ultralites, and more than 40 percent use PDAs/pocket PCs. Sixty percent of large organizations (1,000-plus employees) use BlackBerrys or similar devices, while 38 percent of midsize companies (100 to 999 employees) and 13 percent of small businesses (fewer than 100 employees) use these tools. More than one-third of large companies use smart phones, followed by 18 percent of midsize organizations and 17 percent of small companies.

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We are pleased to announce a partnership with Woodstone, makers of Servers Alive!
Servers Alive monitors and easily informs users of system problems. By using NotePager Pro in combination with Servers Alive, alerts can be sent to pagers and cellular phones, adding another level of notification to network management.
Additional Details on Servers Alive!

Cingular Wireless, which became the largest U.S. wireless operator after merging with AT&T Wireless last fall, claimed Tuesday that it has passed the 50 million subscriber milestone.
"Attaining 50 million customers is a key indicator that our merger with AT&T Wireless is working and working robustly," Cingular president and CEO Stan Sigman said in a statement. " Before the merger, Verizon Wireless was the largest U.S. carrier. When the merger was closed last October, Cingular had about 47 million subscribers, meaning it has added three million since the merger.

Revenues from ring tones and mobile games are expected to grow rapidly over the next five years, but messaging is expected to remain the strongest source of non-voice revenues for mobile phone operators, a market research firm said Tuesday.

Ring-tone revenues are expected to increase to $734 million in 2009 from $217 million in 2004, which was more than double the $91 million collected by wireless carriers in 2003, JupiterResearch, a subsidiary of Jupitermedia Corp., said.

A majority of cellphone users acknowledge they get irritated at other people for using cellphones in a public place.



The University of Michigan poll found that six in 10 users say that using a cellphone in public can be "a major irritation."


About four in 10 said there should a law that prohibits people from talking on cellphones in public places like museums, movie theatres and restaurants. Eight in 10 said cellphones are a major safety hazard if used while driving. But cellphone users also like the convenience that cellphones can bring.

You may think SMS on cell phones is impossible to use but in Europe, it's become an important political communications tool.
After decades of hammers and sickles, red flags and wordy slogans, Russia's Communists are looking to a propaganda device Lenin and Stalin never dreamed of: cellphone text messaging.

The Communist Party is struggling to regain influence and broaden its aging support base, and its leaders on Saturday called for a fresh propaganda push to attract younger Russians and gain attention despite being largely shut out by the Kremlin-dominated news media.

At a party plenary meeting outside Moscow that focused on propaganda - a word that in Russia evokes images of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution - first deputy chairman Ivan Melnikov said the Communists should turn to methods such as graffiti and cell phone messaging.

Members of the party's youth wing "could use telephones to send political jokes or rhymes, or attract attention to events - anything that motivates a person to send the message along to someone else," Melnikov said in comments broadcast on NTV television.

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We are pleased to announce a partnership with RITLabs The Bat!

Using The Bat! in conjunction with NotePager Pro allows users to have important emails directed to pagers and cell phones, ensuring that they are able to respond quickly and efficiently even when working remotely.

Additional Details - https://www.notepage.net/ritlabs/the-bat.htm

The mobile phone is a phone no more. The new models unveiled at the CeBIT technology show Wednesday let users do far more than just call a friend to catch up.

How about sending them a brief film clip of you standing by a fountain in Rome? Or perhaps a photo of the Eiffel Tower with an image quality so fine it could be blown up and placed in a 10x14-inch frame.

Between a new Samsung handset that sports a seven-megapixel camera - better resolution than most nonprofessional digital cameras - and a wide range of mobiles that download and stream music like an MP3 player, cell "phones" are now a lot more than just a keypad and three hours of talk time.

The slew of new features on phones is an astounding leap from just two years ago, when an integrated camera that took fuzzy images was an attention-getter. And since 2002, music and mobiles has meant much more than just ringtones.

All these new bells and whistles have become a big selling point, not just for the makers, but for the carriers who want to increase their revenue.

"This is the first time that (next-generation) phones are getting close to being sexy and attractive," said Leif-Olof Wallin, who follows mobile phone development and marketing for the Meta Group from Sweden.

The onset of mass multiplayer gaming, a widening gaming demographic, greater playability, and increased adoption of mobile services in emerging markets point to a fast expanding market for mobile games, according to a new report from Juniper Research.

“With console games, customers are obliged to make the commitment to purchase a fairly expensive piece of hardware. The beauty of mobile is that it provides a potential global audience of several hundred million 2.5G users who already have that hardware in the form of their handset,” said report author, Dr Windsor Holden.

Dr Holden added that developers and publishers were now recognising the need to expand the demographic beyond the core gamer.

TV on mobile phone handsets is being tested by 500 subscribers in Finland, Nokia announced Tuesday.
Real-time television programming from several popular outlets is transmitted to Nokia 7710 smartphones fitted with special accessory appliances in the Helsinki capital region, Nokia reported.

"The Nokia smartphone also enables direct links to the Internet for access to background information on TV programs or sports results," the firm stated. "the project tests mobile TV services and consumer experiences, as well as the underlying technology." Subscribers are also able to receive popular radio programs in the test, which is scheduled to continue until June 20.

The recent hacking of Paris Hilton's address book-stored on the TV celebrity's Sidekick II smart phone and backed up by T-Mobile's server-has raised questions in the engineering community about whether personal data is adequately protected in the current generation of cellular products.

In Hilton's case, industry observers think the attack penetrated T-Mobile's server rather than the client phone from Danger Inc. Nonetheless, to stave off such attacks, chip vendors, subscriber identity module (SIM) card manufacturers and mobile-handset companies are already strategizing new security features in the next wave of phone and network designs.

While there are operator-specific implementations for protecting private data stored in a handset and in a network, a personal identification number (PIN) is one of the most common ways to safeguard personal information on the phone today. "If an intruder gains access to a user's telephone physically [that is, if it is stolen], the only defense against data theft is typically PIN-based security of the handset itself," said Mike Yonker, director of technology strategy at Texas Instruments Inc.

A step beyond the PIN, questions about mobile security abound. Where should critical information be stored-in SIM cards or handset memory? What sort of hardware/software blocks should be added to a handset for security? Does a secure protocol exist in the communication path from an individual SIM card to an operator's database? How should data stored by the mobile operators be protected?

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Yahoo Inc. says it has acquired technology to take its popular Web-based parlor and card games from personal computers to mobile devices.

In a deal announced Friday, Yahoo said it will integrate technology from New Jersey-based Stadeon, Inc. to permit multiplayer games across multiple platforms. Terms of the acquisition weren't disclosed.

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Nokia has dropped plans to develop mobile phones with fuel cells for at least the next few years, a spokesman for the Finnish company said Thursday.
The world's largest cell-phone maker, which only eight months ago signaled its commitment to fuel cells, said the technology isn't yet mature.

However, Nokia's Matti Naskali left the door open for future use of the technology. "Fuel-cell technology is promising and Nokia continues to follow it closely," he said.

In a cell phone, a fuel cell would remove the need for a rechargeable battery, instead allowing a user to recharge it the same way a cigarette lighter is refilled when it runs out of butane.

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Wireless switch vendor Airespace said Monday that it and Kineto Wireless have converged GSM access into a wireless switch for enterprises.

The convergence uses a technology called Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA), which enables seamless transfers between GSM-based cellular voice and data systems and wireless LANs. The convergence of WLANs and GSM networks, and the ability to roam between the two, will make voice-over-WLAN more powerful, the companies said in a statement.

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