Recently in Mobile Phones Category

So I'm trying to order a new Apple iPhone 3GS from TMC's AT&T's Premiere business website when what do my eyes behold? No iPhones displayed on the Featured Phone web page. Say what? Is AT&T dissing Apple? How can this not be on their Featured Phone page? So then I click on the Smartphone category, but there is no iPhone for sale there either. Huh? I try the 3G category and still no iPhone. Finally, I choose a link that list ALL phones available and still the iPhone isn't listed.

I should mention that the TMC's first 3 iPhones were ordered together on the phone when we joined AT&T Premiere business plan. AT&T espouses their Premiere site as an easy way for telecom administrators to quickly and easily add new phones, manage phones, deactivate service, add service, etc. So here I am trying to save time ordering TMC's fourth iPhone via their web portal and the iPhone is nowhere to be found.

So I try the Premiere live chat. Behold how unhelpful this chat session went:


Full transcript:
Please wait for a chat agent to respond.
You are now chatting with 'Tiffany'
Tiffany: Welcome to AT&T Premier Support. How may I assist you today?
Tom Keating: hi. I'm on my Premiere page and trying to add service + new iPhone. I can't find iPhone anywhere on the page
Tom Keating: here: https://www.wireless.att.com/business/phones/phones_items.jsp?catsel=true
Tiffany: To clarify, you want to know why your Premier site is not showing iphones, correct?
Tom Keating: yes
Tiffany: I will be right with you.
Tom Keating: ok
Tiffany: Unfortunately, if you do not see phone device on your Premier web site they are not eligible through your company.
Tom Keating: i already have 3 iphones as part of our Premiere plan
Tom Keating: Foundation Account Number 1234567, sample iPhone number: 203-722-XXXX
Tiffany: As a TCM, you can specify which products, features and services are available to view on the Premier website. Please click the Support tab and review the "Using the Manage Functions" instructions.
Tom Keating: I'm now on the Support tab, but don't see any links titled "Using the Manage Functions". I'm currently here: https://www.wireless.att.com/business/help/?wtLinkName=Support&wtLinkLoc=MNB&WT.svl=2&_requestid=39498
Tiffany: Give me a moment to located the information you need.
Tiffany: I apologize, Tom select the manage tab then go to settings then go to apply equipment preferences to change device on the Premier site.
Tom Keating: that's odd. I do see the iPhone checked there.
Tom Keating: I'll submit it anyway. let me see if that worked.
Tiffany: Tom, you may have to log out and then log back in because of web site technically difficulties, if you are still experiencing problems with the site, you may need to speak to a live agent in technical support to further assist you.
Tom Keating: yeah, still don't see it. had another admin login using his account.
Tom Keating: where do I find the correct technical contact?
Tom Keating: you have a number for me?
Tiffany: For website technical support, please call 1-866-499-8008, select option #4, Monday - Friday, 8:00 AM to 9:00 PM EST.
Tiffany: Do you have any questions regarding the information we discussed today?
Tom Keating: Nope, guess it's time to try another customer service route.
Tiffany: For website technical support, please call 1-866-499-8008, select option #4, Monday - Friday, 8:00 AM to 9:00 PM EST.
Tiffany: Do you have any questions regarding the information we discussed today?
Tiffany: Thank you for using AT&T Premier Support. We appreciate your business.
Chat session has ended.

So she sent me on a couple wild goose chases and there were occasions where I'd wait 2-3 minutes between her responses. The total chat session was about 15 minutes. What a waste of time!

So then I call the number she gave me and I reach the technical support team. I give her my account details and after explaining the issue, she sounds like she's going to make my day and tell me she can fix the problem. Alas, instead she gives me a trouble ticket! Then she tells me that she merely takes down the info, the trouble ticket goes to the IT technical support team, and the timeframe is 2-24 hours to fix. Oh joy... Maybe I'll just order the damn iPhone over the phone.

The web is supposed to not only make things faster for the customer, but it's also supposed to save on labor costs for the company selling products or services. Well, it took the chat agent time to send me on a wild goose chase, it took the AT&T technical support phone rep time to take my info over the phone and issue a trouble ticket, and it took me time to jump through all these hoops. It also costs AT&T money for me to call their 866 toll-free number as well.

If AT&T wants superb customer service, what should have happened is that the chat agent worked on my issue until it was resolved. None of this sending me to another AT&T support rep garbage. If you're going to put a live chat feature on your "Premier" business web portal, then I expect the chat agent to be able to resolve my issue. It's this sort of terrible experience that makes me much less apt to switch $1000 in monthly telecom costs we pay to Verizon over to AT&T. You're treading on thin ice AT&T and I control some purse strings. Granted, it's a drop in the bucket, but if others are experiencing the same issue, you can imagine how much business AT&T is losing.

Well, Alan Urkawich, my fellow co-worker, ye shall wait a few more days to get your brand spankin' new AT&T Apple iPhone 3GS 32GB phone. I tried man, I really really tried!

The Slacker Radio streaming application, which lets users play personalized radio and buy songs from V CAST Music while they listen, will be "pushed" out to all Verizon BlackBerry Storm phones over-the-air. Whether you want it or not - though you can hide or move it to another folder.

According to Verizon, "Over the next several days, customers using the BlackBerry Storm smartphone will see the Slacker Radio application icon appear on their handsets' home screens as it is pushed over-the-air. The Slacker Radio icon gives customers one-click access to a free version of one of the most popular personalized radio services available today. "

This version of Slacker Radio also connects to V CAST Music, combining this exciting music application with Verizon Wireless' industry-leading mobile music service. When a song is being played using Slacker Radio and is one of the more than 4.5 million available in the V CAST Music with Rhapsody catalog, a V CAST icon will appear on the screen that will let customers easily purchase that track while it continues playing on the smartphone.

"Verizon Wireless is making it even easier for customers who want to experience music on their smartphones to find Slacker Radio, then connecting them directly to V CAST Music so they can take that music with them wherever they go," said Ed Ruth, director of partner management for Verizon. "This combination is great for both serious music lovers and casual fans who want to listen to music when the mood strikes them."

"With the largest music library of any personal radio app, Slacker Radio makes your BlackBerry Storm smartphone the ultimate music player," said Jonathan Sasse, senior vice president of marketing at Slacker. "By integrating with V CAST Music, Slacker listeners will now have the ability to easily purchase music as they listen to their favorite stations."

The Slacker Radio application provides BlackBerry Storm smartphone users in the United States with a personalized music discovery and listening experience, pulling from more than 100 expert-programmed Slacker stations, over 10,000 artist stations or a nearly unlimited number of the listener's own custom-created stations. Features include station caching to storage memory, an intuitive interface optimized for touch operation with support for vertical and horizontal orientation, as well as "peek ahead," allowing the listener to see a preview of the next artist and album in their stations' rotations.

Slacker Radio is included with Email and Web for BlackBerry plans, which begin at $29.99 when added to any Nationwide voice plan.

According to the Washington Examiner, D.C. police chief Cathy Lanier is "irked" that Americans are using an iPhone application to outwit speed traps and traffic cameras which uses GPS to pinpoint the location of the cameras & speedtraps and warns users as they drive. Interesting that the article mentions PhantomAlert, which is a paid subscription that lets you download their database of speed traps and cameras when their are free options such as Trapster available. I don't believe PhantomAlert is even available on the iPhone. I don't see it in the App Store when I searched for it.

According to the article, Lanier said that the technology is a "cowardly tactic" and "people who overly rely on those and break the law anyway are going to get caught" in one way or another. She went on to say, "I think that's the whole point of this program. It's designed to circumvent law enforcement -- law enforcement that is designed specifically to save lives."

Wait a second here. If I'm using this iPhone application and it warns me about speed traps, traffic cameras, etc. and it influences me to slow down, isn't that serving the same purpose as receiving a traffic ticket, but without the associated ticket costs? If the end goal is to cause people to respect the speed limit for safety reasons, then if anything the iPhone application does a better job than speed traps or traffic cameras. After all, a police officer can only pull over so many speeders, while the iPhone application on the other hand will encourage users to slow at every potential speed trap or traffic camera. I use Trapster for the iPhone myself and it warns me about speed traps. It does cause me to drive slower in these areas.

In fact, before I had this application, my heavy foot (former Dodge Viper driver) would cause me to drive pretty fast on highway roads or even rural areas. Now with Trapster warning me, I'm driving much slower in these areas, thus reducing the risk my speed might injure myself or someone else. Of course, personally I don't buy into driving 70mph in a 55mph zone is causing any additional risk to the public or myself. The fact that I like to eat McDonald's french fries is probably increasing my risk of an earlier death than going 15mph over the speed limit.

So the D.C. police chief should be thanking these types of applications if the end goal is to cause people to follow the law. Of course, we know the real purpose of speed traps and traffic cameras - it's to fill the coffers of the local city, which according to the article Montgomery County expects to make $29 million from its red light and speed cameras. Update: The article states, "The greater D.C. area has 290 red-light and speed cameras -- comprising nearly 10 percent of all traffic cameras in the U.S., according to estimates by a camera-tracking database called the POI Factory." 10% of all nationwide traffic cams just for a city? That's just insane!

It's a speed tax - plain and simple and they don't like the fact that these "warning applications" for mobile devices and GPS units may cause you to drive slower and adversely impact their revenue stream. I for one can't wait till teleportation is invented so we can get to point A to point B without "the man" writing out a $300 ticket for doing 70mph in a 55mph zone.

Google just added location info to Safari on the iPhone allowing you to see local businesses very quickly with a simple search. For instance, search on "coffee" and see the closest coffee shops or search on fast food places like Burger King or McDonald's. You can see local results (Norwalk, CT) in the screenshot to the right, along with the ability to manually enter a location, update current location

It works with the new iPhone 3.0 software. All you have to do is go to Google's homepage in Safari and you'll see text that reads, "New! Try My Location to find restaurants, shops and bars near you!"

When you attempt to allow Google to use your location info within Safari for the first time, the iPhone will pop open the usual message about sharing your location info with Safari which you have to accept or reject.

After accepting, you'll see a dot below the search box with your location info. Next, perform a search and Google will return local results. Even cooler, it appears to work in the popular Google app for the iPhone as well, which I prefer for quick local lookups since it supports fast (and accurate I might add) speech recognition searches as seen here:

Since Safari runs in the background this could potentially open the door to some interesting location-based services (LBS), since the alternative is 3rd party iPhone location apps which must remain running in the foreground, thus limiting their usefulness. In theory, a developer could write a hosted web app that tracks your current location and shares it with your spouse or buddy list. One could hope such an app is forthcoming - or maybe not depending on your privacy perspective.

With yesterday's news about the new Nimbuzz for iPhone app and the launch of a Nimbuzz Mac client, I contacted Tobias Kemper, Head of Communications for Nimbuzz and asked him a question about DTMF/touch-tone support in any pending release.

Any plans for DTMF support?

Noticed when I tested it by calling my Skype for SIP account matched up to my corporate PBX that I couldn't reach my extension since there is no dialpad once the call is initiated.

I know touchtones are tricky when sent over an IP connection, which is what RFC 2833 is for. However, RFC 2833 is probably impossible for you guys to support.

However, I've found if you simulate the exact frequency tones and send that as a long tone - say 0.5s long, 99% of the time it gets transmitted just fine. Can often get away with ¼ of a second as well. Thoughts?

He wrote back, "I will send you the official news in a few mins - WITH more stats and data! DTMF is a great next step for us but I cannot speak to it yet."

Ok, so he's not admitting to DMTF support in the future, but he isn't ruling it out either. That's good news, since I really like Nimbuzz. It features SIP capabilities, so I can register it with a SIP-based PBX. Though oddly enough, I had a minor issue with the Nimbuzz for iPhone app with case-sensitivity. I have some test SIP accounts with the format SOFTPHONE01, SOFTPHONE02, etc. all in upper-case. The Asterisk-based trixbox PBX is case-sensitive, so it is expecting the username in uppercase. Well, although I was able to enter in SOFTPHONE01 into Nimbuzz in all upper-case, it wouldn't register. So I SSH'ed into the trixbox server and ran "asterisk - r" to see what was going on. I attempted to register again, and immediately saw the problem in the Asterisk console. Nimbuzz converted my SIP username to all lowercase. Thus, I had to add a new SIP account that was in all lowercase. Looks like they need to update their back-end database to support mixed-case for the SIP username. It's pretty common to use a mix of upper & lowercase letters to help secure the SIP account.

In any event, Tobias also told me, "We developed a Mac client (download) in combination with a new iPhone version (download) because we got massive traction since releasing the iPhone client and have a huge number of active users. (official press release below)  We did it Apple style, focused on slick UI and usability! "

He added, "(Here are) a few stats on why we made the decision to deliver something specific for the Apple fans out there:"

• In just 9 months since launch, consistent Top 10 ranking on all iTunes AppStores in Europe, Latin America & the Middle East, including regular No. 1 What's Hot positions in influential iPhone markets such as the UK
• Achieved massive penetration and popularity.  For example, 1 in 5 iPhone users in France and in the Netherlands are using Nimbuzz!
• Average 848% growth in downloads of iPhone & iPod touch apps in key European markets since the iPhone OS 3.0 update
• One of just 5% of Apps to boast more than 100,000 active users, with an active user base of more than 41% (AdMob Metrics)
• Massive nearly one million newly registered users per month growth across all Nimbuzz clients

With the new Nimbuzz Mac you can connect and interact with friends from the most popular instant messaging communities and social networks like, Facebook, AIM, MySpace, Google Talk (Orkut), Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger (MSN), ICQ and many more, right from your (i)Mac or MacBook (Pro).  It also lets you call your buddies on Nimbuzz, Windows Live Messenger (MSN), Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk.

The iPhone and iPod touch upgrade lets you share photos, music and videos. The beauty of it is that the files are stored online so you have access to your files from your Mac, iPhone or iPod touch! That also saves device memory.

Push Notification for iPhone and iPod Touch - with home screen alerts of incoming calls or chats, effectively keeping you available to the rest of the world even though the app itself has been closed.

We also introduced another much requested feature: location sharing.  Now you can share and retrieve the location of your Nimbuzz buddies on the go. This makes it easier to find your friends and set up face to face meetings.

Here is a demo video to check out before trying : ) 

TerreStar Corporation (NASDAQ: TSTR) announced that TerreStar-1, the world's largest, most advanced commercial communications satellite, has been successfully placed into its assigned orbital slot in the geosynchronous arc and has successfully deployed its 18 meter 2GHz S Band reflector, the largest commercial satellite antenna ever deployed. TerreStar remarked "TerreStar-1 is now poised to deliver the voice, data and video services over TerreStar's all IP next-generation mobile broadband network that combines the power of TerreStar-1, an all-IP core network, and the latest in smartphone technology."

One of the first advanced smartphones the satellite is designed to handle is a new Windows Mobile designed with their partner Elektrobit (EB). The mobile device can handle all of the major wireless specs, including: Dual-band WCDMA (850 and 1900), TerreStar WCDMA HSDPA 2.2 GHz, and Quad-band GSM/EGPRS (850, 900, 1800 and 1900). What this means is that this is a worldwide phone -- and if their isn't a cellular tower in the vicinity, you can switch to a satellite connection.

Apple iTunes is experiencing some severe outage problems today. I was trying to install Truphone and Skype on a coworker's iPhone when I noticed I couldn't search the App Store on his iPhone. Rich Tehrani also tried installing a gaming app I recommended called Blowfish, but it wouldn't accept his password.

My IT administrator then proceeded to try and register a new iTunes account within the iTunes PC software for this iPhone and that wouldn't work either. Perhaps the Michael Jackson resurgence phenomenon is overloading iTunes? According to CNET, "On iTunes, the Web's largest music service, 8 out of the top-10-selling albums for download were from Jackson, with a compilation album, "The Essential Michael Jackson" in the No. 1 spot."

Ok, so the just launched Skype 1.1 for iPhone doesn't support push notifications, but eBuddy, a brand new app for the iPhone or iPod touch does support push notifications. What does this mean? It means you can close eBuddy and still receive instant messages (IMs) from your buddies. Further, eBuddy is an IM aggregator supporting MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, Gtalk, and Facebook. Too bad they don't support Skype though like fring does. eBuddy also supports Google Android phones.

Check out the features for eBuddy on the iPhone & iPod touch:

• One buddy list for MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, Gtalk, and Facebook
• Stay online when you exit the app
• Get push notifications for incoming messages when you exit the app*
• Reconnect automatically if connection is lost
• Get offline messages after reconnecting
• Get new message alerts & typing alerts in the chat screen
• Easily switch between chats by swiping your screen
• Shake your iPhone or iPod Touch to send a buzzer
• Display pictures, personal message and status
• Emoticons & buzzers
• Sound & vibration
• Multiple IM networks
• Multiple accounts for each IM network
• Buddy list management
• Offline messages
• Group chat support

Push notifications for incoming messages are only available if you have the latest iPhone 3.0 software on your device. eBuddy will also soon be adding landscape mode. Oh, and did I mention unlike similar app Beejive ($9.99) & IM+ with Push ($9.99), eBuddy is a free app in the Apple App store? Some minor complaints include it only supports push for up to 30 minutes and it doesn't support file sharing (audio, picture, etc.). Still for a free IM aggregator app, this one is definitely a must for the iPhone!

Whatcha waitin' for? Go grab this cool app now!

Late last night I saw an update notifications on my iPhone 3GS for Skype. New version? Sweet! I updated it and checked out the release notes for Skype 1.1 for the iPhone and iPod touch. It sports some new languages and now includes Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish and Traditional Chinese and of course English.

The bigest new feature is the ability to send text messages (SMS) using Skype credit. They also added voicemail support and improved dialing help when calling phones.

According to the official Skype blog, "we've made some improvements to the look and feel, particularly when calling phones using the dial pad."

You can download the update in iTunes, or even better just launch the App Store on your iPod touch or iPhone and then tap Updates to get the latest version of all your apps!

Some things I would have liked to seen in this release:

• Push notifications (Skype might have to haggle with Apple on this one since Apple places restrictions on third party apps that can run in the background on the iPhone. Though I should add 'push notifications' is Apple's compromise between a full background app and the ability to at least get 'notifications' that something happened in an app that isn't technically running in the background)
• Video conferencing support - Though that probably isn't coming any time soon.

So what would you like to see in a future release of Skype for iPhone?

One phone charger for all? There can be only one! According to Reuters, telecom firms have backed standard phone charger in Europe. No, hell hasn't frozen over. Yes, you will finally be able to use a single charger that works with any future mobile phone you purchase - at least in Europe anyway. That's one less charger to pack when traveling and one less charger to throw away when you upgrade your mobile phone. The top mobile telephone suppliers, including Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and others have agreed to back an EU-wide standard for phone chargers. New mobile phones will use a standard micro-USB socket to ensure compatibility.

Motorola, LG, NEC, Qualcomm, Research in Motion, Samsung and Texas Instruments have also signed the agreement. Interestingly, Apple has also signed on. You mean Apple which charges licensing rights for their proprietary docking cable is on board too? Well, well... Isn't Apple fighting Palm over the Pre emulating an Apple iPod to enable iTunes support? Seems against Apple's nature to support a connection standard that has enabled such a huge third-party cottage industry for Apple's iPod and iPhone products. For example, Apple licenses their connector to FM transmitters, iPod external speakers, and more.

So one charger for any mobile phone - surely there's a catch...