PhoneTalk

To the test: Check out the Motorola T505 Bluetooth In-Car Speakerphone with Digital FM Transmitter

by Joni Blecher
Thursday, July 03, 2008 (permalink)

We tried out the Motorola Rokr T505 with a myriad of cell phones including the BlackBerry Pearl, the LG Voyager, and the Motorola Q Global to name a few. We even tried it riding around town on a scooter. It worked great with all these cell phones, which is kind of the point of the Motorola T505. The device is designed to funnel calls from your cell phone through the products speaker or even your car stereo. Pairing it a breeze and when you leave the car the device automatically disconnects from your cell phone, so you don't have to remember if your Bluetooth is on or off when receiving/making calls.

We found calls to be loud and clear on our end whether we used the internal speaker of the device or the stereo (a real plus in convertibles). Additionally, callers thought the quality was impressive as well. If that's not enough for you, you can also play music stored on your cell phone when through your car stereo. When a call comes in the song stops and resumes where it left off when you finish your conversation. But what's my favorite part of this device, the lady with the English accent that announces the phone number of the incoming call. I also like that I can take it from car to car no installation necessary.

Want to learn more about headsets? Check out our Bluetooth Headset Buying Guide for tips on picking a headset.

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Deal of the Week

by Guest Blogger
Wednesday, July 02, 2008 (permalink)

This week's deal comes from LetsTalk.com's Merchandising Manager, Aaron Horowitz.

What is it? Get a free Sprint Palm Centro and enjoy life both inside and outside of the office! Take advantage of this amazing deal and experience this fashionable smartphone for the masses. The Palm Centro allows you to stay in touch wherever you go through voice, text, IM, email, and web capabilities. The Centro’s touchscreen and full keyboard make staying connected even easier. This sleek smartphone is also an ideal choice for your summer travels, with its 1.3 megapixel camera, 2x digital zoom, and video capture!

How Much? Get the Palm Centro for free out-the-door on all lines, when purchased with any two year Sprint contract.

Why is it such a good deal? The Sprint Palm Centro, which normally retails for $459.99, is free on all lines with no data requirement. You also don’t need to deal with mail-in-rebates because it’s free out-the-door!

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To the test: Check out the Plantronics Discovery 925 Bluetooth headset

by Joni Blecher
Wednesday, July 02, 2008 (permalink)

We tried out the Plantronics Discovery 925 headset to see what it had to offer. In our tests, we found pairing the headset with an LG Voyager to be extremely intuitive. We just turned it on, pressed the main button, and pairing happened almost instantaneously. As for call quality, it sounded pretty good. Callers didn't even know we were using a headset.

There are a couple of "big deal" features with this headset. First, you can pair it with two cell phones simultaneously and send/receive calls from each phone - this is a plus for people who have both a work and cell phone. Also, we particularly like the case that comes with it. It's about the size of a lipstick case and when you leave the headset inside the case you can charge it on-the-go, since it has a built-in charger as well. A definite plus, if you run out of juice while on the road. However, putting the headset in the case is not exactly intuitive. It needs to go in on an angle. Good thing there's a diagram inside the case to show you how it's done.

Want to learn more about headsets? Check out our Bluetooth Headset Buying Guide for tips on picking a headset.

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Calling all DJs - show off your skills on a cell phone

by Joni Blecher
Wednesday, July 02, 2008 (permalink)

Have a hidden or maybe not so hidden DJ talent? It's time to release your inner DJ. Check out the new contest at Tonemine.com. The idea is that you mix your own ringtone, share it with others in the community, share it on your favorite social networking site, accumulate the most votes to win a BlackBerry. Check out the details in the video below and then enter the contest.

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Handsfree driving laws go into effect today: Find out what it means to you

by Joni Blecher
Tuesday, July 01, 2008 (permalink)

Today, the new driving laws for the state of California go into effect, which means that the way Californians talk and drive is about to change. While there are a lot of details involved in the new law, here are some of the highlights:

• Drivers pulled over for using handheld wireless devices while driving and fined $20 and $50 for each subsequent violation. (Note: Additional fees can apply)

• Violations have no adverse effect on drivers’ insurance premiums.

• You can't have both ears covered while using a Bluetooth device, which means you shouldn't be using stereo headsets with your cell phone while driving.

• Drivers under the age of 18 can't use a cell phone, pager, laptop or any other electronic communication or mobile services device to speak or text while driving in any manner, even hands-free. However, drivers under 18 will only be cited if they are pulled over for another driving violation first.

We'll have reviews of headsets all week here at PhoneTalk, as well as provide helpful tips for using a cell phone while in the car. In the meantime, check out our Bluetooth Headset Buying Guide for tips on picking a headset.

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Anticipating the next ten years of smartphone innovation - Part 2

by Guest Blogger
Friday, June 27, 2008 (permalink)

Now, in Part 2 of this special guest post from Symbian Executive Vice President of Research David Wood, get a glimpse at what could be the future of smartphones.

Symbian’s understanding of the probable evolution of smartphones over the decade ahead is guided, first and foremost, by the extraordinary insight we gain from the trusted relationships we have built up and nurtured over many years with the visionaries, leaders, gurus, and countless thoughtful foot soldiers in our customer and partner companies. As the history of Symbian has unfolded, these relationships of “customer intimacy” have deepened and flourished: our customers and partners have seen that we treated their insights and ideas with respect and with due confidentiality – and that has prompted them to share even more of their thinking (their hopes and their fears) about the future of smartphones. In turn, this shapes our extensive roadmap of future enhancements to Symbian OS technology.

To provide additional checks on our thinking about future issues and opportunities for smartphones, Symbian is inaugurating an essay contest, which is open to entries from students at universities throughout the world. Up to ten essays will win a prize of £1000 each – essays need to be submitted before the end of September, and winners will be announced at the Symbian Smartphone Show in October. Essays should address the overall theme of “The next wave of smartphone innovation”. For details of how to enter the contest, click here.

As a guide for potential entrants, Symbian has announced a set of six research sub-themes, which are also areas that Symbian believes deserve further investigation in universities or other research institutions:

• Device evolution / revolution through 2012-2015: The smartphones of the future are likely to be significantly different from those of today. Although today’s smartphones have tremendous capability, those reaching the market in 2012-2015 are likely to put today’s devices into the shade. What clues are there, about the precise characteristics of these devices?
  
• Improved development and delivery methodologies: The dramatically increasing scale and complexity of smartphone development projects mean that these projects tend to become lengthy and difficult – posing significant commercial challenges.
  
• Success factors for mobile applications and mobile operating systems: What are the factors that significantly impact adoption of mobile software? What can be done to address the factors responsible for low adoption?
  
• Possible breakthrough applications and markets: The search for “killer apps” for smartphones continues. Are there substantial new smartphone application markets waiting to be unlocked by new features at the operating system level?
  
• Possible breakthrough technology improvements: Smartphone applications and services depend on underlying technology, which will come under mounting stress due to increased demands from data, processing, throughput, (Read more)

  Tags:

  Somethin' To Talk About

  Symbian

  Smart phones

  International

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Anticipating the next ten years of smartphone innovation - Part 1

by Guest Blogger
Thursday, June 26, 2008 (permalink)

This week celebrates the 10 year anniversary of Symbian, so we asked Symbian Executive Vice President of Research, David Wood, to provide thoughts on the evolution of the OS and how far it still has to go. His post will appear in two parts. Tomorrow, we'll get a peak at just how much more we can expect from smartphones.

This June, Symbian is celebrating its tenth anniversary. As someone who has been a core member of Symbian’s executive management team throughout these ten roller-coaster years, I’d like to share some of my personal reflections on the remarkable smartphone innovations that have taken place over that time – and, in that light, to consider what the next ten years may bring.

It was on 24 June 1998 that the formation of Symbian was announced to the world. The industry’s leading phone manufacturers were to cooperate to fund further development of the operating system known at the time as EPOC32 (this name dates from the inception of the OS, four years earlier, inside the UK-based PDA manufacturer Psion). The funding would enable the operating system to power numerous diverse models of advanced mobile phones – known, in virtue of their rich programmability, as “smartphones”. The news echoed far and wide. In time, the funding repaid investors handsomely: more than 200 million Symbian-based smartphones have already been sold, earning our customers substantial profits. It’s not just our direct customers that have benefited: a fertile ecosystem of partner companies is sharing in an ongoing technological and market success.

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Get Loopt in...

by Joni Blecher
Thursday, June 26, 2008 (permalink)

A while back, I wrote about a friend finder service available on Boost Mobile cell phones called Loopt. The idea behind the service is that you can find out where people are physically located on your cell phone. In order for it to work, you both have to be Loopt members and opt-in. The service is now available on many Verizon Wireless phones and can be accessed directly from your phone via the Get It Now/Tools On The Go menu. If your cell phone supports the feature it will appear as an option in services you can download. Takes the guess work out of it for you. The service costs $3.99 a month.

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Symbian's place in the smartphone market

by Guest Blogger
Thursday, June 26, 2008 (permalink)

This week celebrates the 10 year anniversary of Symbian, so we asked Bloggers around the Internet to tell us their thoughts on the OS, how far it's come and just how far it can go. Our next post comes from David Cassel. To read more from David, check out the Tech.Blorge.

In 2001, I interviewed Symbian's CEO, Colly Myers. He was intensely committed to cellphones — he was using an Ericsson R380 smartphone — but he said he hoped someday to have the option of using a fold-out keyboard.

Myers envisioned a future with more processing power on phones and a lot more development for the mobile platform, I read later. At the time Symbian was locked in a battle for survival with Microsoft — and less than a year later, Myers resigned suddenly.

It's a different world now. Fold-out keyboards are plentiful, cell phones can play full-color video — and Symbian has the dominant smartphone operating system. In 2006 Symbian announced they'd reached a milestone — 100 million Symbian smartphones, shipped to over network operators. (Ironically, this was two years after the the first reports of Symbian worms like Caribe). But the biggest threat to Symbian now isn't Microsoft — it's Google.

In the short-term, Symbian is secure. Android hasn't been released yet, and its final release date is still hard to nail down. (The last rumor I heard suggested September of 2008.) Even then, Android will need to grow a community of developers. Android ultimately needs a critical mass of users, developers, and installations — and I can't see that even starting to happen until sometime near 2010.

Remember that Symbian enters this battle with a head start of 100 million phones. That's important, because ultimately the prevailing operating system will be determined by a handful of key players. Symbian can still boast that they're the industry standard — and if nothing else, there's an inertia that works in their favor. And Symbian's developers have to be happy knowing that they're developing for such a huge user base.

That's the good news for Symbian. But the bad news is the cell phone market is definitely changing. It's always been competitive, and Symbian has real worries that an Android developer will someday create a killer app that Symbian can't replicate. Apple's iPhone also raised the expectations consumers had for the interfaces on their phones. (And the iPhone even started a growing backlash to "closed networks," with Congressional hearings and vocal opposition from Google.) So there's a feeling of flux in the market.

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Cell phones in action: Use a 3G AT&T cell phone as a wireless modem for a Mac

by Joni Blecher
Wednesday, June 25, 2008 (permalink)

We hear a lot about 3G cell phones and all the services they have to offer. We wanted to see just how well it would work if we paired a 3G cell phone with a Mac via Bluetooth and used it as a wireless modem. So we took a Samsung SGH-A737 cell phone, signed up for an unlimited data plan, paired it with a Bluetooth-enabled MacBook Pro, and put it to the test. Check out the results below, and if you want to try this at home, see our How-To on the topic.

Note: Although we used a Samsung SGH-A737 cell phone in the video, it’s best to use a 3G HSPA smartphone.

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