If you thought that little piece of plastic that lets your GSM phone get jiggy with your carrier’s network was fragile, think again. Apparently, you can cook your SIM card (GSM-only, for reasons that should be obvious) to incredible temperatures and still retrieve your stored contact info. Two electronic engineers, Benjamin Jones and Tony Kenyon,…
Juniper Research: Mobile entertainment service market to increase threefold to $64bn by 2012
According to a new report by Juniper Research – it’s the music, games and mobile TV that will contribute the most to the global mobile entertainment market which will rise from just over $20 billion in 2007 to more than $64 billion by 2012. Other mobile entertainment sectors include user-generated Content, gambling, adult and infotainment.…
Heat to electricity – US Department of Energy researchers want to convert body heat into gadget-juice
We waste energy all the time. Incandescent light bulbs emit most of their energy as heat, and just a wee bit a visible light. Energy that goes into cooling our refrigerator is wasted as heat. Electrical energy in our computers generate a lot of heat (it’s the reason that laptop is keeping your giblets nice…
Brazil ended last year with 121 million mobile phone owners
It may not have a population larger than a billion of people like India or China, but Brazil keeps growing like crazy nevertheless. At the end of 2007, 121 million Brazilians owned a mobile phone, 21.1 million or 21% more from 2006. According to the country’s telecommunications regulator Anatel, net additions in December were a…
Acision: 43 billion text messages sent for the New Year; 23 billion through our systems
According to SMS experts Acision, mobile phone users sent 43 billion text messages to wish their loved ones a happy New Year – of which more than 23 billion were successfully processed through Acision’s systems. To put numbers in a perspective, Acision said that global SMS traffic over the 2007/2008 New Year period increased by…
Freesky Research: In flight mobile phone ban could hurt U.S. competitiveness
Over the last year, almost a dozen airlines have announced plans to allow passengers to send SMS from their own mobile phones. Passengers in Australia, France, Turkey, Ireland, Malaysia, India, and other countries are now using mobile devices in flight, or will be able to do so sometime in 2008. However, passengers in the United…
US experts urge research into cellphone effects on children
We were pretty much on the money when we speculated that France’s move to warn its citizens about limiting cellphone use among youngsters would prompt other countries to do the same. Experts in the US are urging Yankee researchers to look into the possible effects of cellphone use on children and their development. Youngsters are…
Webcredible: Most desired services for mobile phone users are email and social networking
Usability and accessibility consultants Webcredible conducted a survey among 1010 mobile phone users to identify which service they would use the most “if speed and quality weren’t an issue.” And the results are: Email – 335 votes (33%) Social networks – 254 votes (25%) Local information/whats around you – 199 votes (20%) Travel information/planning –…
Nielsen: 46 million people used mobile search in Q3 2007; Local listings most popular
According to Nielsen, 46.1 mobile data users in the U.S. used mobile search functions in the third quarter of 2007. Out of that number, Nielsen estimates that: The most popular form of mobile search among data users in Q3 2007 was 411 (18.1 million users), followed closely by SMS-based searching, which was used by 14.1…
Infra-Red transfers are back – KDDI claims IR transfer of entire CD in less than one second
Remember those days of yore when we’d “beam” data between our mobile gadgets via that little dark-red-plastic covered port known as an IR port? It was super-convenient to be able to transfer some contact information on the fly, but it was also super-annoying to have to make sure the ports were lined up correctly –…