Category: Telephony

LLU Line Share finally a reasonable price in Ireland

(Line Share allows other operators to rent just the internetty part of the line, without having to take the phoney part.)

ComReg set it to 77c in August of last year and Eircom, predictably, appealed. The case is now settled, and the 77c price stands. For once ComReg didn’t wet themselves on the courthouse steps and run away crying like a little girl. Or did they? What did Eircom get out of it?

Micro-USB Mobiles in Europe

Obsolete before it actually happens?

Top mobile telephone suppliers have agreed to back an EU-wide harmonization of phone chargers, the European Commission said on Monday, hailing the pact as good news for consumers and the environment.

The Commission said the agreement would involve the creation of an EU norm, and that the new generation of mobile phones would use a standard micro-USB socket to ensure compatibility.

via Reuters.

Palm Pre

[This has been in my drafts since January 9, only noticed it now. It does have a motion sensor and landscape mode btw.]

The wife’ll kill me, I want one of these and I only have my Treo Pro a couple months.

Palm Pre

It seems to settle a major deficiency in the Treo Pro, namely Windows Mobile. It’s not a bad mobile OS per se, but the hardware is a tad underpowered for it, and it has niggles that can’t be addressed because of it’s closed nature. That said, I don’t know if the Pre’s webOS will be open either, but hopefully Palm will have generated Clue from their Windows adventure. And drop it forevermore…

One other apparent deficiency would appear to be a motion sensor and/or landscape mode. You’d think that if it had it, the presenter in these PC Pro videos – well worth watching by the way – would have demoed it; although it has to be said that despite best effort, he’s no Steve Jobs and might have been better off deferring to someone with more charisma.

(Via Slashdot.)

.TEL Coming Soon

New TLD sunrising on December 3, landrushing Feb 3, GA March 24.

Very cool service with no hosting required, everything is done via the DNS. Put your contact details in a few NAPTR records, add your location in a LOC RR and perhaps a few keywords in TXT RRs, and your details will appear neatly formatted on your automatically generated .TEL website. (Tucows is the registrar I use in Beecher Networks.) But of course since that’s just generated from your raw data, it can be used in a multitude of other ways, by your mobile, your GPS unit, etc.

Not cheap though, at least not for sunrise. I haven’t set pricing yet, but I reckon sunrise registrations’ll run at least €300.

Nokia to buy and open source Symbian

I wouldn’t be mad about the Symbian platform, but this is still huge news, it has a huge install base.

Symbian co-founder Nokia announced Monday night that it is buying the 52 percent of the software maker that it doesn’t already own and releasing its mobile operating system under an open source license.

Someone should buy nineties-thinker Tavis McCourt some clue though:

“With the success of Apple’s and RIM’s models, we would have thought traditional handset vendors would develop and maintain similar proprietary OS models,” said Tavis McCourt, a Morgan Keegan analyst. “We view this move as a long-term positive for the smartphone vendors that own their own OS (RIM, Apple and, soon, Palm).”

4 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Cell Phones

I was just telling Walter that I don’t come across anything worth blogging these days – christ, I’m liveblogging now – when lo and behold this pops up:

  1. Luxembourg’s mobile phone penetration rate is 158%. 158 active cell phones for every 100 people.
  2. 15-19 year old Koreans send an average of 60 texts a day.
  3. You’re not the only one that uses your phone as a torch. Not by a long shot.
  4. Half of Japan’s top fiction was written on mobile phones.

(The article lists 10, but the rest or ho-hum.)

O2 Ireland’s ARPU falls in Q1

Excellent, about time they stopped raping Irish users. Now all they need to do is cut it by another 50% or so.

SiliconRepublic: Mobile operator O2 said this morning that monthly blended average revenue per user (ARPU) “combining voice and data revenue” fell from €45.2 in the fourth quarter to €44.2 in the first quarter of 2008.

Stephen Fry Blogs

And his first post is about smartphones. I never fail to be impressed by that man. I think he’s a bit harsh on the Treo 680, but by god is he right about Palm in general — I don’t think they know what they fuck they’re doing, never mind their customers.

Perhaps they could take Stephen on to develop and roll out his idyllic 800, which really isn’t asking all that much in the current technical environment. He could replace the fuckwit that came up with the giant waste of time and money that was the Foleo.

(Thank the gods I can say “was“.)

Mobile Phone Registration Response

The full response to my objection is attached if you’d like to read it, but roughly translated from the we-don’t-give-a-shit-what-you-think language the Greens have rapidly picked up from the Fianna Failures, it says:

“I didn’t actually read your email and have sent you this form response. Fuck you.”

And fuck you too Eamon.