Last week, we had a solar powered Bluetooth headset from Iqua up for grabs (winner announced in a separate post). This week, in keeping with our green theme, though not intentionally, we have FIVE complementary disposable phone numbers up for grabs for use within the USA courtesy of Vumber. Let’s go green – let’s go disposable!

DISPOSABLE PHONE NUMBERS??
Yep you heard it right. Vumber is a service that allows you to link your current mobile phone number to a Vumber account, thus masking your real mobile number. This is useful for short business trips, filtering contacts and gee, for practically …read more

You know, I’ve been reviewing gadgets for the past 5 years – it may be considered a long time for some, but highly unlikely to reach veteran review status soon. The thing with reviewing devices is that one tends to get stuck in the game of tech specs where the premise of “mine is bigger than yours” seems to win out (thus proving that the worldwide tech scene may just really be a man’s world). However, technical specs doesn’t seem to be the way the game is played anymore. In the same way that the smaller Japanese cars have a …read more

When i was a lot younger, I had a teacher who always carried a tape deck with minus one songs at the back of his car. He was a good singer and he would tell me that the deck would be a “precaution” just in case people would ask him to sing at parties. Apparently he got these requests often, which led him to take on this peculiar set up.
While I was in Indonesia last week, our guide had a Nokia E90 with him. It was preinstalled with several hits from the 70’s, but all in minus one format. This …read more

Well, it’s nothing much. But considering that phone company websites don’t really do this, a huge kudos to Samsung for exerting the extra effort to get batty this Halloween. If you visit their website today, you’ll be rewarded with a screen filled with falling bats and a jack o’ lantern at the bottom right.

First it was Apple. And then Google announced their own. Now Skype is joining the bandwagon too. Yes, Skype is partnering with telcos to release their first cell phone.

Code-named the “white phone,” the Skype handset will be introduced by late October in Britain, Italy, Hong Kong, and Australia, and will reach 3’s other five markets later, BusinessWeek has learned. There are no immediate plans to bring the device to North America, though the companies may try to license it to other carriers or sell versions straight to consumers for them to use on other networks.[Full Article]
Two things:
First, unlike the iPhone, …read more

With Web 2.0, we explored the depths of social media and user generated content. This was the dawn of web democracy for blogs and social bookmarking. The talk goes that the next step is to take it to the mobile phones. And it’s no secret that these same 2.0 sites are also developing their counterpart applications for the mobile phone.
As for when this will reach critical mass, I really can’t tell. But I do know this: the adoption rate for “Web 3.0″ will be much slower because not all phones are created equal and more so, not all telcos …read more

They say that there are always two sides of the same coin. The same can be said with mobile phones. The most out of the box yet functional design to grace a phone’s real estate is the two sided Samsung F300, sporting a 2.1 inch multimedia screen on one side for video and music and a smaller screen on the other side for calls. Back home, the advertisment with Beyonce has been playing across movie theatres for the past several weeks. Beyonce is the official endorser for Samsung’s line of mobile phones.

I wonder where the battery is located.

2 Megapixel Camera
Display …read more

The Nokia “Go Play” press invite is around the blogosphere. The “Go Play” is allegedly the iTunes-like service that Nokia has been keeping under its coat for so long. With Apple expanding to phones and Nokia expanding to music, the cross-referencing of business models makes for a rather confusing take on what “core competency” used to mean. I have to admit that I have to see it to believe it.

This must be the standalone Nokia-branded music service we reported on only days ago? The date, the venue, and the details all match the rumoured reports.
Very exciting but perhaps a little …read more

This is big news. Last week on TWiT, John C. Dvorak and the rest of the panel talked about how an open airwave that used to be owned by the big broadcasters is now going to auctioned off for a $15 Billion “public wireless channel.”

The vote was a partial victory for consumer advocacy groups and Internet companies such as Google, which wanted rules that would allow consumers to use a variety of devices on a network. But those groups also sought more-ambitious rules that would open the network to third-party companies. That measure did not pass. Creating an open network …read more

In my interview with James Young, we briefly talked about the new T9 upgrade to be released with new Windows Mobile devices.
Word completion has been a feature embedded in most Windows Mobile devices – and if not, it was an easy download as far as the early days of the Palm OS. What the upgraded predictive text does is map out the possible words you could spell with the letters in the vicinity of where you press. As you can see, this feature is basically geared towards consumers with huge fingers. Never again will you have to push buttons at …read more