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I've just moved to an Orange SPV C500 from an iPaq 5455. The only thing I miss from the 5455 is WiFi. but everything else I need (MP3 / Ogg, mpeg, reasonable mail client and browser, VNC, Camera & Vidcamera, FTP, Document reader, Calendar and Addressbook) is in the smartphone.

Most of it can be done with freeware or ships as standard as well.

http://www.modaco.com/ may have some details on when they will be in the USA. ....oh yeah, that won't work here as it's an MS smartphone :)

All premium rate mobile phone SMS services in the UK will respond to a reply entitles "STOP" from August 1st. Just send the word STOP to them and they are now obliged to stop.

See this BBC new story for more details.

If they're persistant, forward the message to "VSPAM" if on Vodafone or "SPAM" if on Orange and they'll investigate and pass on to ICSTIS.

Finally, sign up to the Telephone Preference Service to stop unsolicited marketing calls and SMS.

T
--
Not speaking for my employers in any way

I've given up in life on expecting customer service people to understand anything technical. If they knew technical stuff, for the most part, they would have a better job. So I call customer service to do basic things like change my plan and such. I travel to Europe a lot and usually change my plan to a really cheap one while I'm there (I have an unlocked GSM dual-band phone that I use in Europe -- I purchase pre-paid SIM cards for whatever country I'm in; Orange for the UK, Vodafone for Ireland, E-Plus for Germany, etc.) And I try to call at times when I think fewer people would be calling. But there aren't any times when they even claim to have a waiting time of less than 10 minutes -- which really means about 20 minutes. Do they specifically staff their call centers to a certain hold time? I'm not happy with my AT&T service in general, but waiting times improving alone would make me a much happier cell phone user.

Get your patch for Apple here

Get Manic Miner for Java enabled phones here or here. The Vodafone release has all 20 levels, the Orange version just has the first five.

Oh, and this charitable release from MegaTree appears to be more about self promotion rather than setting free the fabled sequel.

I use it to get information I need whilst on the move.

Typically as I walk to the station in the morning I'll check my local commuter rail company's real-time running information and the National Rail live departure board for my station to see how late my train is (it's only been on time three times since the new timetable came in last September!) so I know how fast I'll have to walk to catch it. As my train approaches Victoria I often check out London Transport's real-time news to see if the Victoria line is OK or not. If not, I know to head for the bus station on arriving at Victoria rather than go to the tube station.

Coming home, I usually check out these things on the web at work before departing, rather than on my WAP phone, but if there is a problem, WAP is useful for finding out when it's likely to be resolved as it seems that the information on it is often more up to date than the information on the station announcements.

On my journey home I sometimes check out the BBC News headlines on WAP as I don't get in until after the early-evening news programmes have finished.

Sometimes if it's a Thursday when my fiancee is lecturing in London, we meet up after work and instead of heading back home, we'll look to see what's on at the cinema and go and see a film if one appeals.

All the above links are to sites on the "real" web, but they all correspond to WAP sites I use regularly. They don't look as pretty in WAP, and it can be slow to get to what you want, as you have to work through more, smaller screens, but they do work.

Last time I was in the US, last August, my UK Orange GSM phone roamed on both AT&T Wireless and T-Mobile in SE New England: Boston, southern RI and Martha's Vinyard. Perhaps AT&T do use CDMA but they clearly use GSM too.

Orange have both AT&T and Cingular listed as GSM roaming networks in the US.

How about a phone that is a phone first and a computer second?

If you wanted that why did you purchase a Pocket PC based phone then?

If you'd have done your research, you'd have discovered there are Microsoft "phone first" devices, based on Windows Smartphone. They're only just coming out in the US, us backward Europeans have had a couple of a few years now. I got an E200 a few months back.

They are, by no means, perfect. Battery life still sucks, bluetooth is crippled (no DUN profile support), S/SMTP is broken, MMS doesn't support sound, but the syncronisation with your desktop is pefect, unlike the last two Nokias I've had.

The comment on battery life is interesting. Since colour screens became the rage, cell phones have taken a step back (IMO) in battery life. It's going to take a few years to get one that lasts over a week with use again.

Ewan

IANAL, but AFAIK you cannot trademark common English words. The example I've always seen is that you cannot trademark the word "orange", but you could trademark a unique phrase containing the word "orange".

Er...Orange

What? Like: This ?

That's actually happening in the UK now, you can get cards for your laptop that will let you connect to cellphone networks for a GPRS connection. It just runs like a standard 'net connection as far as I can see, apart from including software so you can text message and get an indication of how strong your network signal is. I don't know if they'll work with anything apart from windows though. Here's a link to one service.

Also Orange is the only one carrying these phones (thus the name) and Orange is just one network among many in the UK.

Look here

Also when you look at the Orange-shop, the first cellphone is the Treo 600 with lots of Nokias on the first page. The Orange SVP is not even on the first page anymore.

Microsoft is able to make some isolated deals with some networks, but the vast majority of networks don't even offer them and those who still do are not marketing them.

It is available. But only on the Orange network.

The law says that a wired hands-free kit *is* legal - only if you don't have to hold the phone to make or receive calls (BBC News). The Treo's hands-free kit has a button by the mic that will allow you to answer incoming calls. Sadly, it has no voice activated dialling.

T

BUT they ARE available, i just bought one yesterday from an orange shop in London

This thread is goZing down the tubues. Orange you happy?

Personally, I would rather wait for the Sony Ericsson P900, also out soon.

"The future is Open"

I get the feeling IBM's spiffy sound bite may not work in some European countries; it's taken.

"The future is Orange"

"The Association said an upgrade to the A5/2 encryption algorithm, available since July 2002, addresses the security weaknesses highlighted by the Israelis."

100% of cellphones don't run Windows

What about the Orange SPV?

Or the O2 XDA?

Orange is a reference to the phone carrier that the phone was produced for.
That's: Orange

There are if you're a corporate: Orange offers flat-rate pricing for businesses, including Orange GPRS Business LAN, which is billed by the size of the pipe from their NOC to yours...

I am from the UK. SMS or texting as we prefer to call it is very popular because of the low price involved. I am on the Orange mobile network. Calls cost 35p/min peak and 5p/min off-peak on my contract where I don't pay any line-rental or any other expense except for the cost of the phone. I paid £15 to Orangefor an "extra" from their service. This allows me to send five text (SMS) messages per day for free for life or as long as the 2G network exists. So now it doesn't cost me anything to send a txt (SMS). Orange have removed that deal now, but they still give everyone who signed up their five free messages a day. Because I bought a £50 top-up card, that is £50 of credit I get all extra messages for only 5p/message. txts are anomynous and easy, thats one of many reasons why they're popular. Because each message is limited to 160 characters, they have sprung up a new language of words that are shorter than normal english words. Someone even answered their exam paper using the txt language.

I am from the UK. SMS or texting as we prefer to call it is very popular because of the low price involved. I am on the Orange mobile network. Calls cost 35p/min peak and 5p/min off-peak on my contract where I don't pay any line-rental or any other expense except for the cost of the phone. I paid £15 to Orangefor an "extra" from their service. This allows me to send five text (SMS) messages per day for free for life or as long as the 2G network exists. So now it doesn't cost me anything to send a txt (SMS). Orange have removed that deal now, but they still give everyone who signed up their five free messages a day. Because I bought a £50 top-up card, that is £50 of credit I get all extra messages for only 5p/message. txts are anomynous and easy, thats one of many reasons why they're popular. Because each message is limited to 160 characters, they have sprung up a new language of words that are shorter than normal english words. Someone even answered their exam paper using the txt language.

I am from the UK. SMS or texting as we prefer to call it is very popular because of the low price involved. I am on the Orange mobile network. Calls cost 35p/min peak and 5p/min off-peak on my contract where I don't pay any line-rental or any other expense except for the cost of the phone. I paid £15 to Orangefor an "extra" from their service. This allows me to send five text (SMS) messages per day for free for life or as long as the 2G network exists. So now it doesn't cost me anything to send a txt (SMS). Orange have removed that deal now, but they still give everyone who signed up their five free messages a day. Because I bought a £50 top-up card, that is £50 of credit I get all extra messages for only 5p/message. txts are anomynous and easy, thats one of many reasons why they're popular. Because each message is limited to 160 characters, they have sprung up a new language of words that are shorter than normal english words. Someone even answered their exam paper using the txt language.

I would recommend looking at Ananova as they have some of the most up to date information. The coverage is not very indepth, just rapid publishing of facts searchable by time date stamp or topic. It is England based (run buy Orange) but a very useful source for forming your own opinions based on the latest information. The same information tends to find its way onto the BBC news site (which rocks) a couple of hours later.

Sort of. If you buy an Orange SPV when it comes out, you get a promotional tarrif that allows unlimited internet access, but only for 6 months.

Decisions decisions. Sulk.

True, I switched from Nextel to AT&T, and even though my monthly rate is cheaper (Roughly $40) I'm on a 2 year contract, and my off-peak time doesn't start until 9pm, even on Fridays which is right before the weekend period (which is also off-peak). Not to mention, I pay .10 cents per text-message, which adds up little by little (unless I want to pay an additional $5 for 100 text messages).

I believe though that it's cheaper than the UK, where text messages are 10p per text (Roughtly .15 cents per message, based on Orange's rates.)

My solution is currently an iPAQ H3970 talking to a Nokia 6310i via bluetooth. I can leave the phone in my backpack and send and receive e-mail, SMS, surf the web, even connect to IRC on my iPAQ. Pretty sweet.

So I guess with that, and with a certain hardware company pushing WiFi services, the article really is, literally, comparing Orange to Apple.

I use my mobile phone while I'm mobile. I use my laptop while I'm sitting down (else it wouldn't be a laptop, now would it?)
It's always nice to recall where we've been, but comparing wifi hotspots to the Rabbit project is comparing apples to oranges.
(Apologies for the analogy-links, I couldn't resist)

And there was me thinking that you're billed by the megabyte.

I've had wildfire as my voicemail system on my Orange mobile for over 2 years now and it works just great. It's especially useful whilst in the car on a hands-free kit. I have no idea if any other GSM networks use this yet- or if Orange even offer it on their networks outside the UK. http://www.orange.co.uk/wildfire http://www.wildfire.com

A.D.

Your quoted numbers include a huge portion of Russia, which does not have all these services you speak of, as well as the former Yugoslavia and much of eastern Europe.

Actually having roamned over most of Eastern Europe and parts of Russian with my Orange GSM tri-band, I can quite catagorically state that you are wrong, at least for GSM.

voice tags to people's numbers

A number of Motorola phones have this already and it works quite well (in my experience).

My service provider (Orange) also has a service called WildFire which works on voice recognition... it allows you to dial numbers in your phone book or other numbers by just saying the number... it's great when you're driving with a handsfree kit attached (not that I would know as this is frowned upon by the local law!). WildFire also manages voice mails by voice commands too... you do feel quite silly initially, talking to the service, but after a while you get used to it.

In the UK, both Orange and One2One are GSM 1800 only networks. Of the networks that are GSM 900 (BT Cellnet and Vodafone), they sometimes have GSM 1800 cells in high-density areas (like London), but they always have GSM 900 too.

Ahh... but this is the thing with mobiles in Europe, the whole local/national scheme goes out the window, it doesn't matter if you call a landline next to you or some phone box 500 miles away in Scotland, it's the same charge (quite a reasonable one too).

Since mobiles by their very nature roaming across huge distances you can't penalise the caller or the recipient on distances or location. In fact, apart from specialist call-back cards I've never seen recipients paying for incoming calls. (what an odd scheme of things).

It's a similar thing with international calls too since cell phones have their own location independent area codes (for instance all mobiles begin with 07xxx in the UK), it's the same across Europe.

Say I call my brother's cell phone in France from the UK, it's the same charge if I call him in Switzerland or Germany. I don't have to dial different country codes for each country (how am I meant to know what country he's in without speaking to him, or even know he's abroad? catch 22) so you just dial the same number you do in the UK, and if the cell is roaming in France it gets patched over to their GSM network.

In fact, many of the web to SMS gateways take advantage of this unified network, the messages goes to an Eastern European nation then is injected onto the GSM network and finds its way to the UK or France etc. Companies buy huge SMS quotas from an operator in Prague for example.

As for the call allowances, we get those too, certain tariffs include 10-20 txt messages a day and 50 minutes of free talk time per day for instance, and free access to voice mail etc. Then there's the "pay as you go" phones that incur no monthly fees, but you pay more for the calls.

A similar idea is being touted by Orange whose grand plan is to use an always on mobile terminal device with their Wildfire personal assistant who will listen to your day and arrange things to happen, inform you of information and collate calls and messages wether they are voicemail, email or faxes.

But until we have the always on alway connected devices we're still going to be pretty much tethered to our desks.

I wish someone would tell Orange (www.orange.co.uk) about this. Maybe their flaky Flash animations work in Windows but they keep making Netscape in Linux fall over. I had to disable the plugin just to get at the roaming information page....

Not quite true. WAP can't handle anything - WAP is the mobile version of HTTP, WML is the mobile version of HTML and 9600baud are the mobile version of 56k modems.

It is the phone and GSM network that limit the speed to 9600baud. By removing some of the error correction this can be upped to 14,400bps. By using more than one channel you can double, triple etc the speed.

Currently Orange are allowing 14k4 connections and are selling a datacard for PCMCIA equipped PCs which provides 28k8 conections.

You could, if you wanted run a WAP browser on this and be running WAP at 28k8. I prefer to run a WAP browser on my home PC and get WAP at 512kbps though.

M@t :o)

One company is trying to change that, Virgin Mobile are selling phones at full price and offer relatively cheap calls for no line rental at all. (The other networks offer no-line-rental prepay options but the phones are subsidised a bit and the calls are hellishly expensive.

Keyboard? How quaint!

Why not simply speak into the damn thing? After all, mobile phones have already progressed to the point (at least in the UK, YMMV) already dial numbers and navigate around your voice mailbox using only your voice. (See Orange's Wildfire, for example.)

Mobiles have already shrunk to wristwatch size - I know Toshiba at least have produced such a toy. Using a WAP phone is a pain because most of the current products have been rushed to market without any real thought going into them. (As usual. Sigh.)

I think you're guilty of the same sin as the NYT - you're not thinking far enough out of the box.

To address the comment about losing these items, well, I already think nothing of walking around with £150 worth of mobile in one pocket and £200 of palmtop in the other. (Plus god knows how much valuable data on it.) And of course keys to £15,000 worth of house contents...

We're used to paying 1p a minute local rate and internet access from home anyway. Not a big jump in cost.

N.B. 1ukp = 1.5 USD and 1p = 1.5c

Actually, I believe that Orange (a UK mobile phone company) is planning to bring in video-phone mobiles sometime soon (early next year they claim). They've been going on about it for ages. The demo models I saw a while ago looked pretty nifty, but I think that the quality will be naff, and the batteries will probably last about five minutes.

Actually, I believe that Orange (a UK mobile phone company) is planning to bring in video-phone mobiles sometime soon (early next year they claim). They've been going on about it for ages. The demo models I saw a while ago looked pretty nifty, but I think that the quality will be naff, and the batteries will probably last about five minutes.

Think of the massive cost involved, and then realise that OFTEL are requiring BT to "open up" the local loop by July 2001. Imagine all the big UK phone companies digging separate trenches along the road. It just doesn't make sense. It'll be so much better when they can just splice their own cables down BT's ducts.

I have to say I'm annoyed that it's Cellnet (or BT Cellnet I should now say) that's doing this. As many people have said, they have a reputation for charging fees which amount to extortion and recently, the quality of Cellnet's service (even in "full coverage" areas) has been dire. And I'm in Leeds, where Cellnet have their headquarters!

All I can hope for is that this encourages other companies such as Orange to follow suit and roll out their own services.