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'Texting' Takes Over The Philippines
Logic Bomb writes: "The New York Times has an article [Free reg. req.] about how "texting" -- the sending of short text messages via cell phone -- is taking over life in the Phillipines. I mean really taking over. People are texting while they drive, at funerals, instead of conversing over dinner, during tests in school, even to avoid the potential embarassment of asking someone for a date in person. This is an interesting contrast to, say, Finland (home of cellular giants like Nokia), where cell phones are everywhere but people actually use them to talk. The article gives some economic reasons for this difference, and mentions that this may be a good way to start bringing some of the poorer but developed countries into the digital age. Any thoughts from the Slashdot community? Is this a good thing, or is it an unfortunate imposition of the depersonalizing aspects of technology onto an unsuspecting culture?"
perl isn't meant to be fast, it's a scripting language.
Don't be mean or my friend Oog will smash your head
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
The only thing that should be sent by SMS are "short mesages" with accordingly small content. Asking someone out on a date is nearly guaranteed to fail if you're a boy. If you can't manage to ask a girl out in person then you probably won't be able to talk to her intellectually for an evening and just stare at her stunning beaty. By the way girls like to get attention and asking them out to a date is only going to get you a "no" or "yes". Or if they are really evil a "maybe next time". Which if you are in love fail to recognize as "never". SMS is perfect for telling you are late or the meeting place has changed. But anything else than that it can lead to so many misunderstandings. But as a way to learn new technology and as a cheap in both senses of the word communication it works perfect. Also since there is a 160 character limitation to SMS messages you are to bound to always cut out some vital information. One short advice: If start to send 2 SMS msg's in a row because you had so much to say then call the person.
Remember?
http://www.cryptonomicon.com
In Norway it's now illegal to drive and use a cell phone. If the police catch you - they'll give you a 500NKR (63$) fine/ticket.
I wonder whether lagging behind is the appropriate term? I know w/ TV technology (not even HDTV) U.S. Acted as "pioneers," allowing others to leapfrog but in turn "surpass" us. I assume tis the same w/ wireless.
OK. Maybe I'm weird, but I don't mind talking face to face or using e-mail. I even carry a good old-fashioned pager around with me. It just does'nt bother me the same. Maybe other people are the same and hence this trend.
Or maybe it's just that the line quality is so bad.
Tomorrow will be our 11th Anniversary.
Its been a great marriage strengthened by life on several continents, twice as many cities, a war, and a handful of other life experiences. I'm more than grateful for the chance to interact with the people behind the dim glow of text, a computer, and a MODEM.
YMMV.
Hey, well here in Britain we have something called "Pay as you talk" no monthly charge, and you pay for mins when you use them, you have money stored on the phone, it works great, I am surprised you don't have it, it really took off here, the only problem is that you now have 6 year olds running around with their own cell phones!!!
Here in the Netherlands we have five mobile GSM-providers.
And like Italy there are almost as many mobile phones as telephone lines.
I use a little perlscript on my Linuxrouter which checks some other routers and servers.
If one of them goes down I get a SMS message and an email message.
SMS is great.
I'm paying Fl 30 ($ 14) and get 100 minutes free.
If I call more I pay Fl 0,30 a minute.
And SMS is around Fl 0,40 ($ 0,19) a message.
Spam in my email account is one thing; I pay for a service and if I request it at the ISP level, I can have bulk mail, mail without the @ in it, IP addresses and email addresses filtered.
This does not happen with cell phones.
Recently I have been recieving text spam on my cell phone! A large portion of this spam is directly related to the use of my phone and long distance (I have recieved exercise and cruise ads too). No matter who I talk to at Cellcom (the provider that I use here in Israel, I cannot get them to stop any of it.
My contract is ending soon.. perhaps it's time to switch companies.
Rami James
Guy with a grudge.
--
rJames.org - illustration
I think everyone here who is less than 30 sends SMSs all the time. I receive tons of them everyday, even from people I really do not know. Broadcast messages coming mainly from the cell phone companies exist as well (but you can disable them), and many services are available through sms. During my last exams everyone had to show his own cell phone to the professors, so that they could see whether it was turned off or not and so that we couldn't be able to receive messages during the examination. It's not such a pain to type in your own message, because of the fact that new phones provide nice solutions to this problem: Nokia phones have an internal dictionary, so that you don't have for example to press the "2" key twice to have "b", you just press it once and when you finished typing that word, the phone looks up the various matching words. Ericsson provides a "chatboard", that is a small qwerty/qwertz keyboard that you can plug in to type your own messages.
Announcing it is rather different to releasing it. Having worked with the telecos, as it's part of my job, then current test implementations of GPRS are nowhere near 64k, more like 14.4, and in certain cases the base stations are drawing so much power, they catch fire (thanks Seimens).
GPRS is nothing more than hype right now, it your speed is never guareented.
As SMS-messages are usually cheaper than a phone call, it's a way more convenient method of communication than the pay-per-second call.
That's actually crap. I have had the use of SMS messages for over 4 years now, ever since Orange started trialling them in the UK. They were cool then because hardly anyone used the, and they were free. Nowadays I hate them. They are the most obnoxious, instrusive, tedious, annoying and expensive way to communicate in the modern day.
Some of my friends seem to insist on having whole conversations via SMS messages. At 5p a time, a conversation can easily cost a quid. But because writing text messages is slow, tedious and restrictive (160 chars max), we could have the same conversation by actually PHONING each other for far less cost, because it would take a fraction of the time to say what we wanted to say. This is especially acute when you take into account the large numbers of free minutes of airtime which is often bundled into contracts.
It is for this reason why I have stopped responding to text messages, which has brought new problems. People demand to know why you haven't responded, which is the intrusive part. If I don't want to accept a form of communication, I won't! I've already got too many damn phone numbers and e-mail addresses, I certainly don't need something as lame and annoying as text messages. I've dumped ICQ in a similar way. In my opinion, any form of "instand message" is bad. Get in the queue, cos there are 20 other people who wanted to contact me before you.
Returning to the cost, I did sums once and worked out that it costs over £400 to send 1Mb of data over SMS. It costs £1.50 to send the same amount of data through your mobile through a 9600bps Nokia data suite (at peak times, assuming a cost of 25p per minute). And we all know how much it costs to send 1Mb of data over a 28.8kps modem and a land line.
This cost is unacceptable considering it costs mobile providors absolutely nothing to send these messages. Phone calls use far more bandwidth and cost them far more. The odd text message is often more economical than a phone call, but a conversation of 15 messages each way is not. It's just annoying, and I *hate* typing out messages on a 12-button keypad.
Down the pub, everything's changed. People constantly have their phones glued to their hands bashing out text messages under the table. And while this is going offtopic a bit, will people please note that it is NOT necessary to cycle through all the tunes that your phone can possibly play whilst in the pub.
So please, don't SMS me. I long for the day when Orange introduce a service that automatically replies to people sending text messages with a message like "This person does not accept text messages, because they are lame, tedious, intrusive, expensive and annoying. JUST BLOODY PHONE THEM.
xxx Stuii!Well, I get /. headlines evey few hours to my cellphone through the text (SMS) system, it is great, now I only check /. when something I want to hear about is on it, which in turn reduces the load on the server, which in turn makes the world a better place :o)
No way man, I would slap these people with a lawsute so fast it would hurt, that is a pathetic idea, spam on my cell phone, I would like to see someone try, BTW, if anyone is intrested my cellphone number is +447730300034 fell free to spam me, have fun with it!
Text chat is much cheaper than voice chat.
Is this the end of [the net, government, taxes, civilization, the universe]?????
Slashdot is turning into a luddite chicken-little mental-masturbation party.
In my country (I live in the Philippines) a sent SMS costs roughly PhP1.00 per message sent or US$0.02 (US$0.0228885 if you want to be exact using PhP43.69 to a US$1.00). At that price it is very rare for someone to make voice calls, which normally costs PhP8.00/US$0.18 to another mobile within the same cellular network. If you're curious on how much the pre-paid cellular rates are in the Philippines you might want to check out the website of the country's two predominant players, Globe Telecom and Smart Communications.
The only time I would think someone would make a voice call here would be when a message cannot wait. This is due to the fact that a country with a landmass of a small US State can generate more SMS traffic than the whole continent of Europe. With that in mind it normally takes a few minutes to hours before a sent message is received.
Adding to the features zyzko mentioned earlier mobiles here allow IRC-like and IM-like functions, which gives users of certain networks the ability to chat with people of similar interests based on one's ASL (Age/Sex/Location) or communicate with people on your ICQ contact list using your UIN.
Personally one feature I would love to see in the future is updates whether there are classes or not. Take for instance my case, my school is located along the University Belt in Metro Manila, which is regularly flooded whenever there is a typhoon. By the very nature of my school they do not cancel classes until the last possible moment, which is normally after lunch, and when they do they do not have the courtesy of announcing it over the school's loud speakers. This is a real pain when you find out a few hours later and you have to walk through 1 to 3 feet of flood water just to ride on a bus that's stranded due to the floods and not mentioning the horrors of 4-5 hour traffic jams.
As reported by the New York Times, there has been a lot of controversy over SMS from the Department of Education banning them during tests, vehicular accidents, stalkers, anonymity and malicious jokes. What the Times did not report is that SMS issued a libel case against three comedians and a manager of a basketball player, caused the unintentional closure of a national bank, a political movement known as the 'Silent Protest' was spread via SMS and that drug traffickers use it to coordinate their activities. Even the Japanese had a similar problem when kidnappers used pre-paid mobile phones to hide there identities from law enforcers.
If you want more information concerning GSM phones in the Philippines you can check it out here.
The Graph: Substance that makes techies tick
http://www.gra.ph/
why not have this feature for use with a palm pilot? then you could just "write" the text message.
of course, nothing beats the spoken word. so, when will slashdot take posts via audio files?
I think the fad of txt messaging comes from its very affordable rate. You can get an sms capable phone for around P3500 (less than $85.) Free text messages are alloted usually at 100msgs /month (or more) with an excess rate of P1 per msg (less than $0.03.) (I think the very attractive rate appeals more than a computer with an Internet account which will cost you around $19 /month for around 30 hours.) A cellular voice call costs around $0.19 /min. Long distance rates internationally are as low as $0.40 /min.
I must say that the rates here are cheaper than more technologically advanced countries developing these phones and protocols.
The drawback, there are around more than 2 million GSM subscribers. Txt messages always lag (like the net - it sometimes take hours and even days for a party to receive a message) and networks are busy (even on the same carrier.) There are more people subscribing every minute than the carrier can keep up by upgrading their facilities.
Cellphones are more affordable in terms of digital communication than the Internet (here.) Landline and computers cost too much.
If prices were as cheap as what foreign carriers provide here, cellular communication would really boom. Vice versa, if Internet and computers are very cheap, Internet services will really boom!
Johnlaw
- from the Philippines
"Mabuhay!"
Authors note: I am not a text addict and I don't have any cellphones, beepers, or PDAs. I just 'use' other people's phones to text. :-)
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
When I'm driving -- especially on the highway or other multi-lane road -- I can easily get a better position for passing the alert-challenged, cell-chatting weenie in the next vehicle. It never fails. The person who's talking (or texting) on the cell can't possibly maintain as much concentration on their driving as I can. And I grin each time at them as I pass their vehicle. Their smug expression quickly vanishes. Mine does not. ;-)
Admiral Yamamoto
Texting is popular outside of the Philippines. I recently interviewed Akseli Anttila of the Nokia Research Center who describes the booming popularity of texting in Finland, despite fairly high costs. Full interview is at http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/features/antt ila/ .
title says it all.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
This is off-topic, so don't flame me. But why do you feel it should be free? You pay for the paper version of the Times, the on-line version has the same articles, yet somehow it has to be free since it's online? I don't follow your logic. You don't want to give personal information? I can appreciate that..... It's just that last half which I'm confused about. I've been on the web for a while, so I understand the motto of a free internet, but does that really apply to things like this?
Feel free to take this to email if you'd like, if you don't feel like posting off-topic.
Buses stop at a bus station
Trains stop at a train station
On my desk there's a workstation....
It's worse than that. People 4.5 feet away send SMS' to each other saying "Wassup!?"
Check out some of the newer Nokia 'phones. They have predictive test input whereby you press each key one and the 'phone tries to make up a word out of the available letter choices on each pressed key. forex, pressing 6-4-6-3 will give you "mind". Since "mine" is also spelt by using the same keys, you can cycle between all qualifying words. Saves a ton of time when sending text messages...
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
Text messaging (GSM Short Message Service) has taken off significantly in Europe, with reports suggesting that carriers have been surprised at the volume. They cite various reasons for people using SMS : short messages are cheaper than calls, short messages mean that people avoid having to have a 'gossipy' type conversation, short messages allow other people to think about the response, etc.
I think a killer-app would be to have a community based (i.e. IRC channels, etc) chat system accessible by phones - it could work as a good semi-realtime way of keeping in touch with your community of friends.
If you make a mint out of the above idea - send me a postcard.
-- Matthew - matthew.gream@pobox.com, http://matthewgream.net
It's called SMS - Small Message System
You didn't spell "Short Message Service" correctly.
xx Stuii!
Gery
------------------------------
The answer is yes, me.
From that article as well as others such as this one it looks like the U.S. is lagging behind in technology that is commonplace in almost every other industrialized nation.
The U.S. has partially lost out with mobile technology: europe and a large proportion of the rest of the world have adopted GSM, and have also succesfully developed global roaming. The U.S. is happy to have regionally disparate and different networks. If I remember correctly, the same occurred with ISDN: the first east to west coast ISDN call was only carried out circa. 1996.
This seems typical of the U.S. to some extent: so competitive that it sometimes self-defeating, and everyone loses out in the end.
I can roam across Europe seamlessly, and to Australia as well, all with the one handset: that's pretty good I think.
-- Matthew - matthew.gream@pobox.com, http://matthewgream.net
The LAST thing I wanna see when I pick up a cellphone is "Hi 16/f wanna cyber?"
Ditto here in NZ. Vodafone had been offering SMS for free for months, I think they've just stopped now, and all of a sudden they are advertising cool prizes for using the service.
m -- some interesting figures. It sure looks worth it for the carriers...
Check out http://technolog y.nzoom.com/communications/2000/07/03/00028537.ht
However, it has gotten to a point where people already have their noses buried into their phones while doing practically everything (including driving for heaven's sake!) They do it in church, in class, and it's not uncommon to see a bunch of young people seated around a table none of them talking, but all of them meditating on their SMS.
Nowadays, when newspapers/magazines run profiles on young people here, when asked about hobbies, one of the first they answer is "text messaging" or "texting". Geez, whatever happened to stamp collecting, reading, music, or computer programming?
When it comes to that, I don't like the implications because it means that even in the presence of something more worthwhile, or even in the presence of friends, you'd rather text away. Rumors spread via irresponsible use of SMS endangered some banks here by causing depositors to withdraw heavily.
Such misuse or use at the cost of everything else is not a good thing.
__________________________________________
God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ --1Thes5:9
Actually SMS (text-message) spam was deemed illegal in Finland as soon as it started to appear a few years ago. It remains to be seen what legislators in other countries think of it.
Here in the UK, we're not that far in front. WAP has just been released and it was a failure. One network has just released GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) which currently delivers 64k always-on internet to your phone!
Well, I get /. headlines evey few hours to my cellphone through the text (SMS) system, it is great, now I only check /. when something I want to hear about is on it, which in turn reduces the load on the server, which in turn makes the world a better place :o)
;-)
Same here... only I get these messages within fifteen minutes of the story appearing. Perl is cool
superblog.org: all your favourite blogs on o
I'm looking forward to when all the networks in the US support text messaging. I think it would be fun to get little text messages....
...if there were a voice to text interface. I can't imagine how useful this might be when your only choices are typing on a QWERTY the size of your hand, using script recognition, or using symbol recognition.
Pax Digitalia
Erm, ok, I have been reading through all the posts, this is pathetic, could the UK have the best cellphone coverage. 1/ We have cell coverage almost everywhere! 2/ My tariff is 15 pounds a month, with 50 mins free calls per day, and just 1 pence per min after that! Come on people, this can't be true, prove me wrong, show how much better the reat of the world is!!!
Texting is quite popular even here in Finland, but it's true what Timothy says, talking is even more popular. My personal cell phone bill consists of about 40% SMS, 40% talking and 20% monthly fees. I don't talk long (one reason is that my cell phone is rather old and has quite a poor battery) but I try to call rather than to text someone if I have something to say. That way I get an instant reply (not everybody hears the SMS beep) and can chat with him/her in real time. Plus, I find it nicer to talk than to punch buttons.
The reason why my SMS fees still comprise 40% of my phone bill is that while I enjoy talking, I don't like to leave a message on an answering machine. I rather say it briefly in a text message. That way the recipient can read it when he/she wants and as many times he/she wants. Plus, many times when they have their answering machine on, they still can recieve SMS messages (in a meeting for instance) and perhaps even reply to them.
And then there are these services. Sonera Zed for instance. Get stock quotes, weather information, cinema info, find the gas station with the lowest fees in town to name but a few. All these cost about twice or thrice the standard SMS fee (which is ~15-20 cents) and thus can easily comprise a large-ish portion of your bill.
Many of the phones sold today have predictive text input and that speeds up typing considerably. On the other hand, it's a pain when your buddy has it and you don't: Once a friend of mine sent me a message to which I was replying when he sent another. I had to abort to see what he wrote and then started typing a reply for both. Third message arrived from the same person. This would have gone forever but he got tired and stopped :)
Then there's this thing about privacy. You can't call your girlfriend from work but who would stop you from texting her. We Finns are quite shy in general and therefore find it easier to text rather than to talk aloud when there are others around. And it's more polite as the Japanese guy earlier pointed out.
"Patience is a virtue, afforded those with nothing better to do." - I don't remember
actually i was just in the Phillipines last month and i even attended a meeting with Smart Telecom, the people who bring this monstrosity to the masses.
i've seen it, and trust me, it's scary. you see loads of people plugging away at a stupid 9-key cellphone keyboard for hours at a time! not only that, but it's not all nice and menu-driven on a lot of the phones there. some of them need arcane commands that make 1970s mainfraims look user-friendly. they even have options to randomly find other people to chat with, like ICQ.
this is in a country where the majority of people are below the poverty line and most people i saw (at least in Manilla) live in shacks on the side of railroad tracks.
but what's *really* crazy about their cellphones? well there are a variety of companies delivering the service: the two biggies being Globe and Smart. but get this: if you're on a Smart phone, it's damned near impossible to connect a call to a Globe phone (and vice versa). in fact, if you're on a Globe phone it can often be difficult to reach a land-line (as land lines are still mostly owned by Smart).
i visited a handful of telecommunications companies in various countries in SouthEast Asia. The Phillipines are by far the most backwards and strange country, in terms of telecommunications, that i have ever witnessed.
- j
Here is a Time magazine article from a year ago about how most of the world (except the U.S.) use cell phones for buying a soda from vending machines, running a car wash, zapping a digital picture to a friend and video conferencing. From that article as well as others such as this one it looks like the U.S. is lagging behind in technology that is commonplace in almost every other industrialized nation.
Sending short messages (SMS) is also very popular in Italy: during lessons at school, in the bus or train, while sitting on the water closet... there's no limit for its use.
The US unfortunately has not a single cellular phone standard (like GSM in 90% of the world), and those used are not working outside the US/Canada. So north american users are isolated.
But GSM is not the only technology, where the USA has years to catch up with other (also less-industrialized) countries: teletext in TVs is very useful and RDS on your car-radio also, but nearly unknown in the US.
Again: The world is not US-centric! and the US is not the outrider for every technological achievment
ms
Somebody has got to figure out a better way to enter text data on small devices. Preferably one-handed.
Nokia's predictive text entry works very well: basically each numeric key represents three or four letters as normal. You hit a key once for each letter entered, and the phone finds a word from its dictionary which "fits", then you hit the "*" key to cycle through matching words. e.g. type "8436" and "them" shows up. Hit "*" and it changes to "then", "theo", "vien". If the word you want isn't there, you fall back on the old way of entering, wherupon the word is added to your personal dictionary.
--
Yes, that would be me. Accordioning is the new texting. Just ask Emmett.
This looks pretty nifty...Has this been mentioned on slashdot? I was just looking through freshmeat and saw all the juicy news grabbing/first posting/other paraphanalonia applications...This could make out for a nice story. ::
-Swift
-Swift
2 Messages.
U want 2 go 4 pincic @ marina?
Yes. CU there.
Sure people have a tendency to "yak on", but that's more likely to happen in a spoken conversation. You're point about being scared to talk to each other is a valid one though.
On the other hand, the potential for misinterpretation is greatly increased. I mean, it's bad enough on the Internet, but with the limited length of SMS, what seemed clear to you could be at best incomprehensible and at worst offensive.
It's official: there are now more people who own a mobile in the UK than not. I'm still in the 48% of people who don't and people are beginning to look at me funny. Text messaging seems to have taken over the lives of quite a few friends at college, but I guess listening to someone writing a text msg on the train has got to be better than wankers shouting HELLO? YEAH, I'M ON THE TRAIN...
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
Touch screens, the dictionary, people-indepenent recognizers, the whole shebang, is costly to make. Keypads are well-known, easily pumped out, and therefore cheaper. The screen-size with the resolution necessary to give proper feedback to humans writing also makes the unit bigger, and that's a problem. A few phones have the pen-input, but it never seems to take off. I guess the early-adopters don't find them compelling enough to drive down the price enough to compell the standard consumers.
Motorola's latest entry into the Chinese market is, IIRC, pen-input only. It's very expensive, and sold as a high-end gadget.
Staying in touch with friends and family is an extremely big thing among Filipinos. Neal Stephenson hit the nail right on the head when he wrote this in Cryptonomicon:
I think it's fair to say that this is one of those cases where a technology turns out to have a pretty good "fit" with the culture.The SMS (Short Message Service) phenomenon has been quite common in Germany for some time. Everywhere you go you see people punching messages into their cell phones, or "handys", or you hear the ubiquitous beep of someone receiving messages. Come to think of it, it's not just a German thing, it's all over Europe. One of my roommates texts her friends and parents at home in England from our apartment in Germany. I think it's a really great idea since messages cost around $.25 per, and it's a quite a bit cheaper than calling someone up when you just want to ask a question.
That's my $.25/12.5
-----
"Defenestration" is to throw out of a window; what's a word for throwing 'Windows' out of something?
Actually sending SMS-messages (Short Message Service) is extremely popular at least here in Finland (where the mobile phone density is highest in the world, well over 50%). Admittedly, people also use the phones to talk.:)
In addition to text messages the SMS system can be used to send e.g. email, faxes, pictorial greetings and sounds for the mobile phone, either using GSM phone or web interface.
We have the same situation in Ireland, and it's been identified as a problem for the Uptake of WAP and mobile internet services... ~J
Scary thought: Morse code would work. You can key one-handed and blind. It's faster than trying to enter text via a numeric pad. It's tough to learn, but it could be the next teen-age craze. Somebody's got to put Morse input in a cell phone.
Pretty good 99%-accurate writeup dude on what's happening in Metro Manila.
The Graph: Substance that makes techies tick
http://www.gra.ph/
AFAIK, over a GSM network the only encrypted parts of the signal exchange are between the handset and the base station. From there on it uses the same telco system as landline calls.
Saying that though, I have no idea how SMS (short messaging service, text messaging over GSM) works, although I doubt it would differ as far as encryption goes too much between normal calls.
--
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Andy
I'm from the mentioned country, Finland, and even though we do use the cellulars to talk too, the sending of SMS, or "texting", has reached somewhat hideous levels here too. I'm sure the examples of the article are not unheard of here either (though I haven't seen any in funerals yet).
The Nokia 3210 has word recognition (not voice recognition). You start typing and it guesses the word you want based upon a dictionary. The major constraint is the limited dictionary size.
The cost of communicatig over SMS-messages is not that simple - at current rates here (I live in Finland, BTW) sending an SMS-messages costs about as much as talking for a minute. (0,99 FIM, about $0,17) and even a "simple conversation" requires 2 messages - that's two minutes of talking compared to 320 character of text (one message is 160 characters). On the other hand, SMS-message costs always the same, and voice rates depend very much on who you call and when. (Mobile network vs. fixed network, mobile operator, time of day etc...)
But as previous poster mentioned, this is very common among teens. My brother, who is 17 years uses more money for SMS-messages than he uses for voice-calls and he is quite conservative mobile-phone user.
The other very significant use of SMS-messages are different services - you can get new ringing tones, pictures to your phone (operator and other logos), different news-services, stock-quotes, the showing times of movies in your city, horoscopes, jokes - just about anything you can think of. (The newest "boom" are different dating-services where you can search for a date using your phone) I use the weather-service constantly - I skydive and wind it is important to know what the weather is at the airport (mainly how fast the wind blows) - I don't want to drive 40 minutes just to find out that it is impossible to jump. My mobile phone gives an answer in 10 seconds. These services are still awfully expensive - from FIM 1,99 to FIM 9,90 ($ 0,30 to about $2) - I hope that the upcoming GRPS-networks (promised to arrive early next year) will fix this when the phone is always connected to network and you pay only for transfered data - it makes "push" -services much more usable and hopefully will increase the use of services and bring prices down.
If this is BT Cellnet you mean, they don't seem to be able to make up their minds how fast it is.
:)
Seriously though, this article on the BBC site shows how you can SMS a barcode of a book or CD to a certain number belonging to a company, and it will SMS you back informing you how much it will cost online (from Amazon; there maybe others as well), and give you the option of buying the item online. Havent used it yet, but very very cool
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Andy
Here in Serbia situation is preety similar. Many people have a mobile phone, they bought a pre-paid card and most of time they are sending SMS messages, since it is cheaper. It is free, actually. I do not find it wrong, since we are in very bad economical situation. Still one minute of talking over mobile is expensive for most of young people.
By using,
Username: woof23b
Password: abc123
About a year ago, there was an article in Wired about Nokia and cell phones in Finland. I'm no expert on Finland, but the article made it seem like everyone was "texting" a ton (although I assume they still actually talk.) It told about students who would get together after school in huge groups and play cops and robbers type games throughout the streets using their cell phones to send short email type messages to eachother. So, from what I know, I would have to disagree with Timothy's statement, at least the "in contrast part." I don't have a clue to the actual extent of "texting" in either of these two countries though. Just a bit of info.
The most interesting part of the article was the part about government troops and rebel guerillas trading insults via text.
Does SRS support attachments or scripting?
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
As SMS-messages are usually cheaper than a phone call, it's a way more convenient method of communication than the pay-per-second call.
Additionally it gives one the possibility to talk (err... type) about stuff one's not comfortable about talking face-to-face (err... voice-to-voice). At least in Finland typical SMS-messaging users can be described as teenagers, whom (as we all remember) have needs for this type of communication.
<SARCASM>My point? Just trying to tell everyone that they're following Finland's example - again.</SARCASM>
I'm using Sprint PCS in the USA (Chicago area, actually) and find text messaging really handy. It could be a lot better, of course...
Many of my friends work for the same company where they have two-way text pagers with a tiny QWERTY keyboard. Most of them don't carry cellphones all the time (and when they do, it's just the 'on-call' phone they sometimes carry for work). They can send email to my phone, and I can send it to their pagers. This works great for low-priority messages -- anything we'd use email for if we were tied to our desks all day. For high-priority messages we just pick up the phone, of course. (Or send email that says, "Call me!" :-)
The downside for me is that Sprint doesn't support email directly to the phone, nor does it support composing replies well. I have it set up so that I receive mail via SMS. Of course, SMS has a 100 character limit, which really bites. Especially when the 'From:' line and quoted text is counted. I ended up creating an email-to-SMS proxy that strips out the garbage, and also forwards the original text to my Yahoo account. So, if I need to I can connect to Yahoo and see the full text. And I have to connect to Yahoo to compose and send mail. Sprint charges by the minute for connect time (pay for a block of time up front, or pay about 35 cents/minute if you go over your time limit) and there's no way to compose messages offline. Talk about a cash cow for Sprint!
Entering text on the keypad really isn't bad, even without the predictive entry. It could be better, though. I have a Sanyo 4000 phone. Text entry for its addressbook is really nice. Press a key repeatedly to cycle through upper and lower case letters, and press [1] to cycle through common symbols. The browser (supplied by Phone.com) isn't nearly as convenient. I have to use a menu item to shift between uppercase, lowercase, and symbols. So my email messages tend to be monocase.
Mobile text messaging is really nice in a lot of situations where you don't need the immediacy of a voice call, or if you want to broadcast a message to a group. ("Hey everyone, pizza and movies at my house tonight!") This is what's going to drive the wireless revolution, not that silly "Shop Amazon.com anytime, anywhere from your phone!" idiocy.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Please tell me (us) about the "Thinkoutside" keyboard?
OR? "good Thing" OR "imposition"? What a copletely F_cked dichotomy!
The arogance and cultural elitism behind this phrasing is fairly mind-blowing. How is this complex social behaviour being "imposed"? Are there legal penalties for non-compliance? Financial incentives for participation? Physical threats? What sinister conspiracy might be behind the imposition of "depersonalizing aspects of technology" on unsuspecting vicitims? And just what is so depersonalizing about the written word anyway? Is Slashdot a "depersonalizing" technology being imposed on us by a sinister hidden conspiracy
I respectfully suggest that a little thoughtful analysis of the assumptions underlying this post are in order.Anytime 150, is my tariff. 'bout 17 quid a month, 150 free minutes, low rates to land lines, unused free minutes carry over from month to month. The main thing I like about this is it let me get a nice phone (Motorola L7089) quite cheap (£70).
--
Peter
I was recently in Manila on business. (training someone down there to set-up a large number of linux servers :)
Although internet access & communication in general seemed to be expensive, text messaging was very cheap - usually a # of free messages per month - and just 1 peso per message after that.
$1 canadian/us = approx 25-30 pesos
I was told that they have the largest volume of text messages in the world.
Its also quite amazeing to watch someone able to rapidly type in long text messages using a 10-digit cell phone keypad! - espically when several of your hosts are sending eachother messages across the dinner table. (alot of jokes apparently)
"Nyquil - The stuffy, sneezy, why-the-hell-is-the-room-spinning medicine."
I really don't like slashdotting this site cos I use it a lot but if you want to text (as we say in Ireland) your friends from the web go here.
SMS messages are still used despite the fact that they cost much more. Mayby it's because of asyncronous nature of those. Plus cases where you are sending a phone number of somebody or street address or something that usually is written down while listening.
SMS messages *could* be practically free (I would be happy with 0.01 EUR/message) but because Finns are using those no matter how expensive those are there is no reason for operators to cut down the prizes. After all we are even paying 1.3 EUR for a litre of gasoline.
_________________________
_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
It's called SMS - Small Message System and is a huge success in Denmark (where I live) aswell! The mobile service providers here are making millions on it aswell because the charge you per sent message. mf's!! They are talking about lowering the price but that could take a while... Cheers!
Never trust a windows system manager
In Switzerland, where I live, people are getting mad with messages:
my girlfriend sends about 100 a month (3 per days)
I've heard some friends speaking about 200 a month
Swisscom, the leading provider of mobile phone communications in Switzerland are sending 1 million messages each day! ( they have about 500'000 subscribers I think)
Switzerland is known to be one of the countries where text messages are the most used... (the cost of a message equals about 30 seconds of conversation, and swiss people like getting to the point without talking much, and messages are good for this task)
If it keeps catching on, then don't you think that this will be heaven for spammers? Imagine, people using this during church and getting a message about buying holy books
Hey - don't joke. It's already happening here in Australia. I've received a number of pieces of spam from my mobile provider about competitions to win Olympic tickets; there has been serious discussion about using SMS sell "Team X just won the grand final" shirts minutes after the final siren. Take all the people using the mobile cell for the stadium as a mailing list, and boom - instant spam.
It doesn't help that Aussie mobile providers are doing the serious hard sell - one provider is offering all SMS messages for free for a few months, just to get people signed up and hooked...
... and never, ever play leapfrog with a unicorn.
But that allows me to give people my e-mail address without giving them my cell phone number. It's much easier to ignore a text message, and I don't have to answer it in traffic.
But the bonus is I can put the phone on vibrate, put it in my front pocket, and have my girlfriend e-mail me for a cheap thrill ;-)
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Does anyone offer cellular service for under 10 bucks a month anymore? I'm not interested in $20/month with a bunch of "free" minutes. Keep the minutes. Keep the internet/text messaging junk. Just lower the monthly.
Oh, and coverage must be good over the Mojave desert roads. Laughlin to Vegas to Barstow to Death Valley to Tonopah. How is digital service in the desert? Or is analog still king?
Even something like a "roam only" plan would be OK. Does such a thing exist?
Thanks.
I beg to differ, this is only new for the US, the rest of the world has had GSM and text messaging for quite a while.
True, but that's only because our stupid phone companies can't do anything right. While many other locales had to deal with poor terain for landlines, the US stuck with 'em. Portable phones (and HDTV) are probably the technologies which the US is farthest behind everyone else in.
It's kind of sad in some respects. US trying to play catch up, and ending up going for substandard result, yet having the US public willingly pay for it because they *think* its the best they can get?
Obligatory comparison to Microsoft. Sorry.
you can send SMS messages via the web which is a good thing - no cost involved. the sites i use are http://www.quios.com and http://www.mtnsms.com Happy SMSing people
For me SMS is just a small part of the notification system, but putting together the equipment to pull it off wasn't cheap. The herd are simply latching onto a cheap near-equivalent. And yes, the US is hugely lagging behind on this sort of innovative low-rent use of mobiles - for the rest of the world this is a non-story.
Huh? How is commuicating with people not socialising?
The idea of spam text messages pisses me off too. Definately a case where government needs to legislate to save us.-Dead Lesbian Witches! Think about it!
<flame>
But when will the Japanese abandon Kanji alltogether? To me it seems very antiquated to write with a syllabus poorly adapted to modern needs like the very constant borrowing and forming of new words. I say Japanese is a language like any other and can be written phonetically (whether in kana or romaji) and should be done so! I think it is a bit patronizing of the Japanese to think that their culture needs Kanji to define an identity! It makes the writing just damn hard to first-graders and foreigners alike to learn the spelling.
If adapting a word to phonetical spelling makes it clash with other similar sounding words (homonyms), and you can't make it up from the context then it's time to invent a new compound word based on native kunyomi (native Japanese word form) readings.
</flame>
Just a thing that has been bothering me for some time ...
I met my wife on good old IRC. Yesterday was our second anniversary. And she was the THIRD real girlfriend I met in a chatroom (which goes to show that IRC creates relationships that are neither more nor less stable than the much-vaunted Real World - the outside thing, not the TV show).
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
SMS is asynchronous. A message can sometimes take hours to reach you, for no apparent reason. Most of tie time it will be within a minute or two, but it most certainly isnt synchronous.
:)
This has been a point of contention between me and a friend a few times, too. I've arranged to meet her somewhere, but I tell her to phone to let me know when to turn up. She sends me an SMS message hoping to save 10p or so, and I dont get the message for 2 hours. Typical
--
--
Andy
replacing "www" with "partners" in the url to circumvent registration does no longer work. Is there a new method that someone knows of?
nc
I will not buy this software, it is scratched
50 free minutes A DAY!?
1p/min after that!?
What network/contract are you on, cuz I want some!
--
Peter
Will I retire or break 10K?
...I've got too many bad connections with this.
We have Sitescope send us text messages to our Nextels at work when something bad happens. So you'll get that voicemail ringer out of the blue and it's always a message that says "Sitescope: foo server not responding...".
Now whenever I hear that voicemail ringer, with no previous call, I get a bad feeling.
So wouldn't work for me. Might work for everyone else....
Now that is just a WEE-bit creepy. Who the hell would choose the name slashdot, find it already taken, but settle for slashdot32 or slashdot66? Why are there 94 people named Slashdot??
There's a Pedant, a ubiquity, a sneer, a fermion, a kettle, a television, an automobile, a mustard, a ketchup, a mayonnaise, a table (63!), a chair, a telephone, a he-man, 664 with the name Jesus, a mundane, a boring, a banal, an insipid, a daikatana (only one!), a backpack, a platform, a hinge, a lever, an inventory, a baggage, a wheelbarrow, a shovel, a couch, a bathroom, a paperclip, an armchair, an obtain, an acquire, a devour, a permit, a conjugate, a decline, a translate etc...
Mind you, most of those had at LEAST 10 people! Especially the mundane ones! Paperclip has 12 people. About three of those had only one person.
In fact, there are a lot of televisions, I think there were at least 30. Who picks TELEVISION for a user name? (I'm just curious as to whether or not I can find a word in common usage, or at least semi-common usage that isn't taken)
Quite creepy, I must say. Mind you, I don't mind people living vicariously through internet nomenclature, but for thousands of people to assume pseudonyms that are words for common household items is quite frightening!
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
You'd think that a better approach to sending e-mail by phone would be to incorporate a handwriting-recognition feature (like Palm's graffiti) into the device. Combine this with a good kanji-kana conversion system, like ATOK or Wnn6, and you'd have one hot portable e-mail sending device. Enter alphabetical letters with graffiti, convert to kanji-kana with ATOK, send. Cool.
Course, I doubt if a mobile phone could store sufficient kanji & vocab. in its dictionary to make this solution practical . . . but a dictionary restricted to a limited vocab might do the trick.
Have any of the mobile-phone makers in Japan looked into this strategy? Or will everybody be stuck with a keyboard for the near future, and no possibility of handwriting recognition in the phone?
Actually here in Finland we don't use the soda machines or car washes with cell phones either. There has been some massive hype about those things for a few years though.
:) but I don't know if the celebrity gossip are.
;)
The jokes etc. really are what people do with sms messages (in addition to the chatting of course). Lottery numbers are of course already available
Anyway keeping in touch with friends using messages instead of calling them is at least partly a consequence of that messages are cheaper than calling. Well.. it is if you have just a little to say. I knew a girl whose cell phone bill was something like 4000 mk (~650 USD) for a month. She *really* wrote her text messages quickly
Don't be a slave to your phone. Tell her once that you won't be able to reply if you are busy.
And don't [reply].
I live in Manila, and am at the older end of the so-called 'generation text'. In addition to the reasons mentioned in the article, texting has taken off because it's unobtrusive. When you call someone on his cell phone, you worry about interrupting him - with text he can reply at his leisure. Given the number of dead spots around the city, it also makes it much more likely you'll get through. Text is really more instant messaging than chat, because you have to know the number of the person you're exchanging messages with. Filipinos don't care much for anonymous conversation, which brings me to my next point... Another reason for it's popularity is it always makes one feel connected. Pinoys (as we like to call ourselves), more than other cultures I have known, value their friends, and are proud of them. Sending and receiving messages in public is subtle bragging about how many friends you have, although the irony of conversing by SMS when your other friends are in front of you is unfortunately lost on many - hopefully this is just a novelty effect. Another related phenomenon and of interest to /. users is the popularity of prepaid cards, which allow anonymity - all you need to do is buy a new sim card (a chip-based card that slides into your phone), and you've got a new number/identity. Not even the telco, let alone the government, can listen in/track you. Despite costing twice as much as a postpaid line per minute, prepaid makes up at least 75% of all cellphone users, and growing (granted, the difficulty of getting credit for a postpaid line is also a factor). We are very privacy-conscious, perhaps due to abuses dating back to the Spanish, Japanese, and American colonizers, and as recent as the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. We resisted a national ID system, rightly fearing that the government would abuse it, and laugh at Singapore, where a passport is needed to buy a sim card. Many people don't have bank accounts because they don't trust the banks. Watching the privacy issue unfold over the Net, I wonder whether our experience might have something to contribute. What we have is essentially a system where your identity is tied to your number, but only those you choose to reveal it to can make the connection. When you tire of your number and all that is associated with it, you simply get a new one, realizing of course you lose the benefits along with the liabilities. It will be an interesting experiment, because it is likely that B2C will happen over the cellular phone here, prepaid cards will be e-cash, and sim cards will be identities.
Me and my girlfriend use SMS all the time. We both bought cell phones just for that purpose, that's because my girlfriend is deaf. We study/work in the same city (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) and for keeping eachother up-to-date about travelling back home (we commute by train) SMS is very useful. The costs are not bad either, 50c (about $.2) and with all the free internet sms services it's easier to do too. And getting my horoscope on my telephone every morning is pretty neat too! Oh, if anyone knows a free service that can notify you about emails on SMS, let me know! Joost AI-student
How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?
-E.M. Forster-
Everybody.
Many people use them to send email. It's cheaper (connect time is very expensive here), it's asynchronous, and it's more polite, if you happen to be on a crowded train or similar. This despite the fact that typing in Japanese on a cell phone keyboard is a huge pain. Characters are typed using a phonetic alphabet that has over 50 glyphs organized by initial consonant -- all the "k" syllables are on one key, which you press up to 5 times to get the one you want -- and since most Japanese kanji characters need two or three phonetics, plus a menu-based selection in case of homophones (of which there are huge numbers) it can take more than ten keystrokes to enter a single kanji (and many Japanese "words" are combinations of two kanji). All of this done with the thumb of the hand holding the phone.
But people still do it. Abbreviations are very popular in Japan, and you can forego the kanji and just leave it as phonetics if it's clear enough from context.
One nice thing about this is that you don't have to hold the little microwave transmitter next to your head. Similarly for the new cell phones that have video cameras in them -- you hold them in front of you (but you don't type text in that case, obviously).
Meanwhile the cell phone manufacturers are packing more functionality into the phones. My wife's cell phone has a tamagotchi living in it. Plus all the functions of an address book and memo organizer. All on a 3cm screen. But small is beautiful in Japan, and you can pack a lot of info into a small space (16x16 pixels per kanji) even if it takes a long time to type it.
what a waste of space . I though perl programmers knew when to condense? you have added for the runtime interpreter an extra 50 opcodes to process. CONGRATULATIONS on worthless code :P
just in case you need to know.. perl -e 'print "this is how you do it...."'
I use sms with a few friends, they are a pain to type but are certainly cheaper than regular calls :) and are perfect for sending phone numbers and email addresses without having to worry if the person at the other end has a pen.
Blue Sky Frog formerly smsmebaby.com has a service, (.au only) that allows you to send email from sms phones and recieve emails as sms messages as well!
Yeah i know, wap is better suited and doen't have a 250 char limit but wap is expensive in .au and you can only surf content that your teleco provides, no access to outside networks.
Australian? Join EFA
We have SMS in New Zealand and it's okay to a point. There are some people though who I just wish I hadn't given my phone number to.
There's one person in particular who normally is a heck of a nice person, but stuck in a boring receptionist job. A minimum of three times a day I get that annoying beep beep -- beep beep, only to get the same boring "what are u up to?" message. It wouldn't be so bad if she just called and asked, but replying means stopping everything I'm doing to punch in an answer through a stupid 9 key keypad.
This is worse than instant messaging where you can at least pretend to be invisible and if not, there's a decent keyboard. Switching your phone off is possible but then it defies the point of having the phone in the first place.
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Since I am living in Finland I think I can safely comment on this.
Sending SMS messages is incredibly popular in Finland and there are an amazing amount of services available via SMS.
Some numbers:
Over 65% of Finns own a cell phone (population is about 5.5 million)
Last year there were 650 million SMS messages sent
And the speed some of them can type on those phones is pretty amazing too :-)
Also, if I recall correctly, the number of cellphones exceeded the number of fixed lines in Finland last year
Jody
they would stay illiterate.
heh, what if i have a wearable and i can answer yes to all those questions? ;-P
---
Someone else has probably posted this already but here is the link.
Wonder why they haven't closed off this access point like they did the partners thing... I don't feel like giving my personal information for something which I believe should be free.
exit;
sub sarcasm {
print q( Good! Text based things are much easier to
scan in Echelon! It's about time people got smart
and decided to give the NSA what they want!);
}
--Ask a silly person, get a silly answer.
I just returned from a two-week stay in the philippines, and it's true. A lot of people there have little cell phones that they use only for text-messaging. Even people that you wouldn't think would have such an item. It's really cheap, only 1 piso per message. Consider that the exchange rate for dollars to pisos is about P40 per $1, and you have a method of communicating that is much cheaper than regular cell phones.
--o You're just jealous cause the voices talk to me and not to you! o--
Ironic that this thread would show up as soon as I sign up for my PCS-to-email service. There are countless advantages to this. I pay US$5 a month for 300 messages of 120 characters each. Most convos I would have, I never end up relaying more than 120 characters of pertinent information anyway. Plus, you never roam, there's no long distance, and you don't get those stupid rounded up to the next minute charges.
~Ken
Oh please tell me where the other companies beside NOKIA are:). But seriously, texting has become extremely popular here in Finland lately. Especially young people (ie teenagers) use them in incredible amounts.
The possible reasons for this is, besides the veritable plethora of mobile phones around here, the fact that we have lots and lots of services available via texting. Services ranging from weather forecasts to reserving your movie tickets, searching the whitepages or checking stockprices, even chat-rooms and uploadable modifications to your phone (like ringing tunes and operator logos). Shortly put, we have it all.
Personally I don't use any of those services (well ok, I did load a neat logo for my phone), but these services are definetly attracting a lot of revenue for the teleoperators, since the average user of those services doesn't pay his or her own phonebill but lets daddy or mommy take care of it.
Is this a good thing, or is it an unfortunate imposition of the depersonalizing aspects of technology onto an unsuspecting culture?
It's a new gizmo. It's something new. Remember when you got your first AOL account and you kept exploring? Well, like your first AOL account, this won't last forever.
Seriously, I don't see this as going on forever. Once people get used to tech the novelty begins to fade. Reading the article brought back memories of that Stanford study saying how the Internet was going to be the downfall of society (just as people have said about almost every other invention).
The pros out way the cons in this situation.
Worst case is at a concert!!!!
AsolamioBEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!!!!
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
The Phillipines version of the "Wassup!?" Budweiser commercials:
...across town another guys cell phone rings. He picks it up to the (text) message "WASSUP!?".
Man stands still for 45 seconds hitting buttons on his cell phone...
-Antipop
Does this mean I can have all my quickies in under 20 words?
::
Flames in 2 phrases?
Big images of Beer jugs cascading down my 100 character screen?
I love technology.
-Swift
-Swift
And hard. There are times when it is NOT appropriate to be connected to your friends and whatnot. Not only are they doing it while driving, which is IMAO moronic, but they're doing it at funerals, which is disrespectful to everyone. Someone needs to tell these people to throw their phones into the sea and talk to people face to face, because they crossed the line.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
I live in the UK. It's amazing how the popularity of things like SMS (Short Messaging Service), WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) and 3G (Third Generation Phones) differ between countries (i.e. USA, Europe and Japan). Although my old phone didn't have predictive text input, it was a key factor in organizing my social life.
Everyone I know organizes nights out using SMS. This is why people aren't doing this type of thing on a Palm Pilot - It's kind of inconvenient to pull out your PalmV while at a nightclub and start `writing' on it - and besides, a few people i know can type SMS's quicker than they can write.
SMS messages are also a good (free) way of communicating with my friend who's in the Canary Islands right now. For me and my friends, SMS will continue to be an important means of communication (until the UK gets fast/reliable/cheep or free WAP or Third Generation phones). Even then SMS will probably still have its place, just like some people still using pagers.
What this will create is a world full of socially phobic people, incapable of interacting in person, but fully uninhibited in front of their screen.
Scary.
http://www.logient.com
Here is what it is like for me in Australia (I am 16). Everyone in school has ICQ (that's ICQ not AIM, we all get ICQ because a friend cons us into it). The advantage of ICQ is that u can talk to serveral ppl at once (although in conversation it is hard to do more than 3-4). OK - Mobile phone messages: Approx. 1/3 Australians have mobiles It is popular among Teenagers to send SMS.. often I get stupid jokes like "r u lonesome 2nite" etc.. Most people have Nokia ph's (or the same screen size), because there seems to be a few rude ascii art pictures going around. I think the ettiquette behind SMS is kinda weird. Since PHs don't have QWERTY keyboards (most atleast - I have a ChatBoard), most messages r short & meaningful. I mean If someone never recieves SMS, then u send something like a Love You message, then it means a lot to someone... Unlike so much with phonecalls, everyone loves recieving SMS (it's the noveltly i guess). That's my story.
SMS has been all the craze here (so to speak) for the last two years, I think. Those who use it the most are teenagers, since about every 13 year old here owns a cellphone, and like has been stated before, SMS is cheaper than calling. I can send my coworkers SMS-messages through e-mail, and this is just a public library, not a high-tech startup. The SMS-services offered are quite good, you can f.ex. get scores from the ongoing soccermatch sent to you via SMS in real time, so if you happen to have to attend a funeral while your favourite team is playing, you won't miss out on what's happening.
Gummi
It took us 3 years and a big bribe--affectionately referred to as "grease money"--to just get a second phone line installed in our house. And that's not bad from PilTel, whose customer service antics include severing our telephone wires while performing "routine maintenance checks."
There are still many areas where the only way to get messages in and out is via Ham radio operators to a telegraph office. I'm not kidding! So in an area that's beset by typhoons, earthquakes, seasonal floodings and volcanoes, building and maintaining land lines is extremely difficult compared to simply putting up a few wireless towers.
(BTW, the 1 peso fee for texting is about $0.02 at today's exchange rate.)
--
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
It wasn't long, the general said, before rebels started lobbing text messages at soldiers. He declined to share any examples, but said they tended to be "childish." Sound familliar Signal?
Quite interesting, really.
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
Pardon my American ignorance, but what is RDS? Some kind of digital radio, I gather...?
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything
Why should we assume that the folks in the Phillipines are unwitting tools? Why can't they be on the cutting edge, leading where we will all follow? Who says they're an "unsuspecting culture"?
If it keeps catching on, then don't you think that this will be heaven for spammers? Imagine, people using this during church and getting a message about buying holy books. And imagine how many spams they will get. Love technology, though the spammers just love to ruin it. FYI - it's good to see in the phillipines there is no need to socialize with humans anymore.. ::phew:: I thought tv was going to be the reason why no one will socialize anymore
Ben Cathers - president/partner
Ben Cathers - president/partner
phatstart.com built for teens
They have this in the states - we are the last to join that type of billing - for some reason we are still mainly doing subscription - but analysts say that in the next 2 years the growth of non-subscription (what you refer to) will grow over 300% while subscription based will grow only 6% over that same period. There are sites out there now that offer it - you can do a search. Telegea.com comes to mind as one.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Well... SMS is widely used here in Italy, too... people use cell phones like crazy, and companies are giving out "100 free msgs a day for the holidays" cards for 5$. Last XMas we even had the system paralized by people messaging each other!
I lived in the Philippines for the past 5 years, so I actually watched this technology reach the masses. Most of the posters here have no cultural clue of why this technology exploded the way that it did. It's a matter of economics.
Manila is a densely populated city, with a very poor telephone structure (i.e. difficult for the masses to phone, internet, email, voicemail, answering machines). Hence the popularity of cell phones in general. But how can they all afford it? Because, unlike in the U.S., you DON'T have to pay to RECIEVE a cell call in the Philippines. So "texting" became popular because, in this traffic-congested city where it can take you 2 hours to go 2 miles by car, everyone can communicate with each other for a flat monthly rate. That's it. Simple as that. You have to understand the culture too.
Incidently, when I was there I had operater-assisted text paging for $7/month. When I came back to the U.S., I was expecting the same. But employing an operator in the U.S. is a heck of a lot more expensive, but making phone calls is easy and inexpensive in the U.S. so that is why we all live on voice mail instead. I got my operator-assisted text paging, but it was expensive, and no one ever used it.
One more thing: to set another slashdot poster straight: it was Globe Telecom, not Smart, who started the whole texting thing. And recently they were in legal battles because they wouldn't share their texting network with other companies (i.e. everyone who wanted to "text" had to sign up with Globe). Kind of like AOL's IM.
I live in Canada and I have a Nokia 6100 series Fido phone (Microcell). For 2$ a month, on any of their monthly airtime packages, you can get unlimited text messaging which allows you to send as many messages, up to 160 chars each, to other fido users. Beyond that, anyone with a fido phone can receive text messages for free and anyone can send a user a message from the fido website (http://www.fido.ca). Yay, portable Icq.
I know at least 15 people who have these phones and most have text messaging. This is great 90% of the time, but sometimes messaging gets overused/mis-used. I notice people getting so caught up in the novelty of sending text messages, that they will waste vast amounts of time trying to get lots said by typing on their little nokia 5190/6190 phones' 9 digit keypads when they could just take 10 seconds call each other be done with it. I've ended a few rather extended exchanges by simply calling the person. These little gadgets can turn in to quite the timewasters, and, just like on many other text-based mediums, the chance of being misunderstood runs pretty high, especially when you're trying to limit yourself to 160 chars.
On the other hand, I have gotten extremely efficient at using my little phone, and I find the discreetness of text messaging rather appealing for times such as when I'm at work. Hehe, leave it on silent and you can send and receive sexy little messages without anyone knowing or making your boyfriend blush.
I even have some friends who have written scripts to get around the 160 char. limit. Just log in to their site, tap away at a message any length you like, and their script will break it up into ~160 char. chunks and send it to the phone for you.
Anyway, this might have been a little long winded, but I hadn't heard anyone mention text messaging in Canada, and I can say that it's getting pretty popular.
But I'm biased, my friends are all geeks!
I actually find it a cheap way to communicate with my friends that live in other countries because it is very cheap. (1 SMS = 255 chars or so = 13Euro cent..about 12 US cent) A voice-contact normally lasts longer and thus costs a lot more, even when not using cellphones.
Tough driving and using a cellphone -in any way- should be illegal in any country, IMHO.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
'' communist '' threat!
Oliver's Law: Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
I go back to the Philippines to visit relatives about once a year; my last visit there spanned a week in late March/early April. I was there for the "Pope is dead" rumour, which thanks to a combination of "texting", word-of-mouth and the strong Catholicism (it was a Spanish colony for 300 years), spread like wildfire. I got to see and experience texting first-hand.
One reason for the high adoption of cell phones is that the wait for a land line is incredibly long. My cousins, who live in a suburb of Manila, were on the installation waiting list for over a year. For many people, the only way to get a phone within a reasonable period of time is to go mobile.
A mobile phone is a very handy thing in the Philippines, especially in extremely crowded cities like Manila, with a population of about 10 million (and a possible 2 or 3 million transients who get missed in the surveys). Traffic is so bad that they had to establish a system in which certain roads are off-limits to cars with odd- or even-numbered license plates at peak times, depending on the day. Running late is a common occurrence, and having a cell phone means that you can reach anyone who's waiting for you or find out how late the person you're waiting for will be.
Texting is much cheaper than using up your air time. There are many popular cell phone plans that offer 100 or 250 free text messages per month. Among the teen- and 20-something crowd, texting is most often used to let your friends know where you are or where to meet up. It proved to be extremely handy in "The Fort" -- a very popular and crowded mall of bars, clubs and restaurants located in an area similar to San Francisco's Presidio (along with the new club, Orange, it's a fun place to hang out...tell 'em I sent you).
There are services already available in the Philippines that we here in North America have yet to see. Some banks in the Philippines offer ATM-like functions over your cell phone -- you can check your bank account or be notified of things like payments due or maturing funds.
(In case you were wondering, the two official languages of the country are Filipino and English. Most of the people in Manila speak workable or better English, and most of the signage in Manila is in English.)
Every shopping center and more than a few street market stalls carry cell phones or cell phone accessories. I'm still kicking myself for not getting the Neon Genesis Evangelion face plate for my Nokia. My cousin has one of the phones with a flash RAM updateable ringer. His current phone ring is Aqua's "Barbie Girl", which somehow appals and amuses me at the same time.
As for the cultural aspects -- there's "hiya" (pronounced "hee-YA"), which can be translated as "shyness", "shame" or perhaps "reserve". It's a traditional Filipino trait not to be too outspoken, but you have to remember that a fair bit of North American culture has seeped in, thanks to a large expatriate community, radio and television. Traditionally, you were introduced to members of the opposite sex at well-chaperoned parties held at someones' parents house (many people still don't leave home until they're married there), but these days meeting people while out is increasingly becoming the norm. The teens and twenty-somethings are caught in the pull between the traditional and newer ways to socialize -- it seems that texting seems to be the best compromise. Perhaps texting might be the future of geek pick-ups at Linux conventions!
Just another "The Thrilla from Manila",
Master of Kode Fu
Not if you've got a newer phone.
Lots of new phones come with predictive text input which lets you press each key just once, and it predicts what word you're typing based on a built in dictionary. Much quicker.
Text-messaging is great: the US is really missing out. I find it indispensible for several reasons. Firstly its great if you're in a noisy bar or club, where its impossible to hear a phone. Secondly its cheap: i pay £.06p ($.09) per message, as opposed to £.30p/min to call another network mobile.
Lastly, and most importantly, texting is great for flirting. Little mesages that you'd never dream of saying by voice, are somehow easier to say by text!
I'm finnish and these messages are quite widely used here too but not *quite* to such extremes described here. But the reason is clear: it's less asynchronous than email or physical letters but more asynchronous than calling. Most often in Finland the first words in a phone call are "can you talk?".
We here in America are a culture unsuspecting with technology being foisted upon us.
There comes a time when we must no longer ask what could we do, but instead must consider what should we do.
Start Running Better Polls
And that is why it is better.
I can leave a message for someone across the office and when they're not busy they check their email and can answer my non time critical question.
It often gets very hectic if there are always several people trying to vie for face time. Email allows for more efficient scheduling.
Also, I don't have a cell phone. I hardly ever give people my phone number if they want to contact me, I give them my email address.
Start Running Better Polls
Think about it, just because the QWERTY standard is familiar (well, it is a standard after all), doesn't mean that it is the best for every circumstance.
I would not mind learning a new typing convention if it's learning curve isn't too steep and if it fits the use.
I keep thinking about the one-handed keyboard. Wouldn't something similar to this be of great use as opposed to a 40 key (absolute minimal punctuation, numbers and letters) pad? Key combination pads are the way that I would like to see miniature communication in the immediate future.
Speech recognition is a long way off in this size that would make a 65,000 word vocab small enough to carry around.
Rami James
Guy with a cellphone.
--
rJames.org - illustration
I'm not sure how 'texting' is changing social norms in the Philippines. It would be bad if 'texting' turns a society into just one big virtual chatting society.
The media may be exaggerating this 'texting' phenomenon. I bet you that it's more of a fad than a social upheaval (unless a fad is a social upheaval).
Who coined the term 'texting' anyway?
SORRY:::testing