All mobile phones need a charger and recharging cell phones has always been a bother because of its wires that are needed to deal with.
Posts Tagged ‘Mobile phones’
Wireless iPhone Charger Keeps You Out Of Wire Mess Posted By : Shaun Marshal
July 13th, 2010 |
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Nokia and Microsoft Offer Silverlight the Symbian-Based Handsets
March 15th, 2010 |
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A commitment was announced by Nokia and Microsoft in 2008. According to it, Silverlight can be used for some Nokia cell phones that are based on the Symbian operating system.
With the help of the installable executable file users can take advantage of Silverlight applications on the Nokia S60 5th Edition platform. The executable file [...]
Vodafone interested in iPhone deal
July 24th, 2009 |
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• Operator hints it could challenge O2′s exclusive deal with Apple
• Growth in emerging markets offsets slide in European revenues
Vodafone has added to speculation that O2′s exclusive deal to supply the iPhone in the UK may soon be up for grabs by suggesting that it would like to offer Apple’s smartphone to more of its own customers.
Andy Halford, chief financial officer of the world’s largest mobile phone operator, told reporters this morning that Vodafone was keen to supply the iPhone across more of its empire. It currently sells the device in 11 countries but not in the key European markets of Germany, where it is stocked exclusively by T-Mobile, or the UK.
“It’s a good product and we would love to have it in the portfolio in more countries,” said Halford, speaking after Vodafone published first-quarter results that showed the continuing impact of the recession and intense competition in its core European markets.
There has been intense speculation in recent weeks that T-Mobile, Orange and Vodafone are trying to muscle in on O2′s exclusive deal with Apple in the UK. T-Mobile is going so far as to buy the device in other markets where it is freely available without being tied to one operator and shipping it back to the UK in order to sell it to customers who are considering defecting to O2.
Halford also said Vodafone likes the idea of merging its businesses in underperforming markets with other players in order to reduce costs. The company, which last month merged its Australian business with local rival 3, is understood to have been approached by bankers at JP Morgan about the possibility of a merger in the UK with fourth-placed T-Mobile.
Asked about Vodafone’s attitude to so-called in-market consolidation, Halford said: “The concept of putting two business together with very obvious cost synergies … is one that we like.”
“There are other markets where we think more consolidation would be a good thing,” he added, alluding to the UK.
Much of Vodafone’s recent acquisition activity, however, has been in emerging markets such as India and Africa. In the latter, Vivendi recently halted talks about a potential $10bn (£6bn) acquisition of Zain, which has operations across the continent. Asked whether Vodafone would be interested in Zain, Halford said: “Our primary focus is on squeezing all the pips we can out of the existing business.”
Recession takes its toll
Vodafone announced today that first-quarter revenues rose 9.3% to £10.7bn, roughly in line with analysts’ projections. Splitting out currency effects and acquisitions, organic service revenue was down 2.1% due to weakness across most of Europe as a result of the continuing economic recession. That poor performance was offset somewhat by solid results in Italy and continued growth in emerging markets, especially India.
Overall, the company achieved first-quarter free cash flow of just under £1.9bn, up 21.2%, as it continued to rein in costs. It added a total of 8 million new customers in the quarter – taking its base to 315.3 million – although most of that growth was in India, where is gained almost 7.7 million.
Revenues in Europe were £7bn, down 4.4% on an organic basis, and the only growth markets for the company were Italy and the Netherlands. The company, which flagged at its full-year results in May that the recession would hit the business, admitted that revenue in the second quarter will be affected by regulatory price cuts in the UK and a drop in the money it makes from international roaming as fewer people go on holiday. In some European markets, such as the UK, it has abolished roaming rates altogether.
Within its core European business, Spain continued to be a major problem with revenues down 8.1%, while in the UK revenues of just under £1.2bn were down 4.7% on an organic basis. The firm said this was due to “intense competition and economic pressures; the latter resulted in reduced discretionary spend which led to customers optimising bundle usage, higher prepaid inactivity and lower roaming revenue”.
Vodafone lost customers across three of its four main European markets – Germany, Italy and the UK – with its British operation seeing 159,000 defect. It now has 18.6 million UK customers, making it number two behind O2.
Reports overnight suggested that Vodafone plans to charge people who call the swine flu hotline set up yesterday for NHS patients in England. A spokesman for the company, however, stressed this morning that it is not charging for calls to the 0800 number, in line with rivals Orange, O2 and T-Mobile.
Meanwhile, Vodafone’s Turkish business, which has taken far longer to turn around than the company had hoped, continued to struggle, with service revenues down 11.2% at constant exchange rates, driven by a 26.8% decline in outgoing voice revenues.
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Without fear of trespass
July 17th, 2009 |
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To remove the need for people to defend their privacy so doggedly, make the public square safe
ID cards didn’t do it. CCTV cameras didn’t do it. Not even the Terrorism Act could rouse the masses to indignant protest about the erosion of their privacy. But recently we learned something could: news that a company called Connectivity was to launch a new mobile phone directory so appalled the nation that the service’s website crashed under the weight of people opting out, and the service was suspended. “I’d find it quite intrusive actually,” said one woman stopped on the street by BBC’s Working Lunch, whose report ignited the protests. “I think whoever gets my mobile phone [number], I should be giving it to them.”
On the face of it, this outrage seems bizarre. Go back only 20 years, and almost everyone was happy to be in the phone book. Ex-directory used to be the exception; now an Englishman’s phone is his castle. Yet the same people who think it is an affront to privacy to give out a mobile number often think nothing of revealing their date of birth, relationship status, and much more intimate details on social networking sites.
What explains this paradoxical combination of opening up in some respects, and clamming up in others? An important part of the answer is that personal information is more ruthlessly commercially exploited than it used to be. You were in the phone book simply because you had a phone. You’re on Connectivity’s website, however, because someone was paid to hand over your number.
In the past we didn’t worry about ownership of contact details because they were not treated as property. Now they have become commodified, we quite naturally want to make sure that we, and not others, retain ownership.
On social networking sites, we may expose ourselves, but we choose to do so. We are in control and, often wrongly, we do not feel we are giving away tradable data. In a strange way, social networks recreate a virtual version of what used to be the social reality, a place where we don’t mind people knowing how to get hold of us. But we are as paranoid in the real world as we are naive in the virtual one. Whereas we once trusted that information would not be abused, we now assume that it will.
The commodification of personal data is an often-overlooked factor in the erosion of community. It explains, in part, why society is becoming a collection of individuals vigilantly guarding their own individuality, suspicious of anyone who comes too close to it. This is the darker side of the cult of privacy, with its belief that privacy is a right that needs defending. That kind of privacy needs attacking. Privacy is indeed important, but if the private sphere grows, the public square shrinks. And as the etymology suggests, that is a privation.
That is why always focusing on defending privacy risks getting things the wrong way round. The priority should not be to defend the defence mechanism, but to neutralise the attack. We need solutions that go to the roots of the initial problem, ways of eliminating the fear that people have that, if they give an inch of personal information, someone will try to take a mile.
The priority should be to make the public square safe again, not to make the private realm more of a fortress. This means more robust rules on cold-calling and junk mail, which should both be explicitly on an opt-in basis only. It also means making it possible to go to physical public spaces without having to put up defence mechanisms: it should be illegal for anyone to accost you in a public area, for commercial or charity purposes. People should be enabled to put down their drawbridges without fear of trespass, not empowered to build more moats. We need to remove the need for people to defend their privacy so doggedly, and so address the cause, rather than the effect, of our private anxieties.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Without fear of trespass
July 17th, 2009 |
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To remove the need for people to defend their privacy so doggedly, make the public square safe
ID cards didn’t do it. CCTV cameras didn’t do it. Not even the Terrorism Act could rouse the masses to indignant protest about the erosion of their privacy. But recently we learned something could: news that a company called Connectivity was to launch a new mobile phone directory so appalled the nation that the service’s website crashed under the weight of people opting out, and the service was suspended. “I’d find it quite intrusive actually,” said one woman stopped on the street by BBC’s Working Lunch, whose report ignited the protests. “I think whoever gets my mobile phone [number], I should be giving it to them.”
On the face of it, this outrage seems bizarre. Go back only 20 years, and almost everyone was happy to be in the phone book. Ex-directory used to be the exception; now an Englishman’s phone is his castle. Yet the same people who think it is an affront to privacy to give out a mobile number often think nothing of revealing their date of birth, relationship status, and much more intimate details on social networking sites.
What explains this paradoxical combination of opening up in some respects, and clamming up in others? An important part of the answer is that personal information is more ruthlessly commercially exploited than it used to be. You were in the phone book simply because you had a phone. You’re on Connectivity’s website, however, because someone was paid to hand over your number.
In the past we didn’t worry about ownership of contact details because they were not treated as property. Now they have become commodified, we quite naturally want to make sure that we, and not others, retain ownership.
On social networking sites, we may expose ourselves, but we choose to do so. We are in control and, often wrongly, we do not feel we are giving away tradable data. In a strange way, social networks recreate a virtual version of what used to be the social reality, a place where we don’t mind people knowing how to get hold of us. But we are as paranoid in the real world as we are naive in the virtual one. Whereas we once trusted that information would not be abused, we now assume that it will.
The commodification of personal data is an often-overlooked factor in the erosion of community. It explains, in part, why society is becoming a collection of individuals vigilantly guarding their own individuality, suspicious of anyone who comes too close to it. This is the darker side of the cult of privacy, with its belief that privacy is a right that needs defending. That kind of privacy needs attacking. Privacy is indeed important, but if the private sphere grows, the public square shrinks. And as the etymology suggests, that is a privation.
That is why always focusing on defending privacy risks getting things the wrong way round. The priority should not be to defend the defence mechanism, but to neutralise the attack. We need solutions that go to the roots of the initial problem, ways of eliminating the fear that people have that, if they give an inch of personal information, someone will try to take a mile.
The priority should be to make the public square safe again, not to make the private realm more of a fortress. This means more robust rules on cold-calling and junk mail, which should both be explicitly on an opt-in basis only. It also means making it possible to go to physical public spaces without having to put up defence mechanisms: it should be illegal for anyone to accost you in a public area, for commercial or charity purposes. People should be enabled to put down their drawbridges without fear of trespass, not empowered to build more moats. We need to remove the need for people to defend their privacy so doggedly, and so address the cause, rather than the effect, of our private anxieties.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Even better than the real thing
July 15th, 2009 |
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You can analyse a tennis ball’s flight, recognise strangers and play with a stegosaurus. Charles Arthur reports on augmented reality, coming soon to a smartphone near you
As the players pause between ends in a match at Wimbledon, the TV screen suddenly overlays the court with a pattern of yellow and black dots – showing where the receiver has been returning the first and second serves. As they walk back out, the overlay vanishes and they’re back to play.
As another wicket falls in the Ashes, a replay shows the flight of the ball, and how it was going to clip the off-stump before it was stopped by the batsman’s leg. And in the US, TV viewers watching an American football match see a yellow line running across the field – the “first down line” that the attacking team must reach to retain possession. Except that it’s invisible to the players on the field: it’s added in the TV studios. And this weekend’s Open Championship golf will show the greens overlaid with contours, revealing the territory each putt must negotiate.
All are examples – already so familiar as to feel quotidian – of “augmented reality” (AR), a burgeoning field that mixes computer power with real life to add extra information to a scene or event. The sports examples are only the beginning, relying as they do on static locations. The next generation of augmented reality is designed for people on the move – and it’s already being implemented.
For example, spectators visiting the All-England club this year with an Android-powered phone could download an AR application called Wimbledon Seer, which, when they held the phone up and pointed it at the courts, would display match data, where the refreshment stands were, or whether a cafe had an exceptionally long line.
Unlike virtual reality, or immersive reality (think Second Life), AR takes what is already there in the real world and uses computer sensing to add more information – whether in touch (“haptic”), visual or aural formats.
Pilot scheme
It has already been used in niche applications by well-funded organisations: Boeing, for example, uses AR so that engineers can do the complex wiring on its aircraft. Since a trial in 1996 – which involved PCs worn on a waistband and special goggles – its engineers have seen the wiring diagram overlaid on the place where they are looking, so they don’t have to keep referring back to paper wiring diagrams (where it would be easy to lose your place).
But even that’s not the original form of AR – which was arguably the tapes that you could buy or borrow at museums: slot them into your cassette player (which shows how old the idea is) and as you walked to each exhibit, the tape would provide a more detailed explanation of what you were seeing. It may be the first time art has fostered a technology breakthrough. Nowadays, AR is used in museums in a more dramatic manner – such as Canon, which has a version for showing off dinosaur exhibits: viewed through a special camera, a three-dimensional stegosaurus appears to be right in front of the visitor.
Jen-Hsun Huang, president and chief executive of the graphics card maker Nvidia, is certain that augmented reality is going to become part of our daily life – and soon. “You’ll see it in your car when you’re backing up: you’ll get a readout showing how close objects are. Golfers will be able to put on glasses and it will show them the contours of the green. Already Sony has been using it in videogames – you put a camera over a board, and you put the game cards on the board, and you see a rendering of the monsters from the cards on your computer – and they’re fighting each other. Lego has done one where the model appears to pop out of the box.” He’s sure that the growth in processing power and location-sensing will mean AR will become commonplace in a few years.
Great leap forward
Certainly, AR out in the field needs smartphones with a number of elements built in. First, video or camera input in a high enough resolution; location sensing; direction sensing; and then, the onboard computing power to analyse the visual information and decide what and where to overlay. It’s only in the past year or so that smartphones with all those elements have begun to be affordable, and include elements such as the compass built in to the recently released iPhone 3GS and Android-based G1 mobile.
And there are already a number of startup companies trying to make the most out of this burgeoning area. One is Layar, from SPRXmobile, a Dutch company: it overlays local restaurant, hotel and property data on to the scene that it “sees” through the camera.
Meanwhile a Swedish company, The Astonishing Tribe, has gone a step further, with a facial recognition system called Augmented ID. It tells you who people are, based on identifying their picture via a technology called Polar Rose, which analyses faces and then searches for photos on Flickr that match it – and pulls out the name from the tags.
Another, called Nearest Tube, for the iPhone 3GS, uses its GPS and video capability to give real-time directions – overlaid on to the scene, viewed through the iPhone – to the nearest underground station. An Austrian-based company, Mobilizy, has developed an Android application that, given a camera view and a location, overlays information about it from Wikipedia and photos from Panoramio. So far there are 800,000 points around the world where it works.
Use your imagination
And it turns out that the programming isn’t the hardest part. Chetan Damani, a director of Acrossair, which developed the Nearest Tube application, says: “The app itself wasn’t that complex. Apple released the 3.0 SDK a few months prior in beta version, so we started conceptualising the app in advance. I would say in total we spent 20-30 man days on the project (design, strategy and build).”
He adds that AR isn’t a homogenous field. “Firstly, you have AR, which involves overlaying data in to the current surroundings, like our Nearest Tube application on the iPhone. For that you need the geodata (longitude and latitude) and a capable device. The second type of AR is when you create a virtual object and layer that on to a real-world view, like the BMW Z4 AR app accessed on a PC. For this you need a visual tag the camera can recognise to create the virtual object; in this type of AR app you do not need the geodata.”
It is still early days, though. “It’s really picking up now because of the devices. AR provides a much more intuitive interface to viewing mapping data, and the one thing that the internet era has taught us is that the interface drives interest. The hardest element about AR is getting hold of accurate data – you need to have detailed longitude and latitude data, and although this is available for landmarks and for certain stores, it’s not easy to obtain.”
But with GPS getting ever more precise, and mobile phones getting ever more accurate, it may not be that long before the spectators at sports events are lifting their phones – or perhaps even special glasses – to their eyes to “watch” the event in more detail, and in ways we presently have to stay at home for. Augmenting reality could make experiencing reality much more rewarding.
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Iran boycott for Nokia ‘collaboration’
July 15th, 2009 |
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The mobile phone company Nokia is being hit by a growing economic boycott in Iran as consumers sympathetic to the post-election protest movement begin targeting a string of companies deemed to be collaborating with the regime.
Wholesale vendors in the capital report that demand for Nokia handsets has fallen by as much as half in the wake of calls to boycott Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) for selling communications monitoring systems to Iran.
There are signs that the boycott is spreading: consumers are shunning SMS messaging in protest at the perceived complicity with the regime by the state telecoms company, TCI. Iran’s state-run broadcaster has been hit by a collapse in advertising as companies fear being blacklisted in a Facebook petition. There is also anecdotal evidence that people are moving money out of state banks and into private banks.
Nokia is the most prominent western company to suffer from its dealings with the Iranian authorities. Its NSN joint venture with Siemens provided Iran with a monitoring system as it expanded a mobile network last year. NSN says the technology is standard issue to dozens of countries, but protesters believe the company could have provided the network without the monitoring function.
Siemens is also accused of providing Iran with an internet filtering system called Webwasher.
“Iranians’ first choice has been Nokia cellphones for several years, partly because Nokia has installed the facility in the country. But in the past weeks, customers’ priority has changed,” said Reza, a mobile phone seller in Tehran’s Big Bazaar.
“Since the news spread that NSN had sold electronic surveillance systems to the Iranian government, people have decided to buy other company’s products although they know that Nokia cellphones function better with network coverage in Iran.”
Some Tehran shops have removed Nokia phones from their window displays. Hashem, another mobile phone vendor, said: “I don’t like to lose my customers and now people don’t feel happy seeing Nokia’s products. We even had customers who wanted to refund their new Nokia cellphones or change them with just another cellphone from any other companies.
“It’s not just a limited case to my shop – I’m also a wholesaler to small shops in provincial markets, and I can say that there is half the demand for Nokia’s product these days in comparison with just one month ago, and it’s really unprecedented. People feel ashamed of having Nokia cellphones,” he added.
News of the boycott has appeared on the front page of Iranian pro-reform papers such as Etemad-e Melli, owned by the reformist candidate Mehdi Karroubi. Hadi Heidari, a prominent Iranian cartoonist, has published an image of a Nokia phone on a No Entry traffic sign.
A Nokia spokeswoman refused to comment on the company’s sales in Iran.
The Iranian authorities are believed to have used Nokia’s mobile phone monitoring system to target dissidents. Released prisoners have revealed that the authorities were keeping them in custody on the basis of their SMS and phone calls archive, which was at officials’ disposal.
One Iranian journalist who has just been released from detention said: “I always had this impression that monitoring calls is just a rumour for threatening us from continuing our job properly, but the nightmare became real when they had my phone calls – conversations in my case.
“And the most unbelievable thing for me is that Nokia sold this system to our government. It would be a reasonable excuse for Nokia if they had sold the monitoring technology to a democratic country for controlling child abuse or other uses, but selling it to the Iranian government with a very clear background of human rights violence and suppression of dissent, it’s just inexcusable for me. I’d like to tell Nokia that I’m tortured because they had sold this damn technology to our government.”
NSN spokesman Ben Roome said: “As in every other country, telecoms networks in Iran require the capability to lawfully intercept voice calls. In the last two years, the number of mobile subscribers in Iran has grown from 12 million to over 53 million, so to expand the network in the second half of 2008 we were required to provide the facility to intercept voice calls on this network.”
In other sectors, state-run TV has also been targeted by protesters who have listed products advertised on its channels and urged supporters to join a boycott. Companies are running scared, and viewers have noticed the number of commercials plummet.
“We don’t have many choices to show and continue our protests. They don’t let us go out, they have killed many, we are threatened to text people or distribute emails, they have summoned people who shout Allahu Akbar ['God is great'] on rooftops at nights, so we need to look for new ways,” said Shahla, a 26-year-old Iranian student.
“I can obviously see on the TV that they are facing an [advertising] crisis. This at least shows them how angry people are,” she added.
The SMS boycott, meanwhile, has apparently forced TCI into drastic price hikes. The cost of an SMS has doubled in recent days. Protesters view the move as a victory.
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Twitter, teenagers and tech trends
July 14th, 2009 |
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The world seems all a titter that teens don’t use Twitter
Was the whiz-kid correct? Two teens give opposing views
Teens spurning Twitter was one of the bombshells from 15-year-old Matthew Robson that the media highlighted in a report he wrote for investment bank Morgan Stanley.
However, it wasn’t really breaking news that teens don’t use Twitter.
• Last November, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found the median age of Twitter users in the US was 31, higher than 26 for Facebook and 27 for MySpace.
• In April, web metrics firm comScore reported that the majority of Twitter’s 10m or so users were over 35.
• In June, comScore reported that 11.3% of visitors to Twitter.com in the U.S. are ages 12-17. Internationally, only 4.4% of visitors were younger then 18, according to comScore data from May.
• In June, Pace University said that while 99% of 18-24 year olds have profiles on social networks, only 22% use Twitter.
In a battle of the teen prognosticators, 16-year-old Daniel Brusilovsky, writing on TechCrunch says that teens don’t use Twitter because it’s a completely open network and anyone can see your status updates. Teens prefer the privacy of closed networks such as Facebook. Brusilovsky said it makes teens feel “unsafe”.
It’s probably more about teens wanting to establish a privacy perimeter from the prying eyes of adults rather than a safety issue.
That’s not entirely true. Twitter users can protect their updates so only followers they approve can follow their updates.
Also, as David Meyer points out on ZDNet, Robson only referred to updating Twitter via SMS. However, as Meyer points out, Twitter is now used mostly via a range of desktop applications and internet apps on smartphones. Also, up until recently Twitter was MIA in the UK via SMS because Twitter and the carriers couldn’t reach an agreement on pricing.
A number of bloggers, including my wife Suw, took Morgan Stanley and the media to task for mistaking anecdotes from a 15-year-old for hard data.
Neither Morgan Stanley nor the media seem to be able to tell the difference between anecdote and data. This “research note” is more note than research, and it should not be taken to be representative of all teens. A teenager in a rural setting, or in an inner city estate, or one who feels socially excluded from web culture will have a very different experience than a teen who’s well-connected enough to get himself an internship at Morgan Stanley.
Beyond criticising Robson’s methodology, there is something more interesting going on here. As comScore’s Sarah Radwanick pointed out, as technology becomes more common, teens and college students aren’t the only people in the population that can be considered “technologically inclined”. She said:
…trends are much more prone to take off in older age segments than they used to.
It challenges the idea that the youth are the only people who are “digital natives”. Charlie Beckett, director of journalism thinktank POLIS at the London School of Economics, challenges the whole idea of the digital native:
As Matthew Robson describes, most teenagers use a variety of digital devices, but when you talk to people who work with teenagers they describe a much more complex picture of what they actually do.
The same teenagers who have literacy problems have media literacy problems. Many of the teenagers apparently comfortable with new media are in fact only using a very limited range of applications and in a very limited way.
Other researchers indicate that teenagers are getting just as frustrated as the rest of us with the complexity and cost of many online and mobile applications.
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Nokia turns to Android in phone wars
July 6th, 2009 |
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Finnish mobile phone giant changes strategy to increase share in the only growing market
Nokia is understood to be developing a mobile phone that runs on Google’s Android software platform in a strategic U-turn for the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer.
The new touchscreen device will be unveiled at the Nokia World conference in September, say industry insiders, as the Finnish handset giant tries to revive its fortunes in the smartphone market.
Nokia, which makes roughly four out of every 10 mobile phones sold, has been losing out in the market for phones that can access the internet, send emails and download third-party applications, to products such as the Apple iPhone and BlackBerry Storm. The Android software platform, meanwhile, has been gaining ground with over half a dozen handsets expected to be available by the end of the year.
Analysts at HSBC reckon Nokia had 47% of the global smartphone market in 2007; that was down to 35% last summer and 31% at the end of the year.
The smartphone segment is critical as it is the only part of the mobile phone market which is growing. Cash-strapped consumers are either holding on to their existing phones and opting for cheaper SIM-only deals or “trading up” to more advanced gadgets such as the iPhone.
Opting to use Android, an “open source” platform that any software developer can access, is a reversal of the company’s previous strategy in mobile phone software.
A year ago, Nokia bought out the partners in its Symbian mobile software joint venture and announced plans to make its products free of charge to other manufacturers in an attempt to see off the threat posed by Android and the iPhone.
But the response to the opening of Symbian has been relatively muted. By contrast, users of the iPhone have already downloaded over a billion applications in just nine months and Android has attracted a host of developers offering their “widgets”, or applications, to consumers through the Android Marketplace.
Gadget fans have already hacked one of Nokia’s existing devices, the N810 internet tablet, so it can run the Android system but the new device is expected to fully integrate the Android platform.
There has also been speculation that Nokia is looking to extend its smartphone range as a result of its recent deal to collaborate with chip giant Intel. Nokia was unavailable for comment, however.
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Mobile charges drop across Europe
July 1st, 2009 |
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Mobile phone charges will fall for millions of holidaymakers across Europe from today, after new regulations come into force to drive down the cost of roaming.
A mandatory single tariff, which covers all European Union countries, will make it significantly cheaper for those who use their phones while outside of their home territory. The changes – which were originally approved in 2007 – are an attempt by officials to end what they have called excessive charges.
“The roaming rip-off is now coming to an end,” said EU telecommunications commissioner Viviane Reding in a statement. “Expect the new roaming rules to make it much cheaper to surf the web on your mobile while abroad in the EU.”
After years of experiencing high prices for making phone calls abroad – or receiving them – the new tariffs are radically lower: sending a text message, for example, will drop from an average of 28 Euro cents to just 11 cents. The move should end the well-worn fear of opening a huge phone bill when returning from holiday or business abroad.
The new tariffs include the following maximum costs:
- making a call while abroad will cost 37p per minute
- receiving calls will cost a maximum of 17p per minute
- sending a text message from another country inside the EU will cost 10p
- Data transfers will also fall dramatically, with a megabyte of data costing 85p
More examples of specific costs are available at the European Commission’s website.
The initial decision to enforce cuts was attacked by mobile phone operators and industry bodies who called it “bad for competition and innovation”.
Some of the prices are reductions of up to 60%, but the commission plans to enforce further cuts over the coming years and will be measuring the impact of the changes.
“The commission and national regulators will monitor data roaming charges very carefully and assess next year whether the roaming market is finally becoming competitive,” said Reding.
The new charges are the second piece of good news for European phone users this week – after handset manufacturers agreed to adopt a common standard for phone chargers.
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Phonemakers agree universal charger
June 30th, 2009 |
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Move follows request from European commission to harmonise chargers in a bid to reduce waste
The days of drawers full of chargers for mobile phones you no longer use could soon be over after manufacturers agreed to use a universal model.
Ten companies including Apple, LG, Motorola, Nokia and Sony Ericsson have signed up to offer the charger, which will be based on a Micro-USB connector. Currently, when consumers buy a mobile phone they are provided with a new charger even if the old one still works.
The European commission had asked companies to work on harmonising chargers in the EU in a bid to cut down on waste. It said unused chargers amounted to thousands of tonnes of electronic waste a year and was threatening legislation unless a voluntary deal was reached.
The EU industry commissioner, Günter Verheugen, said he was pleased with the agreement, which would make life much simpler for consumers.
“They will be able to charge mobile phones anywhere from the new common charger. This also means considerably less electronic waste because people will no longer have to throw away chargers when buying new phones,” he said.
Talks between the phone firms and commission officials produced a “Memorandum of Understanding” indicating that the first generation of “inter-chargeable” mobile phones will reach the EU market from 2010.
The agreement says that in future harmonised chargers will improve energy efficiency and reduce energy consumption. They should also give mobile users an “easier life”, cutting costs by removing the likelihood of needing a new charger to go with a new mobile phone, and by foregoing the need to hunt all over the house for the correct charger.
Audrey Gallacher, customer relations expert for the UK consumer watchdog Consumer Focus, welcomed the move. “Industry has chosen to do the right thing for their customers by introducing a common phone charger,” she said.
“This is a sensible solution to an everyday gripe for mobile phone users, which will reduce frustration and confusion for consumers as well as cutting down on waste products.”
Conservative MEP Malcolm Harbour said common sense had prevailed. “This agreement will also encourage more chargers to be recycled, preventing electronic waste. Mobile phone companies should consider whether a new charger is now needed with every handset if there is a possibility that an old one can be recycled.
“It is particularly welcome that the commission was able to reach agreement with the industry without introducing new regulation.”
The new charger will only work with data enabled phones but the commission said it expected most phones bought from 2010 will be compatible.
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Without fear of trespass
To remove the need for people to defend their privacy so doggedly, make the public square safe
ID cards didn’t do it. CCTV cameras didn’t do it. Not even the Terrorism Act could rouse the masses to indignant protest about the erosion of their privacy. But recently we learned something could: news that a company called Connectivity was to launch a new mobile phone directory so appalled the nation that the service’s website crashed under the weight of people opting out, and the service was suspended. “I’d find it quite intrusive actually,” said one woman stopped on the street by BBC’s Working Lunch, whose report ignited the protests. “I think whoever gets my mobile phone [number], I should be giving it to them.”
On the face of it, this outrage seems bizarre. Go back only 20 years, and almost everyone was happy to be in the phone book. Ex-directory used to be the exception; now an Englishman’s phone is his castle. Yet the same people who think it is an affront to privacy to give out a mobile number often think nothing of revealing their date of birth, relationship status, and much more intimate details on social networking sites.
What explains this paradoxical combination of opening up in some respects, and clamming up in others? An important part of the answer is that personal information is more ruthlessly commercially exploited than it used to be. You were in the phone book simply because you had a phone. You’re on Connectivity’s website, however, because someone was paid to hand over your number.
In the past we didn’t worry about ownership of contact details because they were not treated as property. Now they have become commodified, we quite naturally want to make sure that we, and not others, retain ownership.
On social networking sites, we may expose ourselves, but we choose to do so. We are in control and, often wrongly, we do not feel we are giving away tradable data. In a strange way, social networks recreate a virtual version of what used to be the social reality, a place where we don’t mind people knowing how to get hold of us. But we are as paranoid in the real world as we are naive in the virtual one. Whereas we once trusted that information would not be abused, we now assume that it will.
The commodification of personal data is an often-overlooked factor in the erosion of community. It explains, in part, why society is becoming a collection of individuals vigilantly guarding their own individuality, suspicious of anyone who comes too close to it. This is the darker side of the cult of privacy, with its belief that privacy is a right that needs defending. That kind of privacy needs attacking. Privacy is indeed important, but if the private sphere grows, the public square shrinks. And as the etymology suggests, that is a privation.
That is why always focusing on defending privacy risks getting things the wrong way round. The priority should not be to defend the defence mechanism, but to neutralise the attack. We need solutions that go to the roots of the initial problem, ways of eliminating the fear that people have that, if they give an inch of personal information, someone will try to take a mile.
The priority should be to make the public square safe again, not to make the private realm more of a fortress. This means more robust rules on cold-calling and junk mail, which should both be explicitly on an opt-in basis only. It also means making it possible to go to physical public spaces without having to put up defence mechanisms: it should be illegal for anyone to accost you in a public area, for commercial or charity purposes. People should be enabled to put down their drawbridges without fear of trespass, not empowered to build more moats. We need to remove the need for people to defend their privacy so doggedly, and so address the cause, rather than the effect, of our private anxieties.