Texting this number will cost £1 plus usual charges
By Dave Adamson in Reader
Posted in Uncategorized on January 23, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Aren’t mobile phones wonderful? More accurately, isn’t text messaging wonderful!
Think about it, instead of talking on the phone, we can whip off a terse response to anything. Instead of declaring our undying love for someone via the power of spoken word, perhaps quoting Shakespeare or some other long dead writer, we can now just send “I luv u” and it means exactly the same!
Apparently, people are using texts to lie to their partners and friends. I read it in a report by Friends Provident. Actually, see, I’m lying! I actually read it in a news article about the report by Friends Provident. AND… it might not even have been a report by Friends Provident. So, I could still be lying but because I’ve typed it, you’re bound to believe it! See, wonderful technology.
Anyway, I stray from my point.
I’m sat here watching some music channel or another and there’s adverts for various text messages services, some subscription based whilst some are not, all cost a quid or more and all you have to do is text something to a short number and you get pointless content to your phone, or the astrologer in the bottom 1/6 of the screen will predict the chances of your relationship surviving, or answer a question, or give you your adult movie name.
There seems to be a steady stream of people texting the one on this music channel, asking questions like “What is Usher’s real name?” and getting charged a quid for information that you can find for free on the internet. Of course, it might be that nobody is sending in texts and it’s all a bigger con than I think it is at the moment.
I thought the brouhaha over the Crazy Frog ringtone would have killed this type of text thing stone dead, but it hasn’t. It looks like there are people out there (no doubt not “16 years and over” as the ads would have us believe you have to be to subscribe) spending their hard earned top ups on ill conceived and boring after the first ten seconds (”Pick up your f-ing phone, pick up your f-ing phone” - hilarious, I’m sure it isn’t).
Perhaps I should start one up. Send a text to 8XXXXX and I’ll send you a different letter of the alphabet every hour, you’ll receive 26 messages costing £1.50 each. Any takers? Oh, hold on, I’ve just got a text!
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iPhone - A moment of excitement
By Dave Adamson in Reader
Posted in iPhone, Apple on January 12, 2007 at 8:57 pm
I have a confession to make… the Nokia N91 Smartphone with 4GB microdrive is a fantastic phone and a bloody nuisance thanks to it’s resemblance to a house brick, it’s fiddly little number pad, it’s annoyingly small connector on the charger that just feels like it might snap off at any moment, the fact that it feels like it takes a full five minutes (nearer one in reality) to start up to a useable state, the fact that every so often it decides to just hang after you’ve sent a text message and I know that one day I’ll use it as a projectile weapon! Oh, and the wonderfully mirror like surround to the screen which, in the middle of summer, blinds you if you catch the sun in it. Aside from that, it’s a fantastic idea let down by a bit of a ropey implementation.
The Apple iPhone (not to be confused with the Cisco iPhone… how long before Apple just call it the MacPhone… or would McDonald’s lawyers be banging at the door?), though, looks like a fantastic idea supported by a rather snazzy implementation! I mean, come on, and proper iPod crossed with a proper phone. Up to 8GB of storage, Apple OS X (which I don’t mind that much, I guess (assuming it doesn’t have the bouncy dock thing)), just over 1cm thick, and… that touch screen. I love touch screens. Really. I don’t want to think how grimy it will look when my fingers deposit their prints all over it, it’s a touch screen and that’s all that matters. I can’t imagine myself scrolling through my contacts (they’ll fit on one screen!), but music… yes, it has to be better than the never-quite-in-control method I seem to have become comfortable with with the N91. If the touchscreen is anything like the surface of my PSP (obviously not touchscreen, unfortunately), it’ll be attracting fingerprints from the ether anyway, so that’ll be okay… nothing says ‘used’ more than fingerprints everywhere.
Will I dash out for an iPhone when it arrives in the UK? Probably not until my contract ends, but after that… I’m game….
What I’ll be really interested to see, however, is what Nokia and Motorola put out in competition.
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