Mobile Phones Blog

Merseyside Police have warned that a sports tournament which has banned visitors from bringing mobile phones may result in a car crime spree, as opportunistic thieves pillage vehicles while their owners are watching the event. As part of a zero-tolerance crackdown, spectators at the Royal Birkdale Golf Open in July will not be permitted to carry a mobile phone on site. Every visitor must go through a security check at the gate; anyone found with a phone in his or her possession will be expelled from the grounds.

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Indian farmers are turning to the mobile industry for information about weather and markets, under a new scheme run by Reuters. In rural India, where pricing information is often impossibly hard to come by, the news service and financial market data provider has been piloting a service which delivers market information to farmers' mobile phones.

The programme, known as Reuters Market Light, has been trialled in the state of Maharashtra, around the size of Italy and one of India's most prominent agricultural centres. 60 Reuters reporters have been dispatched to the area to collect market information which is then sent in local-language text messages to subscribers.

According to a recent report commissioned by the Indian government, every 34 minutes an Indian farmer commits suicide because of debts, crop failures and other problems. Economists hope that the new scheme will give the state's economy a much-needed boost by informing farmers about different markets and thus boosting competition.

“We saw that there was clear market inefficiency,” said Mans Olof-Ors, a Reuters employee who initiated the scheme. “The farmer would decide which market to travel to, then would just sell to that market. So there was no competition between markets.”
As well as helping farmers get the best price for their goods, it is also hoped the information the service Over one third of the 146 million tones of fruit and veg that India produces annually rots before it can be eaten.

A similar project was set up last year by the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, in which farmers are use text messages to receive alerts and ask questions of experts and colleagues. Called “aAQA” (almost all questions answered), the programme enables farmers to enquire about everything from projected rainfall patterns, disease forecasts for plants and animals to efficient ways of milking buffaloes.

However, both projects are still available only to the privileged few who own mobile phones. According to the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency, India has a long way to go before mobile phone use catches up with that of the developed world. It reports that last year 20% of the Indian had a mobile phone subscription, compared with mobile owners in the UK. What is more, many farmers are illiterate and would need younger family members on hand to read the text messages to them.

There have been countless trials and surveys about mobile TV, but the problem for people in the UK, is that they have no idea what any of the discussion is about. Mobile TV to a UK resident is about brief clips of streamed content, at low resolution, with dubious charging mechanisms, purely for video gimmickry such as the latest YouTube hand-me-downs. This is called Unicast TV and uses up the same bandwidth that we use for speaking. One person watching TV means that roughly 20 people cannot make a phone call.

This has come about primarily because there is no spectrum currently available in the UK to build out the favoured European standard for “proper” mobile TV, which is called DVB-H and relies on an extra radio and demodulator in each device and an entirely new country-wide network, usually in TV spectrum such as 700MHz at a likely cost of £100 million or more. DVB-H offers about 4 to 5 times the resolution of most Unicast services and just looks a hell of a lot better.

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The latest bit of mobile phone-related viral goofiness to hit You Tube involves two bored Swedish chums sheathing their vibrating mobes in contraceptives and racing them across a lubed-up floor surface;

In the Durex Derby, outside favourite to win LG Viewty (8-1) capitalises on an early lead gained on what appears to be Nokia 6500 Classic (2-1), who struggles to get past the first furlong having some initial difficulties, but makes a valiant effort to achieve a photo finish. Ladbrokes bookies are furious and are reportedly refusing to pay out on bets placed on Viewty to win.

I guess you’ve got to allow for the fact that large parts of the country experience total darkness for months on end; people must get bored stiff.

Sorry, it’s been a long week.

Doctors in Wales are using picture messages to speed up patients’ treatment. In a trial at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital in Llantrisant, South Wales, junior doctors have been sending X-ray pictures to specialist consultants via their mobile. The senior doctor can then make a diagnosis and advise how to proceed immediately. The doctors claim that waiting times have already been reduced during the pilot scheme.

Previously scans had to be sent by telex or taxi, which is both time-consuming and expensive. Jonathan P Davies, orthopaedic consultant at the Royal Glamorgan hospital said “Picture messaging proved a successful, quick and cost-effective method of transmitting images between colleagues for discussion. It is obviously a portable, hand-held mechanism, and we have found it quite accurate in the assessments we have done.”

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Even before Nokia delivered what may well prove a killer blow to Google’s ambition of setting universal handset software standards, the search giant’s Android plan was hitting roadblocks - highlighting that the company, for all its internet strengths, is a novice in understanding the mobile handset and developer communities. Just before the Symbian Foundation was unveiled, Google had been forced to admit that Android would be delayed, even though it had shown the first prototype just a week earlier. Now it has another software giant breathing down its neck, with Microsoft reportedly bringing forward the release of Windows Mobile 7. This means the first smartphones running Android and the latest release of Windows Mobile should debut about the same time, in the first quarter of 2009.

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T-Mobile are all set to announce some pretty impressive shake ups to their mainstream mobile tariffs - customers on £30 Solo and Combi plans are to be offered an unbeatable service. Under the new scheme, T-Mobile promise to match or beat the amount of minutes being offered on similarly priced contracts from rival network operators. Presumably, this means that customers halfway through their contract will be able to ring up and ask for an upgrade if there is a better deal going, on say 3 or Orange.

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The mobile phones industry is big business. More than three billion people worldwide now own a mobile phone, with 1.15 billion units sold in 2007 alone. With so many of us using and upgrading mobiles, the environmental implications are great.

Some 40-50 million handsets are dumped each year, according to a report by the UN Environment Programme (Unep) which was issued at a recent conference on the UN Basel Convention, designed to regulate international trade in toxic waste.

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The Imperial March from The Empire Strikes Back, could have accompanied the Nokia deal to buy out its Symbian partners and release the whole kit and caboodle to an open source process.

The announcement, accompanied only by the payment of a mere $410 million this week, massively strengthened the traditional handset vendors and cellular operators, and in one stroke effectively killed off both Linux on the handset, and any chance that Google’s Android had of taking the cellphone by storm.

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T-Mobile has announced that it is to cut data roaming charges by 80 per cent from the 1st of July, and simultaneously reduce the cost of sending texts from EU countries by 30 per cent from 30 August, in a bid to appease the European Commission. The official T-Mobile statement said:

“We will cut the cost of international internet access from a handset and mobile broadband connectivity via a USB dongle or data card from £7.50 per megabyte to £1.50, and the cost of sending a text from EU countries will be brought down by 38 per cent, from 0.40p to 0.25p.”

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