Cool Tech Reviews

The NY Times’ Laura Holson reports on the latest battleground with spammers as they have figured out how to hit cellphone users with unsolicited and unwanted text messages, which depending on your service plan, you may well have to pay for.

American consumers are expected to receive an estimated 1.5 billion unsolicited text messages in 2008, according to Ferris Research, based in San Francisco, which tracks mobile messaging trends. That is nearly double what they received in 2006.

Of course that is a small percentage of the overall number of messages: an industry survey showed that consumers in the United States sent and received about 48 billion text messages in December alone. But for many people who are charged as much as 20 cents for an incoming message or are interrupted in the middle of dinner, even one is too many.

“The reason this really burns people up is because they have to pay for messages they don’t want, and they shouldn’t have to,” said Chris Murray, senior counsel for Consumers Union, a nonprofit group.

There’s some discussion of fighting with your carrier to get refunds, but more interesting is cutting off the spam before it arrives:

Most phone spam is actually e-mail that comes through gateways linking the Internet and cellphone networks, industry executives said.

Most wireless phones have a dedicated e-mail address. At AT&T, for example, it is a customer’s cellphone number followed by @text.att.net. Using computers, spammers create millions of possible number combinations, then send messages to those addresses.
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All major communications companies give consumers the ability to thwart spam by changing the easily guessed e-mail addresses for their phones, or completely blocking messages coming from the Internet. They can do this by logging onto the company’s Web site and changing their preferences.

“I did that six months ago and I have not received any spam,” Mr. Melone of Verizon said. “No one, not even me, wants their cellphone to ring at 2 in the morning.”

The utility of blocking all messages from the Internet depends on how you use your phone, but changing the default email address is a precaution that everyone should take. And there’s more danger on the horizon:

But inconvenience is not the only downside; there is also the threat of viruses as phones become more like personal computers. Some companies are already preparing for this.

Last winter, Symantec, a maker of security software, introduced a product for smartphones that connect with the Internet to detect mobile threats, check for viruses and automatically delete spam or corral suspect texts in a folder.

Khoi Nguyen, a product manager for mobile security at Symantec, said the company developed the software mainly for Asia and Europe, where creative spammers try to steal credit card information or banking data through phones. He said he expected to see the same trend here in the next 6 to 12 months.

What percentage of mobile phone users do you think will install and correctly operate a mobile security package?

Verizon Wireless was the first to announce a $99.99 unlimited voice plan followed by AT&T and T-Mobile, and now Sprint aims to undercut them all:

Sprint Nextel upped the ante in the $99.99 all-you-can-eat rate plan battle Thursday by introducing a service that includes unlimited voice as well as unlimited data and slew of premium services.

Called “Simply Everything,” the plan will give customers unlimited voice as well as unlimited data, text, e-mail, Web-surfing, Sprint TV, Sprint Music, GPS Navigation, and push-to-talk service for $99.99 a month. The company made the announcement during its fourth-quarter earnings call, in which the company also announced heavy financial and customer losses.

The new pricing plan is available to existing and new customers on both Sprint’s CDMA network as well as its Nextel iDEN network starting on Friday. Current customers will not have to renew or extend their contract to switch to the service.

Family pricing is $5 off on the second Simply Everything line, $10 off on the third and so on up to five lines. So how does it stack up compared to the competition?

Clearly Sprint’s offering offers customers the most bang for the buck. But some analysts have warned that if Sprint significantly undercut or added more services to the bundle for the same price that they could start a price war in wireless.

That may be bad news for the carriers, but customers won’t be complaining. There’s more in Sprint’s press release, but one worry with all this low price goodness is that Sprint’s poor financial condition will be exacerbated by the price war and throw a real crimp into WiMax deployment.

The trend towards multipurpose portable gadgets is undeniable for the simple reason that carrying multiple separate devices is very inconvenient. The problem, of course, is that an “all in one” gadget is generally inferior functionally to each to the individual units that it replaces. Sony Ericsson is trying to change that for the camera phone with its announcement of the K770 Cyber-shot:

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Lost in the din of last week’s Apple iPhone launch was the announcement of an interesting service in the USA from T-Mobile called HotSpot @Home that combines the best of cellular phones and low cost Wi-Fi VoIP (technically, it’s GSM over IP).

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Most cell phone users have a love-hate relationship with their cell phone company with perhaps more of the latter. Don’t you sometimes wish that you owned own cell phone provider and could tell your old nemesis to ring off? Well, it’s now possible (in a way at least) without building a lot of tall towers and hiring annoying salesmen through the services of a company called Sonopia.

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Ads for laptop computers always seem to show smiling people sitting on the grass pecking away on their machines. As enticing as that is , my experience has been that most folks (including me) really treat laptops as portable PCs with the machines merely being easy to carry from one wall outlet to another. Therefore, I was interested to see Sony roll out the VAIO TX series ultraportables which actually have enough battery life to make true mobile laptop use a possibility. As is usual, there are a plethora of model numbers in the TX series, but here are some excerpts from CNET’s review of the Sony VAIO TXN17P/B:

The Sony VAIO TXN17’s biggest plus is its battery life. In our battery-drain test, we got 4 hours and 54 minutes from the system–making this one of the longest-lasting laptops we’ve seen. When we tested the previous model, the TXN15, last year, we got around 9 hours of battery life from it, but that was with an older, less taxing test. The included battery does stick out slightly from the back of the system, but it’s a fair trade-off for the extended running time. Working on tasks less battery intensive than playing a DVD will yield even more uptime, making this a great system for long plane trips or all-day on-the-road use.

(The CNET TXN15P/B review mentioned is here.) No matter how you measure it, it still seems pretty good for a laptop with a Intel Core Solo U1400 / 1.2 GHz processor, 2GB of memory, and a 80GB hard disk. These systems are clearly targeted at business with Windows Vista Business Edition installed and Sprint WWAN access (for the Sprint Mobile Broadband service) built in.

However, there being no such thing as free lunch, you have to pay a price for a 2.9 lbs laptop with good battery life and that is that the screen and keyboard are small:

Measuring 10.8 inches wide, 8 inches deep, and 1.2 inches high, the TXN17 is among the smallest ultraportables we’ve seen. It’s tiny enough to carry around without much hassle, but the small screen and the cramped keyboard will be uncomfortable for extended use. The Sony VAIO TXN17 weighs 2.9 pounds (3.6 pounds with the AC adapter), which is extremely light when you consider the system has a built-in optical drive, something many smaller laptops omit to save on weight and bulk. The Asus S6F features a similar footprint and an optical drive but is noticeably thicker.

The tradeoff with using an ultraportable laptop is the miniaturized keyboard, and the VAIO TXN17 is no exception. The flat-topped keys are an acquired taste, similar to those on a MacBook, and those without nimble fingers will find themselves hitting the backspace key often. The touch pad, by comparison, is plenty ample for every day use, and the media control buttons built into the hinge are accessible, even when the lid is closed.

The 11.1-inch screen has a native resolution of 1,366×768, which translates into small text and images when Web surfing, but not more so than other ultraportable systems. The display is nice and bright, thanks to new LED backlight technology, and displays video and image files nicely.

Finally, there is one other price to pay in that the models in the TX series are rather expensive with the TXN17P/B reviewed above currently running around $2450 at most retailers, although I see there there is a a retailer selling through Amazon that currently has it a couple of hundred bucks cheaper. One reason for that may be that the TXN27 models are now available with a U1500 1.33GHz processor and 100 GB hard drive, although they seem to be selling on Amazon, at least, for the manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $2700. As always, you may find a better deal at your favorite on or offline emporium.