Vonage adds Europe to calling plans

May 3, 2006 | blog

Vonage has added European access to their Premium Unlimited $25 and Small Business $50 plans.  The international calling fees to the UK, Ireland, France, Italy, and Spain will be waived for these plans.  Good news for international callers!
Check out ZDNet’s article for more information.

Visto – A Vulture

May 3, 2006 | blog

So here comes wave two of the patent suite against RIM.  ZD Net is reporting about Visto suing RIM over their BlackBerry mobile email system.  This is the same company that is engaged in a lawsuit against Microsoft – and the same one who did a cross-license agreement with NTP (who just settled with RIM themselves) on several of their patents.

Trying to paint RIM as some evil patent-stealing empire, Visto’s CEO Brian Bogosian says:

“Under the law, which protects consumers from products that contain infringing technology, RIM should not be able to sell the BlackBerry system.”

More crybabies who can’t compete fairly.  I’m just curious where Visto’s and NTP’s lawsuites were when RIM was starting the mobile email productivity revolution 5+ years ago?  Wouldn’t it have been prudent (for them) to stop the company then?  I’m really getting tired of this kind of behavior that impacts progress and innovation.

Anyone who thinks mobile email is a breakthrough technology must have been born yesterday.  My advice to Visto/NTP – develop a real, competitive, creative business plan and produce some real products that truly are breakthroughs in the mobile space.

Is AT&T a more powerful brand than Cingular?

May 3, 2006 | blog

Today RCR Wireless News is reporting that AT&T will drop the Cingular Wireless brand name in 2007 – surely not a surprise to many who suggested this when they heard SBC was buying AT&T.  While I’m not sure how this will play out in the end, I believe that AT&T is making a mistake.  With all the effort and dollars invested in the Cingular brand they now decide the old AT&T Death Star is a much more vibrant entity in the minds of customers.

Cingular has worked expanded their brand in the public mind share, they’ve successfully rolled out EDGE services network wide, expanded the network footprint for GSM 850 & 1900.  The only area that they have left to improve significantly on is their customer service.  The Cingular brand is youthful in comparison to AT&T Wireless.  Many mobile users were stung in the conversion from AT&T Wireless TDMA phones to Cingular GSM phones and they won’t soon forget the experience.  I think it’ll take a much more expensive sales job to win these customers over (again) to the AT&T brand when they are beginning to be satisfied with the Cingular service.

Many people also like to have a delineation between their land line and wireless providers.  It demonstrates their power of choice, if only to themselves.  Personally, I think the old AT&T is long dead.  The latest ‘3.0’ rendition of the company is really a renamed SBC, and I’ve never had a good experience with them.

So what do you think of this latest play in the AT&T name game?

Brighthand Reviews Cingular 8125

May 2, 2006 | blog

The crew over at Brighthand.com have posted a review of the Cingular 8125 Pocket PC Phone.  A varient of the HTC Wizard, its comparable to the T-Mobile MDA and iMate K-JAM.

For you new (or potential) Cingular 8125 owners – don’t hesitate to check out the HTC Wizard Web community site.  You’ll find a lot of useful tips, tricks, registry hacks, etc…  lots of fun.

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