Oct 19, 2006 | blog
This post at The Wireless Report talks about Detroit leading the nation in wireline telephone replacement with wireless. It also points out that Minneapolis/St. Paul is at about the same wireless penetration rate for wireline replacement.
I’m not surprised, I’m one of the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area residents that dropped wireline service about 5 years ago. While it seemed a little ahead of its time back in 2001, many of my peers, and more importantly, parents, have followed suit.
Both my parents and mother-in-law have gone wireless as well, in addition to my sisters, cousins, friends, and many business associates. Its rare to run across someone who has a home phone any longer.
Most people I know actually saved money by switching to a mobile phone plan in place of a landline phone. With the wide selection of minute plans, included long distance, roaming and such, a $50 cell phone plane for a single user is much more cost effective than a $35 phone plan plus add-on services line long distance, voice mail, caller id, call waiting, etc…
Moreover, most of my family is on the same carrier (T-Mobile) so we all benefit from unlimited calling between each other. Landline service can’t compare.
Are you still using a landline? Why?
Via The Wireless Report – Want to ditch the landline and go all-wireless? Move to Detroit
Oct 19, 2006 | blog
Almost seems like I’ve started some kind of weird “Rocks” series of posts. Well, ok, yes, but it wasn’t intentional – it just kind of happened.
But we’re at our hotel in Duluth and its nice to be able to catch up on news & post a little on things at “full speed”. Brianna was swimming, Amy was reading, and I was keeping on top of news and such.
We were able to make it to Canal Park for dinner, and enjoyed a walk along the shore afterward. Tomorrow we’ll be heading up the north shore to Grand Marias.
An aside: Amy and I both came up the the word “Locatability” at the same time – yikes, that’s weird, even for us.
From there, we’ll head towards Ely, and then on down to Crosslake for a day or two before heading home.
Oct 18, 2006 | blog
If you have been using Outlook Mobile Manager (OMM), you may be interested in knowing that Microsoft Research has released version 2.1 of this very useful tool.
OMM allows email delivered to your Outlook Inbox, to be forwarded to a mobile device, be it a cell phone, smartphone, or PDA Phone. The system learns what emails are important to forward, and which are not based on your actions. Omm can also forward appointment reminders in addition to emails.
Some new features in version 2.1:
- Supports POP3, in addition to Exchange email accounts.
- Enhanced support for native junk-email filters.
- Extended personalization to examples from arbitrary folders
- Multiple user-interface enhancements
Microsoft Research: Microsoft Outlook Mobile Manager 2.1
Oct 12, 2006 | blog
Time for another phone rebuild. I’ve got so much junk on it that it’s got a sync problem. Definitely on the device, not an ActiveSync issue.
I’ll be moving from the Qtek 2.17 ROM to the latest T-Mobile USA ROM. There are many new features in this ROM, even though it has its own flaws.
Again, I’ll be streamlining my software stack on the MDA – trying to thin out the items that I don’t use that often. It also includes changing where I install some app’s, and what sequence they are installed.
Since there are things about Windows Mobile that bother me, here is a short “wish list” of things I wish were built into the OS today.
- HTML capable email client, for POP3 and Exchange push mail
- A close button that actually closes the application instead of minimizing it
- A more robust and easier-to-access task manager
- Ability to change the “From” address when responding to an email. I’d like to use my GMail account to reply to an email that I received from my Exchange push-mail account.
- Phone Ring Profiles – the ability to change from a “Normal” to a “Meeting” to an “Outdoor” profile quickly
Oct 11, 2006 | blog
Well, I’ve waited quite awhile to see a day like today. You couldn’t get away from it! Certainly, Cingular & Verizon have had days like this, but T-Mobile has always been treated like an also-ran when it comes to phones and service in the media.
But today was different – literally, everyone had coverage of the newly announced T-Mobile Dash Smartphone. And well they should – the Dash is everything the Moto Q was supposed to be. Affordable, usable, fast, compelling features, etc.
HTC, the company that makes the actual hardware, has a long history of building quality handsets running Windows Mobile Smartphone. The Dash is the latest variant of their capabilities.
So check out some of the following links for more information – pretty much everybody covered the news of the launch of the T-Mobile Dash today. One more thing to note – T-Mobile USA is the first division of T-Mobile International to get this phone. Usually one of the European arms in the UK or Germany gets the new phones first! Kind of interesting on that alone.
