Hedge*hog*ing v. Interrupting conversations in an office environment by poking your head over the top of the cube.
Awesome factoid of the week: A consumer survey last week from comScore showed that 37 percent of wireless customers didn’t have or were unsure if they had a data package. You’ve gotta hand it to the wireless industry. They’ve got their customers so confused that they don’t even know what services they are paying for.
Props to Verizon Wireless for successfully stymieing Sprint Nextel’s claim of exclusive NFL Mobile content. Several times during recent football games Verizon Wireless has promoted its NFL content provided through its agreement with John Madden during the same commercial breaks that Sprint Nextel is touting its exclusive content from the NFL.
Speaking of Sprint Nextel advertising. We stumbled across an online add from the carrier touting its handsets. Still not convinced to buy the handset? How about if they put a kiss on top of the ad? No dice? Can’t blame you.
Time to face the music. All five members of the GOP-led Federal Communications Commission will get their first taste of the new Democratic-controlled Congress Feb. 1 at an oversight hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee. That could be the easy part. House Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.) has the next crack at the FCC.
We’ve had the chance to play around a bit with Sprint Nextel’s EV-DO Rev. A service, and it’s the cat’s meow. Downlink speeds are a definite improvement compared with Rev. 0-which is now so last year-and uplink speeds are super-fast. Now we just needs some sweet Rev. A handsets and work at RCR Wireless News will grind to a halt.
Also received one of Sprint Nextel’s new hybrid CDMA/iDEN phones. The good: the phone manages to integrate both technologies well and even lets a user in a CDMA voice call to see if an iDEN PTT call is coming in. A call cannot be switched between the two services, but the PTT caller ID is pretty cool. The bad: The phone is only CDMA 1x, so no super-fast speeds, and is also designed in the traditional iDEN mold of a big phone with a small screen.
The frigid temperatures that have affected much of the nation may be forcing Americans to wear their ski gear, but the mittens haven’t kept consumers from tracking the weather on their mobile phones. The Weather Channel’s mobile team reports a 229 percent increase in wireless traffic to its weather.com site during the week of Monday, Jan. 15. Stay tuned as to whether that results in increased sales from the Aruba Tourism Authority – a key sponsor of TWC’s wireless Web site.
Perhaps it was just an ode to James Brown. Not that we laughed out loud about this, but a Vallejo, Calif., man received second- and third-degree burns to his upper body after a cell phone in his pocket caught fire. Perhaps helping to spread the fire were the man’s polyester and nylon clothing. Sure we feel sorry for the guy, but unless your first name is Elvis or Evil, you should not be wearing polyester and nylon clothing. Also impressive is that the brand name of the combustible device was not released. Again, we did not laugh out loud about this.
