Welcome to Hedgehogging. As you know from your own jobs, there is always something happening in the wireless industry. Some of it makes us stop what we’re doing to clap, boo or simply question these developments. This column is a round-up of wireless happenings or gadgets that made us hedgehog.
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More hilarious cell phones names: Krzr, Rizr and-a personal favorite-the Oystr. Won’t someone out there please, please, please make a flip phone and call it the FLIPR???
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LG Electronics Co. Ltd.’s cool new handset, the AX490, appeared at our offices. While the name isn’t all that smooth, the phone is really slick (and sleek.) First, when it’s closed, it looks like a fast car, complete with headlights. Second, when you open the hood, so to speak, it sounds like a car engine turning over. Then, when you close it, it makes the sound of a car racing away. It also features the signature of Ryan Newman, the No. 12 Alltel-sponsored Dodge driver as the screensaver. One assumes (hopes) that can be changed.
A certain six-year-old boy who got to play with the phone smiled like it was his birthday when showed these features. And aren’t NASCAR fans really just six-year-old boys at heart? Even non-NASCAR fans will find themselves driving this car, er phone, across their desks. (Really, it should come with little wheels that pop out.) It’s not often that the outside of a handset gets so much praise from us.
The handset also features a Fastap keyboard that has some pretty good features too, like being able to type in a Web address without punching in `w’ three times.
When is Harley Davidson going to brand its own handset? It could be shaped like a little hog and grunt when opened and squeal once closed. There’s an entire industry here, people.
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Ah, show season is back, and for most of our reporters, none too soon. The first party invite for CTIA Wireless I.T. Show has been sent and RCR Wireless News Online Editor Mike Dano is beginning to compile the party file. We’ll run these in our Show Daily again this year so those of you party animals in L.A. will have easy access to what’s going on when and where after hours.
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Cellact is offering SMS alerts of incoming missiles in Israel just days after the Lebanon conflict started-but here in the U.S., we can’t get our Cold War-era emergency alert system to include cell phones. Nothing like a war to get things in gear.
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Google now offers traffic information on its Google Maps application for cell phones. However, Google Maps still hasn’t integrated GPS location information from GPS-capable cell phones. Traffic info is great and all but I only use a map for one thing: to find out where I am when I’m lost. When Google finally adds GPS capabilities, and they just have to, Google Maps will officially be the best application ever.
Meanwhile, Navteq gets the serious props for garnering a contract from the Office of Under Secretary of Defense to use its location-based solution on the government’s MilitaryHomeFront and MilitaryInstalations Web pages.
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Rumors continue over an iPod phone from Apple (possibly built by RIM). So, look, let me just lay it out for all you iPod fanatics out there: ALL IT DOES IS PLAY MUSIC. It does not cure cancer. It does not cook dinner. And if Apple makes an iPod phone, it’s just going to be the same thing as the iPod: Overblown.
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And finally, props to the Isle of Man for once again topping its larger European neighbors when it comes to having access to high-tech wireless equipment. Manx Telecom, Lucent Technologies Inc. and Qualcomm Inc. announced plans to trial 900 MHz UMTS/HSDPA equipment on the tiny island in the Irish Sea. The spectrum should help better penetrate the island’s brick and stone buildings that every year manage to keep out insane motorcycle racers that speed around the public roads during the Isle of Man TT.
