Visual voicemail is still in its infancy - it's only available on a handful of devices from the nation's top four carriers - but as the service becomes more prevalent, smaller wireless providers may see it as a way to separate themselves from the...
During Tuesday night's presidential election, millions of Americans used their handsets to communicate via text message.Between 7 p.m. and 12 a.m. EST, more than 1.2 billion text messages were sent across the country, according to Sybase 365, a subsidiary of Sybase Inc.Ten minutes after...
Motorola Inc., struggling to return to sustainable profitability, will bring the Aura handset to market this quarter, the company said. With "state-of-the-art handcraftsmanship," the device will set you back two (really) big ones - that's $2,000.The launch's timing aside - for many, the price...
I got another text message from Barack Obama's campaign this week. The latest missive mentioned that Joe Biden was coming to town. "Doors: 10:30 a.m.," it read succinctly. "Free & open to public."Short. Simple. Informative.I've received maybe 20 such texts since I signed up...
Once considered the red-headed stepchild of wireless, prepaid services are finally gaining mainstream appeal helped by the need for carriers to target broader demographics and consumer desires for more ways to control their spending. Over the past several weeks a number of operators have...
FOR NOW, AT LEAST, Verizon Wireless has stepped away from plans to tack on a drastic 3-cent fee to each vendor-generated message on its network. But there's little doubt that some significant changes are in store for nearly every player on the business-to-consumer text...
Financial institutions must now monitor and archive text and instant messages sent by employees through company-issued handsets much like they do with corporate e-mail. However, only a handful of companies offer compliance software. A recent requirement by the Financial Industry Regulation Authority has created...
Editor's Note: Welcome to our coverage of 25 years in wireless. RCR Wireless News is celebrating with a package of stories detailing the advances of the past three decades. For full coverage please visit RCRWireless.com/25years.
People of a certain age will remember the Wayback Machine...
National mobile-phone carriers denied any wrongdoing in reaction to a key Senate lawmaker's probe into industry-wide text message price increases, pointing out competitive bulk texting plans have actually reduced costs to consumers and that congressional questions about the matter alone have triggered a flood...
PUBLIC-INTEREST GROUPS ACCUSED WIRELESS CARRIERS of conjuring up misleading excuses to avoid federal regulation of short-code text messaging, pointing to content restrictions in industry documents that they say underscore the need for anti-discriminatory safeguards."Wireless carriers admit that they engage in content-based discrimination," Public Knowledge,...
The off-deck content world reacted with shock to Verizon Wireless' plan to impose a drastic new fee for vendor-generated text messages. However, it's unclear whether the carrier will actually follow through with the charge."It came completely out of left field," said 4INFO CEO Zaw...
The amount of innovation currently under way in the wireless industry is almost breathtaking to behold.Just in the past month we got to witness the birth of a completely new user interface, introduced by what some have called the world's most powerful brand (Google);...
Federal courts on opposite sides of the country came to different conclusions in billing litigation against Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility, while the number of antitrust class-action texting lawsuits against the nation's top mobile-phone operators has skyrocketed to more than a dozen.While the various...
"Oh no, where's my phone?" That has to be one of the scariest questions these days. And we've all done it; left our cellphone in a taxi-cab, on the counter at Starbucks or even had our phone-harboring purses stolen right from under our noses.Ten...
CHICAGO - Welcome to the beginning of a couple of days of technology, turmoil and transition, as various players of the wireless ecosystem dissect WiMAX technology and its role in tomorrow's marketplace. Against the backdrop of Sprint Nextel Corp.'s commercial WiMAX deployment in Baltimore,...
If this keeps up, "Can you hear me now?" may just become, "Have you gotten this text yet?" And network operators are scrambling to make sure the answer is yes.The average U.S. mobile user now sends and receives more test messages than they do...
The typical U.S. mobile subscriber sends and receives more text messages than phone calls. In a finding that might benefit mobile marketing, Nielsen Mobile found that during the second quarter of this year, domestic wireless subscribers sent or received an average of 357 text...
A $7 million settlement has been reached in a class-action lawsuit accusing Timberland Co. and others of illegally sending unsolicited advertising text messages to cellular subscribers. The development represents but the tip of a litigious iceberg in which the number of texting antitrust class...
It's official. The plaintiffs' bar smells blood.The mobile-phone industry suddenly finds itself under siege over rising text messaging prices; there are now five different class-action antitrust lawsuits against the nation's largest wireless carriers over the issue. The growth followed Senate Judiciary antitrust subcommittee Chairman...
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama won a text message election held during the CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment 2008 trade show held earlier this month in San Francisco.Obama received 56% of the vote to edge out his Republican opponent John McCain, according to a...
The mobile-phone industry may be facing a legal texting tsunami in U.S. courts with the filing of two new antitrust class-action lawsuits against the nation's largest wireless carriers - filings that come on top of a separate price-fixing suit in Illinois federal court and...
A class-action antitrust lawsuit accuses AT&T Mobility, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel Corp. and T-Mobile USA Inc. of acting together to hike the price of wireless text messages. The new litigation comes on the heels of a Senate lawmaker's probe into rising text charges and...
SAN FRANCISCO -- Wireless industry association CTIA and Harris Interactive think they have found the answer to one of history's most elusive mysteries: what teenagers want. In a report dubbed "Teenagers: A Generation Unplugged," Harris surveyed 2,000 teens across the nation to find out...
SAN FRANCISCO -- CTIA announced yesterday the beginnings of an effort to implement 2D bar-code scanning via camera phones. To succeed, the service will require cooperation among a wide swath of industry players, a least a few years for the technology to get distributed,...
