Mobile — Page 3

I’ve had enough: I canceled my mobile data plan

November 12, 2007 by Michael Boyle

I just canceled my Rogers data plan. I finally had a come to reality moment, and I decided that a tiny (3Mb) data plan was actually worse than none at all. When you have a tiny plan, you are always conscious of each and every link you click on and email you download – to the point of distraction, really. And since you pay for overages at an even higher rate, a mistake can be costly. In actual practice, what that meant was that I wasn’t using my mobile data at all. So I decided to stop paying the insane service fee Rogers charges – $25 a month. I’d rather save my money than use a premium service whose very design makes it almost unusable.

I would still love to have a data plan, but one that is a lot more useful than Rogers’ current plans. I wonder if I’ll ever get the chance.

Facebook goes (more) mobile

October 24, 2007 by Michael Boyle

Facebook has announced their platform for mobile devices: Introducing Facebook Platform for Mobile. Developers will have the ability to target content directly to the mobile site and to access Facebook’s SMS platform. This is important for a few reasons, but chief among them is that outside of North America, the mobile internet is a primary means of access for many. In many countries, no mobile literally means drastically reduced access to users.

Walt Mossberg on mobile carriers

October 22, 2007 by Michael Boyle

Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg has published a piece on the extremely limiting role that US mobile carriers have forced on consumers in the US: Free My Phone.

A shortsighted and often just plain stupid federal government has allowed itself to be bullied and fooled by a handful of big wireless phone operators for decades now. And the result has been a mobile phone system that is the direct opposite of the PC model. It severely limits consumer choice, stifles innovation, crushes entrepreneurship, and has made the U.S. the laughingstock of the mobile-technology world, just as the cellphone is morphing into a powerful hand-held computer.

As bad as things are in the US, they’re that much worse in Canada, where the same conditions apply – except that here, we get to pay a huge premium for the “privilege”.

ITU endorses WiMax

October 20, 2007 by Michael Boyle

The news doesn’t seem that interesting: “UN telecom panel endorses Intel’s WiMax technology“. I wonder, though, if this is exactly what Apple foresaw when it chose EDGE over existing 3G for the iPhone. I have always thought that Apple was betting on a non-cellular wireless technology as the long-term data entryway for the iPhone – and the fact that such a tech has been formally embraced seems like a strategic win for Apple.

iPhone: the SDK is on its way

October 17, 2007 by Michael Boyle

As I predicted, Apple has announced that it will release a proper SDK in February (2008). From the announcement:

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users.

Certainly many will find fault with this and say it’s too little too late, but both the marketplace and Apple’s recent history seem to prove the naysayers wrong. Now if only Rogers could their act together and offer non-insane data rates (for all wireless data) and then bring the iPhone to Canada.