Tonethephone

The dangers of mobile adult content

Rating: DON'T WRITE ABOUT THIS WITHOUT MY PERMISSION
By Tony Dennis

There's few real taboos within the cellular industry but adult content is one of them. I once wrote an expose of an incident where a nine year old girl received adult content in the form of Page Three of the Sun style girls accompanied by some pretty risqué captions as MMS messages.
On investigation this content hadn't been supplied by some scurrilous back street outfit. It had come from her own network operator. The scandal blew over simply because nobody within the industry was brave enough to print the actual topless photos.

Tegic outlines search possibilities

Having been a guest of Nuance recently at Mercedes World in Weybridge, it seemed a jolly good idea to check out how one of the compay's recent additions - Tegic - was doing at the Symbian Smartphone show. Tegic is actually only one month into its integration into the Nuance fold. But it looks like there could be some very interesting results from the marriage between the diverse technologies which Nuance now possesses. Tegic has, of course, long possessed a search application in the shape of the T9 Discovery tool. This provides any easy way to find applications resident on the handset.Typing 248 (blu) takes you immediately to the handset's Bluetooth application, for example. But Tegic's T9 predictive text facility could form just one of the ways handsets users would create input for a search engine. Nuance is famous, of course, for its speech recognition technology. So how might these different capabilities be turned into a single intelligent search app? Our source on the Tegic stand, William Clement, hinted, for example, that Nuance has long experience of client server applications - a facility which could prove very handy should you want to provide a mobile search facility that actually works. Trying to run a sophisticated search application on most of the processors which handsets possess today has always seemed to be a daft idea to me. Another interesting relevation from our little chat with Mr Clement was that optical recognition could be molded into a search facility. It wouldn't be hard for a cameraphone user to take a picture of a poster and through optical recognition, the search app could work out the subject you want more information about. The most curious part of the conversation with Tegic, however, was the discovery that there's something called Hinglish. This is basically born out of the common practice for people to type Hindi words into texts using a Latin alphabet. And taking words out of the English language and interspersing them into Hindi. Sadly, I wasn't able to glean how soon a Hinglish version of T9 would make its appearance in a commercial handset. Nor whether Hinglish would be confined to the Indian sub-continent or make its way into handsets sold into the UK market, for instance.

N95 8GB highlights search function

Ran into Jorgen Behrens at the Symbian Smartphone show which is held in the darkest throes of the docklands at the Excel conference centre. Behrens came armed with various handsets he wanted to show and was particularly excited by a bunch of new handsets including the i550 which was launched at the show by Samsung. Significantly the press blurb claims that the i550 is Samsung's first handset with GPS built in. Frankly I find that hard to believe for a leading vendor such as Samsung. Perhaps the PR bods actually meant Samsung's first GSM handset with GPS built in? Anyway, the i550 wasn't what caught my eye. Instead it was Nokia's N95 8GB edition handset which I hadn't actually seen before. And guess what the first option featured on the N95's screen happened to be? None other than a facility to search the Internet plus 'my content'.  Wishing to learn a little more, I played with the N95 8GB on the Series 60 stand. I'm no expert but this search app looked entirely different from the Search facility which is buried away under Tools on my own ordinary N95. The 8GB app has an internet search options right up the top of the list. Unlike my own N95, this didn't use Yell for a local search. Instead it provided the choice of Yahoo! or Windows Live search. Underneath Internet search came My Content which had no fewer than 12 sections. Some of these are very obvious - such as music and contacts. It was interesting to see, however, that you can search text messages and emails separately. What it can't do is help you find that picture you took months ago. It merely displays the file names which are along the lines of 'imagenokia1'. Not very inspiring and not very helpful. What was very interesting about the whole thing was the prominence. What is Nokia plotting to do in terms of promoting this facility? And is the N95 8GB just the first of many handsets to ship with the Search facility right up there on top. I'll let you know when I find Nokia. The company held an event on the Sunborn yatch but when I turned up 90 mins late, I simply couldn't find it. Ho, hum 

Is Mobile VoIP hotting up or wot?

Got a panic stricken phone call yesterday from Truphone's publicity people. The company was worried that I might have misled the UK's great unwashed over the new pricing policy. One of the bargains which I'd highlighted was the low cost of calling from a UK mobile to another mobile phone in the EU. On average this is now 15 pence per minute. But - dearie me - I hadn't made it absolutely clear that the price didn't include the dreaded VAT tax which brings it up to a massive 17.6 pence per minute.
Well, that's still pretty competitive. Or is it? I'm beginning to detect a certain note of panic amongst mobile VoIP suppliers which appears to be fueled by Skype. Didn't eBay write down Skype's value by $1.43 million just the other day. Which could be one reason why mobile VoIP companies are trying to encourage usage with bargain basement tariffs.
In Truphone's case, its prices aren't just low they are absolutely free. That's correct. You can call somebody's mobile phone in USA, Canada, China, Hong Kong and Singapore for absolutely nothing.
Think about it. In which countries are most of the leading edge cellular companies based? I'd say the USA and China are prime examples. What about other countries? Well, you can call land lines in Ireland, Taiwan and Israel for free using Truphone.
So in the run up to the 3GSM, um sorry, Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, I know somebody who will be caning Truphone like mad to save himself a fortune. After all I've got to find some content for my own new web site from somewhere. Crickey, this must be a shameless plug for 3sgminsight.com, then.