Ask Mobile Search Engine

Out of curiosity, I decided to check out if Ask.com has a mobile search engine and I found out they do. Most of my search results and news entries are dated mid-October so I am going to assume that is when Ask Mobile Search was launched. Ask Mobile Search can be accessed by pointing your mobile device's web browser to: http://m.ask.com/. Since SearchEngineWatch Blog has done a tremendous review on this topic, I will skip a full review. Overall, Ask Mobile Search has a clean UI with very similiar menu structure as Yahoo and MSN mobile. As a mobile user, I am glad to see more companies bringing their free services to the mobile space. I have added Ask.com Mobile Search to my PDA Friendly Bookmark.

Data eliminated - FileShredPPC 2.3

Data eliminated - FileShredPPC 2.3 I thought this would be of interest for those who extract and harvest data from PDAs and CF/SD cards. When deleting a file, the file is still there, only the pointers to the file are what are removed. The physical data from the file still remains and can be recovered. FileShredPPC opens the file to be deleted and overwrites the content with a series of nulls,

Battle is on: Microsoft Zune Released

Microsoft's Zune MP3/Video player is released today. This is the big buzz which I hope will last longer than the whole UMPC buzz that lasted about 15 minutes. Apparently, there are concerts throughout the U.S. hosted by MS to celebrate its launch. In addition to video and music, the big push behind the Zune is the "social music sharing" via wireless sync. I have yet to find an evidence showing that Zune can be used for web browsing, yet. For a comparison against the Apple iPod check out zunegroove.com.

Vodafone and Yahoo to Launch Mobile Ads

The title says it all. Yahoo has landed a position to be the exclusive display advertising partner to Vodaphone, a British mobile phone group. A couple of thoughts immediately come to mind:
1). Will Yahoo's new Panama platform allow U.S. advertisers to target ads outside the U.S. and target mobile ads outside the U.S.? Or do we have to advertise through Yahoo's UK office?
2). Vodaphone's service extends throughout Europe and some parts of Asia. Will marketers have the ability to DMA target selected customers beyond UK?
This partnership certainly has some serious potential for mobile advertising. Source: Reuters

Mobile Wallpaper from Import Racing Magazines

While researching for automotive products for TunerBargains.com, a website my friend and I owned, I ran across several auto magazines offering mobile wallpapers as a free incentive. While ring tones, screensavers and wallpapers are nothing new in the cell phone world, I couldn’t help but drawing similarity with the early internet days when websites would offer free desktop wallpapers.

This is significant to the mobile world because of how the desktop world has evolved. In the beginning, websites didn’t know how to make money on the internet, so they offered free incentives such as free desktop wallpapers. The goal was simply to hope that free incentives can bring returned traffic. While free mobile wallpapers may not revolutionize the mobile industry, it is a good start.

However, the lack of a universal standards will make it difficult for content providers as mobile phones don’t all share the same basic specs, OS, screen-size and application support. This makes a universal rollout of anything free more costly as it has to be tailored to each phone specifically. For instance, I tried to download a wallpaper just to find my phone not supported in their database; same thing happened when I tried to sign up CellFire.com, a coupon service endorsed by my carrier Cingular, yet my phone was still not supported in their phone list.

The sooner the wireless providers, manufacturers and mobile software community come to a standard, the faster this industry will grow. So far, I like what I see from Microsoft in that at least all devices running Windows Mobile 5 shares the same uniformed standard whereby I can install the same mobile applications from Pocket PCs to Smartphones.

Email SMS Text Messages (Free SMS)

Inspired from the Sprint Treo SMS post, I have decided to post email extensions to U.S. wireless providers. This is handy if you have a smartphone with email or you can use your PC to send a email text message without being charged (the receipient will be charged for receiving). Simply input the receipient's 10-digit phone number infront of their carrier's email extention and they will receive your short email via SMS. Several downsides to this method: 1). Sender information will be some random number, so the recipient may not read your SMS. 2). Not sure if reply to that random number will work. 3). You'll always need to remember each carrier's email extension and know recipient's carrier.

T-Mobile: phonenumber@tmomail.net
Virgin Mobile: phonenumber@vmobl.com
AT&T: phonenumber@txt.att.net
Sprint: phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Verizon: phonenumber@vtext.com
Nextel: phonenumber@messaging.nextel.com
Source
Source 2
Update 2/24/2008: For the hardcore SMS folks using a Nokia Smartphone, a Widget is available for you to blast SMS text messages via your phone plan but using your Windows Vista computer!

Sprint Customers and their Treo SMS Woes

I believe one of the biggest reasons why the U.S. is behind in mobile technology is due to the large control imposed by the wireless providers. They disable hardware features (ie. bluetooth, wifi) and set software limitations just to squeeze an extra cent out of their customers. This ultimately hurt the consumers and the mobile movement as a whole.

The latest story came from customers of Sprint PCS. Apparently, users of the Treo 700wx have been having some difficulty in sending SMS text messages to Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile customers. Perhaps this is just a simple mistake and Sprint is working to fix this problem. I wouldn't be suprised if this was done intentionally.

Source: Engadget