Tag archive: cell phone

Going into effect on Sunday, February 12, AT&T is increasing the activation fee on phone upgrades from $18 to $36 according to a memo issued to all AT&T store managers according to BGR. This brings the activation fee equal to the current rate of $36 for starting a brand new service plan. As directed by AT&T corporate management, store employees are supposed to define the fee as costs associated to picking out a new phone as well as… Read More

According to the latest study out of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, over half of all shoppers during the 2011 holiday season used a cell phone to research a product that they were considering. Within the sample of 1,000 American adults, one fourth of the respondents whipped out their mobile phone within the store to look up the price of a product at other online retailers. Twenty-four percent of the group used a… Read More

Occurring on Tuesday night during a performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony by the New York Philharmonic, a man's iPhone erupted in the familiar marimba ring tone during the closing moments of the performance. Seated in the first row of Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall in New York City, the man with the ringing iPhone watched as conductor Alan Gilbert halted the orchestra, turned toward the direction of the ringing and asked audience… Read More

Starting on Black Friday and running through the entire shopping season, the Promenade Temecula shopping mall in southern California and Short Pump Town Center shopping mall in Richmond, Virginia plan to track customers locations within the mall by monitoring cell phone signals as reported by CNN earlier today. The malls intend to follow the path of each shopper and collect data to understand typical shopping patterns. While the malls claim… Read More

Reported in a third quarter earnings call this week, U.S. Cellular CEO Mary Dillon told investors that the company turned down Apple when approached in regards to offering models of the iPhone to U.S. Cellular customers. While Dillon indicated that the U.S. Cellular network was definitely capable of handling the expanded traffic from sales of a new iPhone, Apple's offer was rejected due to terms that were “unacceptable from a risk… Read More

Civil liberty concerns are being raised across the pond as Britain's largest police force was revealed to be operating a surveillance system which masks itself as a fake phone network. The surveillance technology has the ability to track cell phones, gather data and even remotely shut off devices. London's Metropolitan Police has been doing business with a Leeds-based company called Datong plc, according to the Guardian. Datong was… Read More

Received in early October 2011, Celina Aarons of Florida was ”crying and shaking” after ripping open her 43-page T-Mobile bill for the month that totaled over $200,000 in wireless charges. While Aarons wasn't directly responsible for racking up the charges, she did authorize one of her brothers to use the account during a vacation to Canada. The brother, Shamir, is legally deaf and communicates entirely through text messaging.… Read More

Yesterday a document detailing mobile carriers’ data retention policies was revealed. We took some time to get privacy advocates' take on the new information, which included the fact the Verizon alone keeps your text message content for a number of days and AT&T holds onto to call records for up to seven years. “The moral of the story is use a prepaid phone and text,” says Beth Givens, director of Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. “If… Read More

There was a time when little kids used to talk into toy phones to imaginary friends. Now it seems that they have real phones with Internet access and pay-as-you-go payment plans. According to the results of a survey released this week, 10 percent of UK children under the age of 10 have their own iPhone, while a third have a cell phone. Five percent even have their own iPad. Of the parents questioned in the survey, 10 percent said they felt it… Read More

If you’re going to pay 42,000 euros ($60,000) for a cell phone, it would be nice if it could download apps, take photos, cope with emails, or perhaps surf the web. Unfortunately the somewhat stratospherically-priced AE+Y cell phone from Danish luxury retailer Aesir can do none of these. Indeed, the phone’s specifications looks like something from a bygone era – a 2-inch TFT screen, 5.2 hours talk time and a weight almost double that of… Read More

According to a study released today from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, only 12 percent of smartphone owners use the device for checking into location services like Foursquare or Gowalla. Within the group of over 2,000 adults, the age group most likely to use the location services were 18 to 29 year old people. Eighteen percent of that age group used check-ins while only 2 percent of people over 50 use the service. Hispanics were… Read More

New York City is rolling out support for a Web-based initiative that ties text messaging and smartphone apps into making payments on expiring parking meters. After registering online and putting a credit card number on file, residents and visitors to the Big Apple will be able to send a text message with the meter number and purchase time for that meter. The city will also provide access through an app if users are on a smartphone, although… Read More

All the talk about the hazards of using a cell phone while driving a car must have passed straight over the head of Brit David Secker. Perhaps he simply got confused about the idea of using a cell phone hands-free. Whatever the case, the 34-year-old was caught by police using not one, but two mobile devices while driving along at 70mph. A BBC report on Monday said that Secker was seen “talking on one phone while holding the other as if texting.”… Read More

It’s an unfortunate state of affairs when you can’t walk down the street and have a conversation on your cell phone without someone coming along and wrenching it out of your hand. But that’s exactly what happened to a local woman in the Russian Hills neighborhood of San Francisco the other evening.  No doubt feeling rather shaken following her ordeal, she must have thought that was the end of it. And the assailant most probably believed he’d got… Read More

It seems somewhat remarkable that after years of studies on cell phone usage there is still no broad agreement on whether the devices adversely affect the human body. San Francisco's Board of Supervisors seems to think it knows. On Tuesday it voted overwhelmingly in favor of getting cell phone stores to warn customers about the hazards of radiation being emitted by their phones. According to an LA Times report, the board voted in favor of… Read More