Tag: text
Phone problems on New Year's night? Cut the networks some slack…
O2 announced today that a record number – 166,000,000 – of text messages were sent over its network during the 24-hour period ending at 7.30am on New Year’s Day. That’s 1,900 a second, but obviously in the hour or so around the New Year, that will have been considerably higher.
Extrapolating out a bit, given three and a half other major phone networks, that means that something like half a billion messages were sent in the UK in a 24-hour period. I’m an O2 customer, and had a perfectly fine phone conversation just after midnight with no connection problems whatsoever. If you’ve got a system that can cope with that, and survive unscathed, then I salute you.
O2 Media Centre (via @O2UKOfficial)
Related posts: Textecution – an extremely clever mobile app that stops you texting while you’re driving | Textually challenged start petition to disable iPhone auto-correction feature
Hiogi launches – a crowdsourced mobile answers service
What do you get if you cross Yahoo! answers with a service with Texperts, AQA or 63336? Hiogi. It’s a free service, accessible via the web, mobile web, text, skype or email, which lets you ask questions and get replies. The German-based start-up has just come out of private beta.
What you basically do is ask a question, and then wait till the community answers it for you. When the answer comes back you can rate it positively or negatively depending on whether it’s correct or useful or not. On the answering side, you download a ticket which gives you questions. Once you see one that you can answer, you can reserve it for 10 mins to answer it.
GMail adds yet more functionality – this time it's SMS
GMail’s really blitzing new features out at the moment – yesterday it became an OpenID provider, and earlier in the week they rolled out gadgets for Calendar and Docs, but today’s new feature is SMS.
If you’ve got phone numbers stored with your contacts then if they go offline when you’re talking to them, your messages will be sent as SMS instead. Best of all, it’ll give the person you SMS a number that they can email in the future to get messages to your GMail account.
The functionality hasn’t arrived over this side of the pond yet, but it’s a lovely little bonus feature, so I hope it shows up soon. It’s yet another reason why you should use GMail over Yahoo or Hotmail.
GMail (via GoogleWatch)
Change your mobile phone's font with FlipFont
Okay – hands up, font geeks. This one’s for you. If you’ve had enough of watching Helvetica, and you’ve already told everyone you know about the Ban Comic Sans campaign, then you need something else to do with your time, right? How about fiddling with your phone’s font…?
BLOG ACTION DAY 2008: Mobile Phone use in developing countries
To coincide with Blog Action Day 2008, which is themed around poverty, I thought it’d be interesting to example the use of mobile phones in the developing world. To us in the western world a computer is something that sits on your lap or desk with a 14″ display, but many people in less economically developed countries interact with the internet in a very different way – through a mobile phone…
Textually challenged start petition to disable iPhone auto-correction feature
It seems that some of the Apple faithful are having a bit of trouble with their iPhones. Now that it’s available in so many new countries, English isn’t the only language its users are choosing to text and type in. However, the iPhone’s auto-correction feature — which pops up helpful words when a user’s chubby fingers don’t quite hit the right letters on the virtual keyboard – isn’t multilingual.
The same problem is happening when users try to use “txt spk” is text messages. It seems Apple would like us all to send well-composed, correctly spelt SMSs rather than persisting in the popular practices of dropping vowels and substituting consonants…
EU helping reduce your Vodafone direct debit – proposes capping roaming SMS and data fees
The EU is once again aiming its twin bureaucracy cannons at the mobile industry, this time planning a crackdown on roaming fees charged when users TXT THER M8s from holiday.
The EU, lead by a rampaging Viviane Reding, has already signalled its intentions to attack rip-off roaming fees, but now we have facts – a cap of 11 euro cents (8p) per roaming text is proposed, a 62% reduction on the current average roaming fee of 29 cents…
"HAVIN GUD TIME. HAS PHOTOCPIER GT TONER?" – 65% of people contact office while on holiday
We are a nation of WORKAHOLICS that are heading for an EARLY GRAVE thanks to technology. Those are the findings of a report by data protection agency Credant Technologies. It didn’t mention early graves, but I can assure you it would’ve if it could’ve.
The shock statistic is that the days of relaxing holidays are long gone, with 65% of us checking in with the office via email, phone…
Pope Benedict XVI promises to send "daily inspirational text messages" to Australian Catholics
Turns out the Pope is a dab hand at texting, as he’s promised his Australian worshipers a little daily SMS fun.
He’s apparently visiting the country later this year, where he’ll send out “daily inspirational text messages” to all who sign up for the service, and in a spot of publicity you just can’t pay for (GOD PREFERS TELSTRA!), he’ll be using the phone network Telstra’s 3G service for reaching his internet-bound friends via webcasting…
Jaxtr – sort of like a web-based Skype, now with free international texts
Jaxtr totally bypasses your local operator so you’re not at the mercy of your mobile or landline provider any more. Sign up, register your handset, and it’s hello to extremely cheap – and in some cases free – global telephony options.
Jaxtr’s been going since 2007 and has just granted all of its users the chance to send £FREE international text messages. Excitingly, this is one scheme that we’re allowed to join…
