Filed under: Cellphones, HDTV, Home Entertainment, Media PCs, Wireless, Networking

Eager to live in the fantastical future it has prophesied, NTT DoCoMo went to CEATEC and demoed an upcoming addition to its Pocket U service: MH2H (Mobile Home to Home), which gives you the ability use your cellphone to stream content from your computer at home to a friend’s TV. The phone connects to your friend’s WiFi network and sends his or her DLNA-compliant receiver the IP address of your also-DLNA-compliant server, then tells said server to accept the connection and start streaming any videos, songs, or photos you feel like sharing. When you leave, the connection ends and every one goes back to partying on their own isolated media islands like it’s 2006.

[Image courtesy of Tech-On!]

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Filed under: Cellphones

No need to adjust your set — the United Nations communications chief has boldly predicted that half of planet Earth’s population will be hooked on some sort of mobile phone before 2009 dawns. Granted, the numbers he’s talking about do look strictly at subscriptions, so a small percentage will be skewed by those with multiple accounts (and thus, multiple numbers), but really, the forecast isn’t all that outlandish. After all, we already hit 3.3 billion mobile phone subscriptions back in November of last year (and 4 billion lines overall). As predicted, it’s growth in developing regions such as Africa and the Middle East which will boost the overall figure the most, with yearly increases in those areas expected to hit 27% and 25%, respectively. So, what are the chances a post eerily similar to this pops up in 2012 or so saying the entire world has a cellphone? Our trusty Magic 8-ball says “Signs Point to Yes.”

[Via Core77, image courtesy of Road and Travel]

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Filed under: Cellphones

We had a sneaking suspicion that the world hadn’t really come to strapping pads around lampposts in order to keep walking texters safe, and sure enough, the whole shebang was more of a stunt and less of a bona fide trial. Reportedly, only a few pads were put in place and photographed for around 36 hours — afterwards, the PR firm responsible for putting them up simply took them back down. It seems as if the scheme was meant to “test out [the idea] and gauge people’s opinions,” according to a 118 118 spokesman, and safe to say it certainly accomplished that.

[Via textually]

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Filed under: Cellphones

According to a recent report, human beings are becoming so incredibly stupid that they require cushioned lamppost bases so that when they run into them they don’t mess up their idiotic faces. Apparently, a study in the UK found that one in ten people actually managed to hurt themselves by walking into a post while peering down at their mobile phone screen. The mishaps — called “walking and texting” injuries — have spurred the charity Living Streets to launch the padded-post-pilot scheme in Brick Lane, London. It seems that if all goes well, there are plans to roll out the idiot-proof system in Birmingam, Manchester, and Stupidton.

[Image courtesy Yahoo! News]

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Filed under: Cellphones, CES, Handhelds, HDTV

A few companies have demoed cellphone chips capable of of HD output, but the fact is HDTV inputs weren’t designed with mobile power requirements and form factors in mind. Apparently unsatisfied by the mini HDMI connector created as part of HDMI 1.3, Silicon Image went ahead with its own design, reducing HDMI’s 19 pins to 5 while still retaining compatibility for full HD and digital audio in a package it calls Mobile High Definition Link (MHL). Cutting out any serial connector or further compression, the first MHL equipped products are the VastLane SiI9220, SiI9222 and SiI9290, which could reach cellphones near you as soon as the third quarter of this year.

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Filed under: Cellphones

Is the mobile phone really mature enough for brick phones to make a retro comeback? According to the makers of the ironically named Mini MOB, the answer to that is yes. The Mini MOB is definitely designed in the retro brick phone style, but at only 3.5 cm wide, it could probably be considered a scale model. It includes some pretty standard specs — camera, MP3 player, 128 MB card for the SD slot — but also happens to have an amazing battery life of 30 days standby, and a full 72 hours of continuous talk time! That’s almost enough to get us interested in picking one up, but at £160 ($320+) it ain’t an easy decision.

[Via TechDigest]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless

If you’ve been losing sleep over not knowing precisely what was going to happen to all that spectrum space that will be freed up when the imminent analog-to-digital cutover takes place, your insomnia is about to be cured. Reportedly, a UN telecoms meeting decided today to give mobile service providers access to the bandwidth currently reserved for terrestrial TV broadcasts. The US of A apparently pushed hard for a worldwide agreement on spectrum use, suggesting that a common approach was more reasonable than each nation choosing separate frequencies for next-generation services. As it stands, US citizens can look forward to reaping the benefits of this move sometime in 2009, but most of the world will be waiting until 2015 before making this section of the radio spectrum available for mobile activities.

[Image courtesy of toddemslie]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless

If you’ve been losing sleep over not knowing precisely what was going to happen to all that spectrum space that will be freed up when the imminent analog-to-digital cutover takes place, your insomnia is about to be (at least partially) cured. The US of A apparently pushed hard for a worldwide consensus on spectrum use — suggesting that a common approach was more reasonable than each nation choosing separate frequencies for next-generation services — and sure enough, it ended up getting exactly what it wanted. Apparently, the 700MHz band will now be reserved for a mobile broadband standard accessible throughout much of the globe, including most of North America, Central America, South America, Europe, China, India, South Korea and Japan. Of note, Europe was able to land a concession that enables it to offer up “about half of the bandwidth available for mobile services in their region” compared to what is offered elsewhere, but the agreement definitely makes the forthcoming auction that much more interesting.

[Via RCRNews, image courtesy of toddemslie]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Cellphones

Bringing the iPhone to Europe was big, but potentially bigger for Apple is the Chinese market, which probably explains why China Mobile CEO Wang Jianzhou is in talks with the company over its much publicized handset. Mr. Jianzhou admitted in a speech at the GSM Association’s Mobile Asia Congress that he doesn’t like the revenue sharing agreements that Apple has managed to wrangle: you and every other mobile executive worldwide, Wang! But who knows, maybe the fact that China Mobile has 349.66 million subscribers will be enough for Apple to make one two very big exceptions and do a more traditional deal. Whatever happens, the Chinese market is likely to throw some curveballs at Apple’s usual pitch.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Cellphones

For now it’s not much more than a plan to announce a plan within the next few weeks, but since it involves Google and cellphone networks, we’ll take it. The Wall Street Journal has the news that Google will announce its mobile offerings within the next two weeks, which could take the form of hardware, software packages, or — most likely — an open platform for phones that third party developers can build on. Interaction is the key word here: Google’s platform won’t involve locking down features, rather, it’ll open them up so that they work together. How exactly the company will execute this plan will be revealed within the immediate future: although with most phone manufacturers already subcontracting development of their phone’s software platforms, it doesn’t sound like it should be too difficult a job to muscle in.

[Thanks, Harry; via MarketWatch. Image credit]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Cellphones

For now it’s not much more than a plan to announce a plan within the next few weeks, but since it involves Google and cellphone networks, we’ll take it. The Wall Street Journal has the news that Google will announce its mobile offerings within the next two weeks, which could take the form of hardware, software packages, or — most likely — an open platform for phones that third party developers can build on. Interaction is the key word here: Google’s platform won’t involve locking down features, rather, it’ll open them up so that they work together. How exactly the company will execute this plan will be revealed within the immediate future: although with most phone manufacturers already subcontracting development of their phone’s software platforms, it doesn’t sound like it should be too difficult a job to muscle in.

[Thanks, Harry; via MarketWatch. Image credit]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Cellphones

For now it’s not much more than a plan to announce a plan within the next few weeks, but since it involves Google and cellphone networks, we’ll take it. The Wall Street Journal has the news that Google will announce its mobile offerings within the next two weeks, which could take the form of hardware, software packages, or — most likely — an open platform for phones that third party developers can build on. Interaction is the key word here: Google’s platform won’t involve locking down features, rather, it’ll open them up so that they work together. How exactly the company will execute this plan will be revealed within the immediate future: although with most phone manufacturers already subcontracting development of their phone’s software platforms, it doesn’t sound like it should be too difficult a job to muscle in.

[Thanks, Harry; via MarketWatch. Image credit]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!