Spotty cell-phone coverage is a global problem.
A 78-year-old woman living in a village in Olt County, Romania, climbs a tree twice a week to speak to her grandchildren on her mobile phone, according to a report by the National newspaper.
The only way for Maria Niculae to get reception on her phone is if she climbs a particular sour-cherry tree in the village. She does this every Wednesday and Saturday at 10 p.m. and waits until her children and grandchildren call.
"Two weeks ago, my grandson, who had just had an exam, was supposed to call me at 10 p.m. sharp," she told the National. "I waited in the tree for an hour with the phone in my hand, but no one called. Later I heard he was so happy he passed the exam that he went to celebrate it at the disco and forgot about his old grandma."
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Generating PDABuzz.com: Readers of PDABuzz.com are up in arms about the firing of the website's popular founder.
Handheld Media Group, which purchased the website in March 2002, fired Wes Salmon as part of the acquisition. But it now has a handful: Readers, in protest of Salmon's ousting, are leaving the site in droves.
"To all my PDABuzz friends and refugees, this is most likely the last time I'll talk to you all here," posted one reader. "Adios amigos."
"Good luck to all of you in maintaining a site without a community to support it," wrote another reader.
Salmon, who has a personal website, said he was "overwhelmed" by the response.
"My Blackberry has not stopped buzzing since 4 p.m. today," he said. "Who would have thought that a simple interest in gadgets and Web technology ... would have turned into something so important to so many people."
Salmon founded PDABuzz.com in October 1998.
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SMS for the deaf: Britain plans to implement a system that lets deaf people report emergencies by sending an SMS to the police, authorities said.
The system will be in place in central England on Monday and is expected to be copied by police forces across country.
One in seven British people, or about 8.6 million people, has some form of hearing problem, the British Deaf Association said. About 140,000 of them are profoundly deaf, the association said.
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Videoconferencing on a PDA: NTT DoCoMo, Japan's No. 1 mobile phone service provider in terms of subscribers, said it would begin selling a two-part terminal next week -– a personal digital assistant base unit with a wireless phone –- that is compatible with the country's high-speed wireless (3G) Internet service.
The FOMA SH2101V base unit has a built-in camera that lets users see and talk to each other in real time at 64 Kbps. The mobile phone has a Bluetooth radio that lets users sync wirelessly with other devices within 30 feet of it. The phone can also be used as a remote control when playing downloaded music on the PDA and to check e-mail.
The price for the terminal hasn't been set. But the standard accessory kit, including a wireless phone, battery packs, AC adaptor and cord, touch panel stylus and FOMA-card cover will cost $390.
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California investigates Cingular: The California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) is investigating Cingular Wireless, the nation's No. 2 mobile phone service provider in terms of subscribers, to determine whether it broke any state consumer laws.
The PUC said it has received 4,700 complaints about Cingular in the last three years. In most of the complaints, customers say Cingular provided them poor cell-phone coverage, apparently due to lack of room in its networks. The company would then discourage customers from canceling their service by charging a $150 early termination fee.
The PUC said it would investigate whether Cingular's sale of cell-phone service and equipment, and its collection of the early termination fee and other penalties were "fundamentally unfair to consumers."
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Not giving up wireless: Despite current economic conditions and complaints surrounding lousy cell-phone service, almost a third –- 31 percent –- of U.S. Americans aged 18 and older plan to purchase new handsets within a year, according to a recent survey by Harris Interactive and Telephia.
In a study that included 51,000 Americans, including people who did not own cell phones, the market research firms found that one in five who did own mobile phones – 18 percent of them – intended to upgrade their current mobile phones. The cell-phone subscribers wanted added features such as address books (80 percent), voice dialing (74 percent), short text messaging (SMS) (67 percent), an alarm clock (66 percent), downloadable ring tones (65 percent) and high-speed wireless Internet access (11 percent).
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Peer-to-peer cell phones: Mitsubishi said it has the prototype for software that will let mobile phones communicate with each other directly rather than to a base station in a cell tower.
When someone calls on a cell phone, the signal travels to the base station in a cell tower before a connection is made.
In a peer-to-peer network, the signals from the cell phone would jump from phone to phone until they reached their final destination. By eliminating some dependence on the cell tower, this relay system could reduce the number of dropped calls.
But don't expect carriers to embrace it. It may make it more difficult for them to keep track of calls made to nearby phones, according to SRI International, a research firm with similar technology in its lab.
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Hello? Anyone? Hello? Cell-phone users at Toronto's Pearson Airport are in for a big surprise.
Airport officials said they would begin shutting down cell-phone coverage to keep devices from interfering with airport communications. The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) said it wouldn't stop the airport from cutting off cell-phone users.
Approximately 28 million travelers go through the airport annually, and 15,000 people work there, according to the National Post newspaper in Canada.
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Cell-phone software for Macheads: Owners of Ericsson mobile phones could download software that will let them sync the devices with machines that run on Mac OS X.
The "Ericsson Client" allows Mac OS X-powered computer users to transfer files to and from an Ericsson phone using a cable or wirelessly via Infrared or a Bluetooth radio.
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Rumor mill: AT&T Wireless (AWE)and VoiceStream Wireless are in merger talks, The Wall Street Journal reported.
AT&T was originally talking to Cingular Wireless, but those discussions have since ceased, the Journal reported.
If AT&T and VoiceStream were to merge, they would become the second largest mobile phone operator in terms of subscribers after Verizon Wireless.
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Dialing around: In a slap in the face to Microsoft, Nokia and IBM plan to hook up and develop software to distribute music and other media over cell phones and other wireless devices, The New York Times reported.... Sprint PCS (PCS) will begin offering its next-generation (3G) services on August 10, the CEO of Audiovox, which will provide some of Sprint's handsets, said in a quarterly conference call.
Reuters contributed to this report.
