The Greek gaming community is up in arms and going to court next week to fight a law that makes playing games on cell phones illegal, reported Greek newspaper Kathimerini.
The recently enacted law bans online gambling, including games with "electric, electro-mechanical and electronic" components. The government has admitted it can't differentiate innocuous video games from illegal gambling machines.
Gamers who infringe on the law face a fine of up to 75,000 euros ($74,440) and up to one year in jail.
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Bluetooth bites budgets: Customers will pay $5.6 billion a year to maintain their Bluetooth appliances, reported research and advisory firm Gartner.
While Gartner expects consumers to purchase more than 560 million gadgets with Bluetooth chips in them, the firm also expects customers to pay a high price to implement security measures.
Bluetooth is a radio frequency technology that lets gadgets within 30 feet of each other interact wirelessly. It is more powerful than infrared and can transport data at 1 megabit per second. But there is no standard way to guard against hackers grabbing information transmitted between devices.
Gartner's findings coincided with an announcement by Microsoft this week that it will release a keyboard and mouse embedded with Bluetooth chips next month.
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Hello, you've made the 'graylist': South African cell-phone giant Vodacom admitted that it has stopped blacklisting stolen mobile phones and rendering them useless on any network in the country, according to the website AllAfrica.
Instead, the company has decided to "graylist" the stolen handsets and send the thieves polite short messages like "Are you aware that you have a stolen phone? Please return it."
"I think we did such a good job of publicizing blacklisting that many people think it's still being done, but we've found that our customers are very happy with graylisting," Vodacom spokeswoman Joan Joffe told AllAfrica.
In South Africa, about 15,000 cell-phone owners report stolen handsets to Vodacom each month. Under the new graylisting policy, the service provider will be able to trace the phone's location, but won't shut down service. Minutes will continue to accumulate on the owner's bill.
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SMS a bust in the United States: Either Americans don't get it, or messaging over cell phones has been an utter failure for carriers in this country.
As The New York Times reported earlier this week, it has been possible since April to send a text message to any cell-phone subscriber in the country with a Web-enabled phone. Yet most people don't know the capability exists.
While sending notes via short message service (SMS) to mobile phones has been hugely popular in Europe and Asia, it has failed to catch on in the United States. Industry watchers cite a lack of effective marketing by the carriers, the popularity of instant messaging on desktop computers and the inconvenience of typing text notes on a phone's number keypad.
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Microsoft's new playground: Software vendor PacketVideo has agreed to offer Microsoft software alongside its platform to send and receive video and audio over cell phones.
The deal allows Microsoft to enter the mobile video delivery market, and it exposes PacketVideo to a larger customer base.
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So long, Sony Ericsson: The days of the joint venture between Sony and Ericsson appear to be numbered.
Ericsson recently said it would abandon the deal if the company didn't turn a profit at the end of the year. Ericsson (ERICY) also said the company is bound to have a loss for the full year due to weak cell-phone sales worldwide and technical problems with some Sony Ericsson handsets.
Sony, however, said it wasn't ready to give up on the joint venture. Industry analysts expect Sony to go solo into the handset market if and when Ericsson backs out of the deal.
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New stuff from Nokia: Nokia is expected to hold press conferences in Europe and Asia this Friday to unveil its next-generation (3G) cell phones.
