For at least a short while, those facing prosecution in Lee County may find it less likely to have information about their cellular phones submitted as evidence in court.
Cell phone service provider U.S. Cellular recently informed County Attorney Mike Short the company has begun charging for information about its subscribers.
It has become increasingly common for the county attorney's office to request cell phone records for crimes such as harassment, Short said.
"We give out subpoenas to cell phone companies by the hundreds. ... Every crime, we're checking cell phone records," Short said Tuesday during a Lee County department head meeting following the regular Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday.
U.S. Cellular began charging May 4, Short said.
For the short term, the attorney's office doesn't have the funds budgeted to pay for as many subpoenas as it has requested in the past.
"Considering the volume we have done, it could run into some real money. Obviously for the short term, it's not in budget," Short said. "Which means I'm probably not going to do as much or I'm going to come back later and say (to supervisors) I'm going to need a little more money."
When Short protested the charges, U.S. Cellular cited a 2005 court case, Ameritech Corp. V. McCann, in which a U.S. District Court judge in Wisconsin ruled cell phone companies can reasonably bill for information, Short said.
U.S. Cellular charges for a variety of information ranging from $5 for each monthly bill to $40 for specific call information, Short said.
A handful of other companies, including Virgin Mobile and Verizon, also charge for such information. Short expects AT&T and Sprint soon will be sending him bills, too.
Short noted that I-wireless, an affiliate of T-Mobile, does not charge.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Cell phone record subpoenas cost
Sprint Releases Eco-friendly Accessories
Sprint’s new cell phone charger has an integrated solar cell to allow for “mobile charging,” as the photovoltaic solar cell is capable of charging a lithium ion battery using just the sun’s rays.
The SOLIO Mono Hybrid Charger takes about 10 hours to charge directly through sunlight, with peak charging times between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. The charger is compatible with many phone models, as well as digital cameras and other portable electronics.
Sprint is also offering cell phone carrying cases made out of 100 percent recycled PET, which are manufactured by Nite Ize. The new accessories are part of Sprint’s environmental priority to “promote an environmentally-sound supply chain.”
Another of Sprint’s priorities is to encourage cell phone recycling, as the company has set a 90 percent recovery rate goal by 2017. The company currently recycles about 34 percent of its phones.
“Sprint customers will continue to see more eco-friendly options, whether through our products and services or our business practices,” said Ralph Reid, vice president of corporate social responsibility for Sprint. “Sprint’s eco-friendly products will help consumers conserve natural resources and reduce their carbon footprint.”
If not so pricey, Nokia phone could hurt Palm Pre
Palm is fortunate that the Nokia doesn't yet have any U.S. carrier partners for its N97 smart phone. The phone, which was unveiled on stage at D: All Things Digital conference has some very impressive features. But, because the phone isn't subsidized by a carrier, anyone who wants one will have to pay $699. The soon-to-be-released Palm Pre will cost $199 with a two-year cell phone contract. The 8 GB iPhone also sells for $199.
At the moment, Palm is getting a lot of attention ahead of its June 6 release of the Pre, which impressed me and a lot of other people when it was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. If the N97 was competitively priced, it might have put a damper on early Palm sales but at three and a half times the price, the new N97 is a nonstarter.
Nokia didn't allow D attendees to try out the phone so all I know is what I saw during the demo. My impression could change once I actually get my hands on one but--based on what I saw--it looked quite good. The GSM phone is likely to work on the AT&T and T-Mobile networks in the U.S. as well as most networks in Europe and other parts of the world.
Like the Palm Pre, there is both a touchscreen and a QWERTY keyboard. The iPhone only has a touchscreen. The N97 comes with a whopping 32 gigabytes of internal memory plus a microSD slot for those who want even more memory. The Palm Pre has only 8 GB while the current iPhone maxes out at 16 GB.
The N97 has a 5 megapixel camera with a Carl Zeis lens. Most important, the lens has a cover to protect it from being scratched or soiled by coins, keys and pocket lint.
Nokia, which acquired Navteq in 2007, incorporates Navteq's mapping technology which includes turn-by-turn directions and a point of interest data base that's dynamically updated with such things as gas prices.
One possibly useful feature is a text to speech engine that can read your e-mail out loud. Like most text-to-speech software, it speaks in a robotic voice that many people find annoying but it does make it possible to listen to your e-mail while driving. Of course, you still have to configure it, which could require you to take your eyes off the road, but once you press the play button it can read all of your recent messages.
It also has a built-in FM transmitter to stream audio to a car radio.
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Sprint offers two new unlimited service plans
Sprint Nextel today ups the ante in the wireless wars.
Reeling from a poor financial performance in 2007 and projecting another bad year, Sprint is trying to lure cord cutters, cell phone junkies, business professionals and other high-dollar wireless customers.
In the process, Dan Hesse, Sprint Nextel’s chief executive, is hoping to take the uncertainty out of monthly wireless bills.
The company today begins offering two new unlimited service plans offering more value for the money than those unveiled by their competitors.
A $99.99 “Unlimited Everything” plan includes voice calls, text messaging and a laundry list of Internet-based data services. An $89.99 “Talk/Message/Connect” plan offers unlimited voice calls and text messaging, but charges extra for access to the Internet or other data services.
The rates undercut competitors AT&T Wireless, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile by as much as 40 percent. None of those companies offers unlimited access to the rapidly growing wireless data market, which includes services as diverse as phone-based TV and turn-by-turn navigation.
Hesse called the Sprint plans “bold” and “unprecedented.”
“To us, this is the beginning of a new era in wireless,” Hesse said.
According to surveys by organizations ranging from Consumer Reports to the University of Michigan to AARP, problems with mobile phone bills are one of the leading consumer complaints nationally.
After selecting plans that provide a set number of minutes for a set price, customers complain that add-on charges for navigation, Web browsing and text messaging bulk up their bills.
“Wireless today is about much more than just voice,” Hesse said. “It is about data services — texting, e-mail, video, pictures, music, navigation, surfing the Web and more. Customers want these applications, but without complexity and without having to worry about their bill.”
Wall Street, however, was less than impressed.
“I’m not seeing anything here that’s going to change the trajectory much,” said Timothy Horan, an analyst with Oppenheimer & Co.
Horan noted that T-Mobile has a plan that offers 1,000 minutes of talk, 1,000 text messages and e-mail for $55.
John Garcia, Sprint’s acting chief marketing officer, said services offered by Sprint and T-Mobile aren’t comparable.
“They are still in a fairly slow network and their data offering is primarily just text and e-mail,” Garcia said during a call with investment analysts. “And anything else you try to do is, like I said, slow.”
Some type of move by Sprint on unlimited calling plans was expected. The company’s three leading rivals announced unlimited service plans last week.
The announcement was the lone positive note Thursday in a cacophony of bad news released as the Overland Park wireless company announced its quarterly and annual financial reports.
Sprint wrote off $29.7 billion in the fourth quarter and said the company will lose 1.2 million postpaid customers during the first three months of this year.
Hesse said Sprint’s plan differentiates the company from its competitors while offering customers simplicity.
In some ways, Hesse is going back to the future.
While with AT&T’s wireless division in 1998, Hesse introduced one-price calling for cell phones, eliminating different charges for local and long distance calls. At the time, consumers were charged extra for cell phone use outside their home region or for long distance calls.
Before the plan was introduced, Hesse said, only about 16 percent of wireless consumers regularly used their phone in areas that would bring extra roaming charges.
“We penalized any customer who actually wanted to use the mobility function,” he said. “You didn’t take your cell phone when you traveled and you didn’t make long distance calls on your cell phone. The market was small because the wireless industry made sure it was small.”
The plan to standardize rates is a whole new revolution, Hesse said.
“At our rates, we feel we have struck a very healthy balance between fiscal responsibility and a broader reach, which will grow the wireless data market,” Hesse said.
William Power, an analyst with Robert W. Baird & Co., said the plan puts Sprint in a competitive position for the most lucrative customers. But, in a report to investors, he included a caveat.
“That is a relatively small piece of the overall market,” Power said.
Power noted that Wall Street had been concerned Sprint would start a wireless price war.
“On the whole, the pricing actions do not appear to be as aggressive as some had feared,” Power said. “The lack of a stronger lower-priced offering could be positive for the industry.”
Hesse conceded that only a small percentage of current customers are coughing up $100 a month for mobile phone service.
“It’s correct that today a small percentage of users spend $100 a month on wireless,” Hesse said. “But that could change. It could be that it’s because we make it difficult for users, or really very expensive, for users to use broadband capabilities on the phone.”
Roger Entner, vice president of the communications sector for IAG Research, applauded Sprint’s plan.
“It’s enough to give them differentiation, but not enough to make everybody freak out and start a price war,” Entner said.
Entner said Sprint’s plan also offers another benefit overlooked by other wireless companies in their unlimited plans — families.
Sprint’s plans give families a $5 incremental discount for each line on a family plan. A second line costs $94.99; a third, $89.99.
“It’s on the right path,” Entner said of the plan.
Unlimited voice and data, including texting, Web browsing, push-to-talk, navigation, TV, radio and other services.
$89.99
Unlimited voice calls, push-to-talk and texting, but no free access to other data services.
$89.99
Unlimited data, including texting, Web browsing, navigation, TV, radio, push-to-talk and other services, and 900 minutes of talk time.
$69.99
Unlimited texting and push-to-talk, and 900 minutes of talk time.
$49.99
Unlimited texting and push-to-talk, and 450 minutes of talk time.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Sprint and Samsung Release M520 Slider Phone
with audio caller ID that helps users to identify callers with a spoken voice while listening to music, and a 1.3 megapixel camera that offers 2x digital zoom and camcorder functionality. Source
Friday, January 18, 2008
Amazon Kindle: Save Trees, Support E-Book Readers
As much as I love to read, turning pages one by one, breaking a new paperback book into a well-weathered memory to trophy in my book case, I realize it is costing some forest, somewhere, a tree.
he Kindle retails at $399 and in my fair and balanced opinion, it comes the closest to getting all things right for this relatively new medium. It lets you download a mini library of books, magazines, and blogs wirelessly. It can do this from just about anywhere you might find cell phone service, kindle specifically uses the Sprint wireless network to link up. The key feature to the wireless kindle is an integrated high-speed EVDO antenna (similar to the ones found in the 3G phones). This antenna allows users to download a 544-page book in 45 seconds. This rockin’ bonus to this wireless access is that it’s free. However, there is a but, do remember that subscribing to magazines, blogs, and newspapers can cost you.
The unit weighs 10.3 ounces and is smaller than many hardback books. The E-ink display screen does not need constant poser to feed it allowing the battery to last much longer. A full QWERTY keypad can be used to do text searches or insert remarks.
The kindle makes reading as close to the real “paper” experience as possible. The unit contains a 6-inch screen that produces a high-contrast E ink display that will not flicker nor does it use a backlight. This E-ink technology allows you to read for hours without eye strain. The text can be instantly resized for easy reading or those who have adjusted vision requirements.
There are large Next Page/Previous Page buttons on the side of the screen that are convenient but they are so big that you can accidentally bump the buttons and throw yourself off by a page or two. Also, the scroll-wheel-based menu system does take some getting used to.
The Kindle store via Amazon is the supply portal for the e-books, complete with some 90,000-plus available titles. The supply proves to be both plentiful and cheap, with best sellers going for $9.99, and many e-books out there are free or mere pennies compared to the paper copy. It holds over 200 titles at once and it has a very long battery life. According to Amazon, leave wireless on and recharge approximately every other day or turn wireless off and read for a week or more before recharging. The unit fully recharges in 2 hours.
Source
Sprint to launch Samsung Ace World Phone
The Samsung Ace rocks a 1.3 megapixel camera, microSD card slot, Bluetooth 2.0, and EVDO on the CDMA-side of things. Unfortunately, jet-setters will be relying on the Rev. 0 flavor of EVDO, while GSM-surfers will have to deal with a lowly GRPS data connection to get their wireless data-fix.
Source
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Find your friends on a cell phone: Pelago introduces Whrrl
Whrrl is a new service that allows mobile phone users to chronicle every social activity in their lives -- writing reviews of movies or restaurants or uploading photos from concerts and sporting events. It then plots that information on a map and combines it with similar content from friends, creating a personal mobile city guide. It also provides the real-time locations of people as they wander from place to place in a city, tracking chosen friends as dots on a map.
Whrrl -- not to be confused with a competing service called Whirrl -- is the first offering from Pelago, a Seattle startup that scored $7.4 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and Trilogy Equity Partners last year.
Led by Jeff Holden and Darren Erik Vengroff, both of whom previously held high-ranking positions at Amazon.com, Pelago is one of a number of companies trying to tap the emerging arena of location-based services. The idea is that mobile phone users will want to locate friends -- who may be at a nearby restaurant -- or at the very least get a review that a friend wrote of the restaurant from a few weeks ago. The service is also accessible on a PC.
For businesses, the concept holds much promise -- potentially allowing them to target coupons or advertisements to people as they shop in a book store or buy a cup of coffee.
Of course, plotting the location of people on a mobile map in real time opens up dozens of potential privacy issues. That's especially the case since Pelago is targeting teenagers and those in their 20s. Eventually, the company wants to combine the power of GPS phones with a patent-pending technology it dubs "Passive Visitation" to automatically record the locations of users as they move around a city.
Holden, a former senior vice president at Amazon.com, said Whrrl was built so that location information doesn't get into the wrong hands. For example, users can set different privacy levels in order to allow or disallow specific people from seeing the location. They also can "cloak" themselves -- essentially switching off the location feature, Holden said.
Despite the potential privacy bottlenecks, Holden believes that people will find value in disclosing their locations to selected friends or family members.
And, he said, the ability to search for restaurant reviews or other information based on one's location is a compelling idea that hasn't been addressed by other players in the market.
"The real power of this thing is that you can combine social data with factual data that we have gathered," said Holden. "And so you can say: 'I want to see only the places that my foodie friends think are great restaurants and are within a half mile of here, have outdoor seating, and are open now.' That is a trivial query in our product." Such a query would take just four clicks, Vengroff added.
The search functionality allows users to quickly "mine tribal knowledge" from friends, which Holden says is a much more powerful recommendation than reading some anonymous review.
Of course, the concept will only work if people start using it. To attract users, Pelago has entered into a marketing agreement with American Eagle Outfitters in which customers of the retailer will be exposed to the Whrrl service through in-store and Web site promotions.
It also is working to create services so people can add reviews from their mobile devices to social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.
Other potential competitors include online city guides such as Yelp and Citysearch, both of which have mobile products, and Loopt, a two-year-old Silicon Valley startup that also allows users to find friends on a map on a mobile phone. Backed with $5 million from Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates, Loopt's service is available on about two dozen Sprint phones for $2.99 per month.
Google also is moving into the arena with the purchase of Jaiku, a company that allows mobile phone users to create a running Web log of events, recommendations and other information. Jaiku describes its mobile product as "a live phonebook that displays the activity streams, availability, and location of your Jaiku contacts right in your phone contact list." Twitter, which also allows people to share small tidbits of information with friends, also is a potential threat.
Holden said he likes the concept of Jaiku and Twitter because they offer an "always-on connection to your network." But he said Whrrl is different because the content has more long-lasting value than the quick posts on Twitter and Jaiku.
"People post something and it is not that interesting like five minutes later, whereas in our world when you post something it is almost always in the context of some thing in the physical world," said Holden, adding that restaurant reviews or concert photos can be recycled for others to use.
Though it is launching today, Whrrl is not available to all mobile phone users. Only subscribers to AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile -- on about eight to 10 phone models -- can download Whrrl. A portion of the service is free, though Pelago plans to charge less than $3 per month for the location-based service. Pelago, which plans to go out for more funding early next year, employs 34 people.
For more on location-based services on mobile devices, check out The New York Times today which reports on offerings from Loopt and Buddy Beacon. It also notes some of the privacy concerns, quoting an analyst who says there "is a Big Brother component" to the services.