New Cell Phone Tricks at CTIA
How'd you like to grab a document from your PC, edit it on your data-enabled cell phone, and then save it back to your desktop? What about getting desktop-quality (almost) web pages on your low-end (i.e. non-smartphone) browser, or sharing restaurant recommendations on the fly--and on the move--with your buddies? Or calling a friend overseas for free on your cell?
New software and services make it all possible, although sometimes with a few caveats that may or may not go away in time. Here's some of what I've seen thus far at CTIA--and how or when you'll be able to use it.
1. Your desktop on your cell: The most powerful and impressive mobile document access I've seen to date is due early next year from QuickOffice (creators of the Mobile Office productivity suite) and Soonr, a remote access service we've covered before.
By setting up Soonr's desktop software on your connected PC, you'll be able to download and edit Word, PowerPoint and Excel docs from within Mobile Office 2.0, but that's not all. Mobile Office's app also includes scalable vector graphics technology that enables graphic depictions of the remote files, so for example you can view small thumbnails of the slides in your PowerPoint presentation before you even download it. The interface looks like this:
The caveats: Your phone may not support this cool technology. Mobile Office is primarily a bundled app on certain Symbian-based smart phones (the S60 and UIQ editions), so it's mostly confined to Nokia models such as the N series (QuickOffice says it eventually plans to support Java and Windows Mobile). Also, you will likely have to pay for the service, depending on how much data you transfer. Still, for some people, the ability to grab documents from your desktop could be worth the expense.
2. The Web on your cell: You may have a browser on your cell phone, but are you really happy with the Web that it delivers? Either it takes forever for big pages to load--and then display improperly--or, with sites that are optimized for mobile devices, you get a dumbed-down version that's not much fun to look at.
A company called InfoGin offers an alternative. It's basically a proxy-based service that processes page requests from mobile devices by analyzing the content of the requested page and optimizing it for the browser that's making the request.
InfoGin's compression and formatting algorithms allow phone browsers to display graphics in a reasonable amount of download time; the service can also handle technologies such as Flash, which most mobile browsers can't.
The catch with InfoGin is how you get it to process your page requests. The company hopes major carriers will pick it up, so that it would be transparent to end users (all Web page requests would simply be routed through InfoGin servers). Failing that, however, you must load an InfoGin portal when you begin surfing, and enter your URLs there--which may be too much trouble for many people.
If you're interested in trying out InfoGin, however, you can do so by starting your mobile browsing session at AOL (either http://aol.com or http://wap.aol.com or mobile.aolsearch.com) or InfoGin's own demo Web site (http://m.infogin.com).
3. Share your stuff: Easy photo and video sharing is the mantra of several services. Thumbplay, which sells ringtones, videos and games for mobile devices, has introduced a free My Locker service that allows you to upload your cameraphone videos and stills to Thumbplay's Web site for storage and sharing (you can also store your Thumbplay purchase). And a mobile blogging service called 3Guppies has introduced a Facebook application that lets you easily send Facebook images to your cell phone (you can already do this with MySpace).
But images aren't the only items you can share on your cell these days. TeleNav, which does navigation software for GPS-enabled mobile devices, has added some sharing features to its newest version, which can be found on AT&T Wireless's recently introduced Tilt. You can now search for restaurants based on their ratings, which initially will derive from the popular user review site Yelp, but will be augmented by TeleNav's own users. You will be able to read full reviews, which will look like this:
Telenav's latest version also has a new feature for easy one-click rerouting if your route finds heavy traffic.
A company called Pelago, meanwhile, has launched a service called Whrrl that allows you to access your friends' recommended real-world businesses on your GPS-enabled cell phone. The example is that if you're in downtown San Francisco looking for a good restaurant, you can view the nearby restaurants your foodie friends have enjoyed (assuming they've used the service to rate restaurants they've visited).
Whrrl is initially available for 10 cities (Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Austin, Chicago, Boston, New York, Washington, DC and Atlanta), and its usefulness will depend on how successful you are in getting your circle of friends to sign up and use it.
4. Free, ad-supported overseas calls: A while back I tried out a VoIP-based service for overseas calls called Rebtel; you can read about it here, but the idea is that the service generates local numbers for both you and your overseas friend. You'd call your local number for the friend; it would ring through, but then while you held the line the friend would have to hang up and immediately call their local number for you. The call would then be routed through Rebtel's VoIP servers.
Rebtel requires that you put money into a Rebtel account in case you slip up and make a Rebtel call to someone who doesn't have their own local number for you, or doesn't use it (those calls cost some money). But a newer service called Talkster takes the same approach one step further: It only works if both parties have created local numbers for each other, and it's ad-supported, so you pay absolutely nothing.
But it suffers from the same shortcomings that I delineated for Rebtel: It's complicated to use, and the local numbers overseas weren't necessarily toll-free numbers, so my call recipient wound up having to pay.
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A correction; Rebtel doesn't charge for the hang up-call back calls. Rebtel offers the same hang up-call back service WITHOUT the 10 seconds commercial in 39 countries. In addition to that you'll get 10 minutes without the hang up-call back routine and 5 more for each friend you sign up. On facebook as well http://apps.facebook.com/myrebtel
If you think it's OK to pay e.g. 1.8 cents a minute (+ the cost of the local call) to call your grandmother in the US Rebtel offers you the option to skip the hang up-call back stuff. You?ll get an extra 10 minutes for swiping your card.
...and by the way, I think the quality is great