Mobilestead Blog

The TechCrunchIT post by Vic Gundotra who is the Vice President of Engineering for Google’s mobile and developer products, presents a lot of interesting data: 4 billion global mobile subscribers (ITU, 2009) In 2009 half of all connections to the internet worldwide will come from a mobile phone. (eMarketer, 2008 and 2009) This is a bit hard to believe even for me, as I would imagine that most cellphone customers don't have a data plan. MetroPCS is a prepaid cellphone company which offers fully unlimited ... Read More

After keeping quiet on its stance of Jailbreaking, Apple has formally come out saying that this is an illegal practice. Before today, they simply said that this modification would simply void the warranty. More info on the legal context at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). As we all know, Apple's iPhone comes with restrictions that prevent owners from running applications obtained from sources other than Apple's own iTunes App Store. Prior to iPhone 2.0 and AppStore, which came out in July 2008, jailbreaking ... Read More

GSM Association just announced a standardized charger for all mobile phones. Consumers have been demanding this for a while now. But before we all get excited, the target date for this is Jan. 1, 2012 – 3 years away! This makes perfect sense and I would imagine that this would have been introduced a lot sooner as there are obvious advantages to both consumers and manufacturers. This new charger should also be a bit more energy efficient. There are 17 companies involved in ... Read More

According to the Telegraph, the average age for a kid to get his or her first cell phone is eight. Eight! I was lucky enough to get my first cell-phone at the age of 16. At that time this was a shared resource where one in five had one. A brick sized phone was a status symbol. This was still the age of the beepers and pagers. According to the survey based on“1,435 people including 546 children aged seven to 15, 676 parents ... Read More

New York City partnered with Google to create NYCgo.com and a brand new Official NYC Information Center, located at 810 7th Avenue . Tourists can now navigate the city easier by integrating Google Maps for mobile into their experience. www.NYCgo.com is similar to other sites as it lists hotels, restaurants, and things to do in New York. This is also in a way a competitor to CitySearch. Most pages embed Google Maps, and feature "send to phone" feature, which sends locations to ... Read More

Today is a major day for Location-based Social Networking. Google has just launched Latitude, which probably should have been called Location for simplicity. Now your friends can see exactly where you are. More info on TechCrunch. Google Mobile Blog has the official announcement. This means trouble for startups in this space, as none really got significant traction. In our opinion, mobile social networking space will eventually be won by the likes of Facebook which already know all your friends and can easily turn location ... Read More