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Joe Malia’s privacy scarves provide mobile phone users and portable video game players with privacy, a light/glare-free texting/playing environment, and warm necks. “Users of the wearable mobile phone scarf can venture into public spaces confident that if the need to compose a private text message were to arise the object could be pulled over the face to create an isolated environment.” (via eyeteeth)
Cell phone trees. “Unlike most palms and gymnosperms that take many decades to grow, these ‘new’ trees appear within days.” This is my favorite cell phone tree, just outside of NYC and completely inconspicuous.
Cheatsheet for how to get to a human operator on various automated phone systems. When calling Best Buy, “press 1,1,1,#,# and then wait through the 3 prompts asking for your home telephone number”. (thx, scott)
The 3% federal excise tax on your phone bill “was imposed in 1898 to help pay for the Spanish-American War”.
Cl1ff N0t3s for the millennials: mobile service will condense books into short text messages. “For example, Hamlet’s famous line: ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’ becomes ‘2b? Nt2b? ???’”.
Hugms connects to your mobile phone via Bluetooth and then when you squeeze it, is sends a “hug” text message to the person of your choosing. See also sweethearting. (thx mike)
Got quite a few emails in response to my post on sweethearting/pinging. Several people mentioned pranking[1] as a current implementation of this idea, a trick I remember using as a kid. You call someone and hang up after one ring…”prank me when you’re outside my apartment and I’ll come down”. Pranking is typically driven by economics…you don’t pay for a phone call that doesn’t connect.
Gen Kanai asks: “why can’t SMS do this?” It certainly can; if I were implementing sweethearting, I would piggyback it on SMS. But what I’m really concerned with (as usual) is the user experience. To send a blank text message to a specific recipient with my phone takes at least 6-10 keystrokes. I want to do it in two keystrokes and (in time) without looking.
[1] I received reports of pranking being used all over the world. It’s called one-belling (or pranking) in England, people send “toques” (roughly “touches”) or “sting” each other in Spain, Italians “fare uno squillo” (which Google translates as “to make one blast”), and in Finland it’s called “bombing”.
Update: In South Africa, they call it a “Scotch call”.
Here’s a feature I would like on my mobile phone: the ability to “ping” someone with 2 or less keypresses (something that takes around a second to do), even if the keypad is locked. The idea is that when I press a couple of buttons on my phone (say, 1#), a tiny content-less message is sent to the person corresponding to that key combination. On their end, they see something like “Jason pinged you at 7:34pm” with the option to ping right back. You’d have to set up what pings mean beforehand, stuff like “I’m leaving work now” or “remember to pick up milk at the store”.
Pings would be perfect for situations when texting or a phone call is too time consuming, distracting, or takes you out of the flow of your present experience. If you call your husband on the way home from work every night and say the same thing each time, perhaps a ping would be better…you wouldn’t have to call and your husband wouldn’t have to stop what he was doing to answer the phone. You could even call it the “sweetheart ping” or “sweethearting”…in the absence of a prearraged “ping me when you’re leaving”, you could ping someone to let them know you’re thinking about them.
This reminds me a bit of Matt Webb’s Glancing project: I’m Ok, you’re Ok. I guess you could think of pinging as eye contact via mobile phone…just enough information is conveyed to be useful, but not so much that it disrupts what you’re already doing. Webb cites Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs:
Howard Rheingold in his book Smart Mobs gives a good example of text messaging being used for this. He talked about kids in Sweden after a party. Say you’ve seen someone you quite liked and you’d like to see them again, but don’t know if the feeling’s shared. You’d send them a blank text message, or maybe just a really bland one like “hey, good party”. If they reply, ask for a date. The first message is almost entirely expressive communication: tentative, deniable.
Matt does a fine job explaining why this stripped-down style of communication is sometimes preferable to more robust alternatives.
Quite a few folks are pointing to the results of this survey (graph here) about what features people want on their most frequently used mobile devices. The results are interesting but also probably misleading in about 1000 different ways (text messaging didn’t even make the list). But it got me thinking about how I use my most frequently used digital device, my mobile phone. In order of a combination of most usage and importance, here’s what I use my phone for:
Stuff I don’t want on my phone:
What’s your most-used portable device and what do you use it for? Feel free to comment here or link to a post on your site.
This is odd…you need a mobile phone to sign up for Gmail (or get an invite from a current user). Well, I guess that’s not a whole lot more strange than needing an email address to sign up for an email account.
The Firefly is a cell phone for kids. It doesn’t have a keypad, but it’s got dedicated buttons for calling mom and dad and accessing the parentally controlled address book.
Barcode tattoos + mobile phones with cameras = business card (or, say, a list of your sexual preferences) on your arm.
Billboard is now tracking the top-selling ringtones. The list seems to track pretty close to the top singles list. Well, except for the Super Mario Bros theme song ringtone. (via rw)
How to use your cell phone anywhere in the world. Get a GSM phone, pay through the nose for roaming, or unlock your phone and use local pay-as-you-go SIM cards wherever you are.
Nokia.com comes up first in a Google search for “motorola mobile phones”. I suspect it’s because Motorola’s site isn’t optimized for Google (lots of Flash, little text) and a difference in usage: it’s “cell phones” in the US versus “mobile phones” in Europe (where Nokia is from).
The Apology Line. “The way it worked was that you could call and confess to anything that you wanted, and you’d be recorded, or you could call and listen to other people’s confessions.” Sounds sort of like a phone-based message board.
Get rid of cell phone reception dead spots by using cellular repeaters. They’re not cheap, but they work.
Walt Mossberg: wireless phone carriers exercise too much control over the technology their customers can use. “I once saw a sign at the offices of a big cellphone carrier that said, ‘It isn’t a phone until “Harry” says it’s a phone.’ But why should it be up to Harry (a real carrier employee whose name I have changed)? Why shouldn’t the market decide whether a device is a good phone?”
Indian man sends a record 182,689 text messages in a month. His cell phone bill was 1411 pages long.
Use Morse Texter on your cell phone to tap out text messages using morse code.
Two Morse coders beat two text messengers on Leno. That’s it…I want a phone with one big button with which to tap out messages.
How Sprint PCS loses customers. Sprint wanted Cam to sign a 2-year contract just to switch plans, even though he had been a customer of theirs for 7 years. He switched to T-Mobile and got a new phone in the process.
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