Technology

Motorola announced the Milestone 2 (demo video) a few days ago.

It has larger keys because they got rid of the right hand side cursor pad. This is the one thing that I miss in the plain vanilla Milestone.

Pocket Lint has an informative preview of it, with many pictures.

The Canadian mobile phone provider Rogers has many plans, but many choose the Pay As You Go, since it is suitable for their needs.

The bad part is that the plan does not include any data usage on Smartphones.

But there is a way to get this working on Android phones.

Not surprisingly, a KPMG worldwide survey has shown that Canadians are behind the curve when it comes to more sophisticated use of mobile phones.

My viewpoint: the lack of standards, carrier locking, and the high cost are the main hindrances, stifling competition and dragging the market.

The study is published here.

Via the CBC.

The mobile market in North America is badly fragmented, due to
different carriers using different technologies (CDMA vs. GSM), different frequencies for different companies (AWS, 2100), and locking of phones to the carrier.

This fragmentation strengthens the stranglehold of the carrier on the customer, who has a higher barrier switching from one company to the other.

Industry lobbyists still call for more balkanization of the market, by adding more frequencies, against standardization.

This is misinformation, fearmongering and industry lobbying at its worst.

The Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA) is alleging that carriers need more radio waves, because consumers are using more bandwidth and have more connected devices than ever before.

Android tablets are here! This is good, since they will provide competition for the Apple iPad.

Examples are Pandigital Novel and the Dell Streak.

Update: I have finally found an adequate solution, which is using wrtbwmon, a bandwidth monitoring tool for OpenWRT routers. You can download it from the previous link.

Original article follows ...

Anyone with more than a couple of computers on a LAN will sooner face the issue of increased bandwidth usage by someone on the LAN. Be this teenagers downloading via torrents, employees watching YouTube and Facebook videos, or other reasons.

Unlike WINDMobile which operates in the AWS spectrum, Mobilicity operates on the standard frequencies used elsewhere in the world for GSM.

It is nice to see the CBC go deep into the iPad and highlight Apple's tight control of the platform. Moreover, they also criticize the disparity between USA data plans and Canadian ones, which much less bandwidth for more cost.

Joining the heels of WIND Mobile, a new company, Mobilicity, will start operations in Spring 2010.