Telephones
Apple
- iPhone's browser is really just a customized version of Safari, with all the support for web standards, Ajax, and other niceties that come with it.
- iPhone sports a desktop-grade web browser based on Safari, which supports hooks into the iPhone's built-in applications (phone, address book, calendar, etc.).
- Safari on the iPhone does not support Flash, or other plug-in technologies like Java applets.
- Safari on the iPhone has no text selection or clipboard features.
- Safari on the iPhone provides no support for multi-touch events within web applications.
- In fact, Safari on the iPhone provides no way to respond to the user touching the screen at all—all you get is a
click event in response to single taps.
- iPhone does support JavaScript, but neither Flash nor Java is supported, so users will not be able to view sites that rely on those elements.
- Apple CEO Steve Jobs was quick to quash these theories in a widely-reported interview: "Java’s not worth building in [to the phone]. Nobody uses Java anymore. It’s this big, heavyweight ball and chain."
- 3.5-inch, 480-by-320-pixel resolution display
- Manual dialing is performed via the touch screen dial pad, which makes it practically impossible to dial a call simply by touch without looking. Since voice dialing is not supported, using the iPhone in a car where there are hands-free operation laws will be a dicey affair.
- Apple has made the iPhone a closed device, which means that individual users or the IT departments that support them will not be able to add their own applications to the device. This privilege is Apple's alone, and any future application additions will come solely through Apple's periodically released updates for the device.
- The iPhone's e-mail application works out of the box with many common Web mail services, including Yahoo Mail, .mac, AOL and Gmail. Other e-mail servers are supported only via POP3 or IMAP, leaving many Exchange implementations out in the cold. The e-mail application did not support e-mail domains hosted via Gmail and Google Apps.
- View PDFs, Word documents and Excel spreadsheets obtained via Safari or e-mail, but I you can not edit the documents at all.
- Unlike the iPod, the iPhone cannot even be used for data transport, as I could not mount the device as a USB drive. This limitation was compounded by the fact that the iPhone does not contain a file browsing application, so even if I could store documents locally, I could not access them from the iPhone anyway.
- the iPhone has some DNS resolution problems in certain circumstances. Specifically, the iPhone has trouble communicating with certain home routers that act as a local DNS proxy. To solve this problem, I needed to configure the iPhone with a static IP address and DNS server information, with the DNS setting pointing to my ISP's upstream DNS servers, rather than the local proxy. With this fix in place, Wi-Fi performed as expected.
- The 2.0-megapixel camera is fairly bare bones. There are no zoom or manually configurable lighting options, and the camera does not do video, only still photos.
Bell Canada
Rogers
- Help
- E-mail options:
- E-mail Messages
- You can set up ten (10) e-mail accounts (ISP or webmail)
- myname@rogers.blackberry.net
- Only one account allowed
- Messages do not go through a normal mail server. (through the BlackBerry server?)
- The messages go directly to the BlackBerry. You don't need to respond to an (annoying) text message telling you there is an e-mail (see below).
- 5149876543@pcs.rogers.com - Your phone's e-mail address is 4165551212@pcs.rogers.com
- Rogers Wireless: [10-digit phone number] @pcs.rogers.com - This is your phone's e-mail address.
- "The ‘email' thing doesn't really work with Rogers. They will just send you a text to your cellphone saying you have an email from (insert email address) and to reply with 'Read' to receive it… so it would cost the sendee a text message to read what you wrote."
- "You have to reply to the message with the word ‘READ'. So when the message comes up that says “You have mail from ______. Please reply with ‘Read' to read your message”, you have to hit reply, then type the word Read and hit send. Then the actual message that was sent to you will come through. This is what Rogers calls their Spam Filter which is bull crap but whatever. You can bypass this by paying Roger $5/month to add an Text-to-Email feature and this will just send you the message direct without having to type READ."
- Email to text for Rogers customers only works if the person is paying for the $5/month service: - Text Messaging - Rogers
- SMS/MMS = Text/Multimedia messaging
- Ordinary text (or multimedia) messaging
- Rogers.com - Text Message Centre - (Signup&Login - $0 - required) (= www.rogers.com/sms)
- Send a Text Message - Rogers
- Text Messaging & Extreme Text Messaging - Rogers
- email to sms and mms gateway services
- Rogers.com - 2-Way Text Message
- Unlike Bell.ca (which allows text messages to be sent directly using number@txt.bell.ca), there is no direct URL to send text messages to a Rogers mobile account.
- Solutions:
- Bell-iPhone to Rogers-BlackBerry: One (imperfect) solution is to set up just the telephone number as one of the contacts in the iPhone's Contacts list. You can't send the text message through the Contacts list. You must open up the "Messages" app, then click on the + sign, then select the telephone number that you set up in the Contacts list. Very awkward, but it works (without having to respond to a text message 'Read' in order to read the e-mail (that you wanted to send as a text message).
- Rogers-BlackBerry to Rogers-BlackBerry: use the PIN (instead of the telephone number) (Menu > Options > Status > PIN)
Pay $5/month to get the Email-to-Text service. (see above)
- PIN
- Each phone has a unique PIN.
- Messages do not go through a mail server. Messages go directly from one phone to the other phone. Very fast.
- Instant Messaging
- You can set up any account for instant messaging (including BlackBerry)
- Voice Messages Management
- Call your number from any phone. (or simply press and hold the number "1" key)
- Don't answer your cellphone.
- Press the # key, and then your password.
- Roaming with Rogers
- Travel with Your Phone - Rogers
- COVERAGE, RATES AND DEVICE COMPATIBILITY - Rogers
- Roger.com - US Voice Roaming - Rogers
- US Data Roaming - Rogers
- Using Data When Roaming - Rogers
- Long Distance and Local Calling Areas - Rogers
- Roaming in Copacabana - The Globe and Mail
- I knew Canadians pay the world's highest data rates, but I had no idea how much I was incurring while on the road.
So I went to a Rogers store and asked the sales clerk how I could have calculated the charges as they occurred. I expected there to be some website that could tell me what I routinely learn from taxi cabs: a real-time fare update. So where do I look?
I can't do it, I was told by the sales clerk. It's not possible.
Why not?
“Because Rogers tells all of its cellphone manufacturers to disable that feature in our cellphones,” he said in a manner that suggested I was the last person to learn this. Perhaps I was.
And why does Rogers do that?
That's when he dropped the one-word bomb: “Revenue.”
Talk about honesty.
So Rogers won't keep a running tally of my roaming data charges because it consciously made a decision not to tell me
- Rogers Deliberately Disables Notifications Of Roaming Charges | Techdirt
- Apparently, Rogers has quite a reputation -- and it appears to be well deserved. Rob Hyndman points us to a story about the ridiculous roaming charges for those who use a Rogers device outside of Canada. Ridiculously high roaming charges are nothing new, of course. They happen to everyone, unfortunately. What's stunning, though, is that the reporter gets a guy at Rogers to admit that the company demands that all of the mobile devices it offers disable any feature that lets you see how much you've racked up in roaming charges. In other words, they know they're ripping you off -- and they want to make sure you don't realize by how much until it's too late.
Roaming / Traveling
- Roam Mobility - Talk, Text and Data for Canadians Roaming in the US - Only $3.22/day? (Vancouver, BC)
- Public Mobile - Unlimited talk, text and data at affordable prices. Only $0.15/min roaming charge.
- Beat wireless roaming charges when abroad – USATODAY.com - 2011-10-17
- Truphone
- XCom Global
- Tep Wireless
- Line2
- Boingo wireless app
- A more complicated option is to get rid of your phone's SIM card and get a local one for a foreign country. This can be done for $5 to $20 in the country or online from National Geographic's CellularAbroad.com or Telestial.com.
- "The best strategy is to get a prepaid SIM card for the country you're traveling to," says Ritterhern, who unlocks his phone before he lands in another country and then changes SIM cards on arrival.
- because the majority of phone calls are to local people in that country, the local SIMs are cost-effective
- Skype Unlimited World Plan
- Many business travelers say they turn off the roaming function of their mobile devices when they are abroad.
- The 411 On International Travel and Smart Phones
- Use your existing phone (with roaming rates)
- Rent an international SIM Card
- Rent a phone
- Takeaways = Buy a phone
- Freephone2phone - Free phone to phone long distance and international calls up to 10 minutes from US mobile phones and landlines - Supported by advertising
- Roaming with Rogers
- SIM card is required if you want to use your everyday cellphone.
- You can arrive at your destination and rent just a SIM card that will make all your calls local at your destination.
- Bell Canada does not offer any cellphones with a SIM card.
- Brightroam - (Toronto, ON)
- Roadpost.com
- Canada Direct
- When you make a call with Canada Direct, you will be billed in Canadian dollars at the Canadian international long distance rate, not the rate that applies within the country you are calling from. To call with the Canada Direct service, all you need is a calling card from a Canadian company (e.g. Bell Canada).
- Canada Direct- bell.ca - (800) 561-8868 - make calls from overseas but pay Canadian international long distance rates instead of foreign rates
- International Cell Phones, Rent a Cellular phone for International use - World Cellular Rentals
- CDN $35 for first week, then $8/week or $50/month
- $0.59/minute anytime anywhere in North America
- 9203 St-Laurent 514-327-0216 877-626-0216 (Montreal) (North of the Met) - call first
- They deliver
- TripTel - Rent a GSM or CDMA phone by the day or week from the Los Angeles, or Washington D.C. Dulles International Airports, or in downtown San Francisco!
- US$15/week + US$0.95/minute
- 877-847-7835 877-TRI-PTEL 415-474-3330 310-645-3500
- Calculators
VoIP = Voice over Internet protocol
514-270-0000