Archive for the ‘Cell Phones’ Category
Teen takes a bite out of Apple
A Teen heading off to college this fall found a way to make the Apple iPhone work with another wireless company.
Teen to Apple: Never say never
Hackers got credit for another victory Friday, as news spread that a New Jersey teenager broke into his iPhone and reconfigured it so the machine could make calls via a wireless carrier other than AT&T.
The iPhone, available since late June, is supposed to work only with AT&T, which has a five-year exclusive contract. But limiting the touchscreen phone to a single carrier immediately was seen by many tech-savvy tinkerers as an invitation to assert their control over the device.
Hw r u 2 day?
The New York Times reports that text messaging is our new shorthand. For example, when I write “brb” in my instant messenger it means–”be right back.” Or if I type text message using my cell phone, which I hate doing, I always substitute “u” for “you.” or “r” for “are.” OR for laughing I automatically use “lol.” It’s become second nature for me to text message using shorthand.
The Pleasures of the Text
By CHARLES McGRATH
As with any language, efficiency isn’t everything. There’s also the issue of style. Among inventive users, and younger ones especially, text-messaging has taken on many of the characteristics of hip-hop, with so much of which it conveniently overlaps - in the substitution of “z” for “s,” for example, “a,” for “er” and “d” for “th.” Like hip-hop, text-messaging is what the scholars call “performative”; it’s writing that aspires to the condition of speech. And sometimes when it makes abundant use of emoticons, it strives not for clarity so much as a kind of rebus-like cleverness, in which showing off is part of the point. A text-message version of “Paradise Lost” - or of the prologue, anyway - that tries for a little more shnizzle might go like this: “Sing hvnly mewz dat on d :X mtntp inspyrd dat shephrd hu 1st tot d chozn seed in d begnin hw d hvn n erth @{rcub};– outa chaos.”
Cell phone movie contest
Cell phone movie contest! Could you make a blockbuster in just 30 seconds?
College Launches Cell Phone Film Contest
ITHACA, N.Y. - An Ithaca College dean is encouraging students to instead think small — and she’s offering a $5,000 prize to do it. The school has invited high school and college students across America to submit a 30-second movie shot entirely with a cell phone.
It may come off like a gimmick, but Dean Dianne Lynch has no doubts about the contest’s academic value.
In today’s media marketplace — where cell phones can take pictures, play music and games and connect to Web sites — it’s all about thinking small and mobile.
Dial up Bono
Concerts are now becoming interactive! I think this is really cool how U2 communicated with each and every person at a concert.
Acts, audience connect via text messaging
SAN FRANCISCO (Billboard) - About an hour into a typical show on U2’s Vertigo tour, Bono tells the crowd to hold up their mobile phones, in what has become the modern-day equivalent of flicking on a lighter. Instantly, thousands of blue-tinted screens illuminate the darkness as he marvels at the spectacle.
“Is that a 21st-century moment or what?” Bono asks.
Soon the video screen atop the stage flashes a five-digit number above the word “UNITE.”
“Time to do a magic trick,” he says. “These little devices — these cell phones — they can do all sorts of things.”
Then the band launches into the song “One,” and Bono encourages the audience to use their phones to send a text message (also known as an SMS) to the one.org Web site, a sort of digital petition voicing support for poverty relief in Africa. Later, during the encore, the names of all who did so are scrolled on the same screen, and each receive a message of thanks from Bono on their phones.
