Sprint’s M2M Focus A Hit With Developers and Business

I spent the last few days at Sprint’s Open Solutions Conference and came away impressed with the way the wireless operator is working with developers and entrepreneurs who are building machine-to-machine (M2M) services on top of the Sprint network. M2M refers to automated data communication between devices. M2M devices typically aren’t phones.  Well know examples include the connected Kindle and “smart” power meters, but there are hundreds of other ways M2M is being used to in business, technology and for fun hacks. I spoke … Continue reading

Sprint Developer Conference – M2M and Meego

I’m at Sprint’s Developer Conference in Santa Clara today. I’m surprised at how large it is. There are 1500 registered attendees and at least half of the (typically morning adverse developers) showed up for the 9:30 AM opening keynote. Sprint is only the third largest US operator, serving 50 million customers or about 17% of total US mobile users and around 1% of the world’s phones. So why did 1500 mobile developers show up for a relatively minor operator’s event, … Continue reading

CTIA Day One Wrapup

Today was the first full day of CTIA.  I didn’t expect a lot of big announcements but I was wrong, there was actually a lot of news.  First up, Verzion announced its LGE rollout plans which are quite aggressive.  They plan to cover a third of the US population by year end with service lighting up in 38 cities and 60 airports.  PreCentral has the details including a list of the lucky cities and airports.  Verizon president and COO Lowell … Continue reading

Updated: The Good and the Bad – New Prepaid Data Options From Sprint, T-Mobile

Updated 16-May-2010; new Virgin Mobile plans can be used with any Virgin Mobile US handset. One thing that’s been holding back the adoption of  mobile web services in the US is the lack of affordable data,  or in some cases,  any data at all on prepaid mobile plans.  It looks like that is about to change with both T-Mobile and Sprint expected to roll out new data options for prepaid users this month. Sprint’s new offer looks pretty good.  Starting … Continue reading

Find Your Palm Pre With Sprint’s Mobile Store Locator

If you are a customer, or prospective customer of U.S. CDMA operator, Sprint or just want to play with the Sprint exclusive Palm Pre, you might find this mobile site useful. It lets you quickly locate company owned and independent stores selling Sprint phones and service. A free-form search box accepts a zip-code, street address or city and state. Results include store hours, available services, click to call phone number and a link to text based turn by turn driving … Continue reading

No More Openwave SDKs?

I was trying to help a mobile web developer track down a problem that was keeping his pages from displaying properly on phones with Openwave browsers, which are still widely used on feature phones from U.S. operators.  I was going to suggest that he grab the Client SDK, which is really just a browser simulator, off the Openwave developer site. When I went there, I couldn’t find it, just an message that Openwave had sold their browser business to Purple … Continue reading

Opting Out of Transcoding

Remember the furor that erupted on the web and the wmlprogramming Yahoo group over transcoders? Specifically, the ones that Vodafone UK and other carriers implemented with the goal of making non-mobile web pages more usable on mobile handsets? The issue was that these services had the (hopefully unintended) consequence of degrading or completely breaking numerous mobile web sites and services. Ring tone and game downloads no longer worked, some mobile web sites didn’t load or displayed malformed content. Sites that … Continue reading