Mobile Choice Blog

Spongebob Squarepants: the phone!

Don't pretend you don't love this too. Forget boring old Nokias or dated Sony Ericssons* - we've seen the future, and it looks like a certain yella fella called Spongebob. Admittedly, this is a corded landline phone and not a mobile, but it doesn't take much imagination to see the idea being translated into the mobile space.

So, it's a flip phone modelled on Spongebob Squarepants, that stands proudly when you're not gabbing away on it. Worth $19.97 of anyone's money, we're sure you'll agree.

(via Nerd Approved)

*we don't really think Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones are boring, obviously. But if they could be shaped a bit more like cartoon characters, it'd be nice.

The future of mobile games is... gardening?

Forget your real-life allotment or vegetable patch. The future is virtual gardening on your phone. Well, that's the message from a competition organised by EA Mobile and Channel 4, which asked people to pitch their cool mobile game ideas to a panel of experts.

The winner was an idea called 'Let It Grow' by Tom Dowding, which involves nurturing a plant until it becomes a beautiful flower, then sharing it with your friends. The phone's camera is involved somewhere along the way too. He's won £2,500 and a work placement at EA for winning, although there's no guarantee that it will actually be turned into a game.

Other entries also made use of mobile phone features, including the camera but also GPS and connectivity. It seems the next generation of mobile game designers aren't content to just rehash Tetris and Pac-Man. Good work them!

(via Pocket Gamer)

Get your burning sports questions answered by... Terry?

You've been able to text questions and receive replies from services like AQA and Texperts for a while now, but radio station TalkSPORT has just launched its own service called 'Ask Terry', powered by mobile firm ROK.

It works the same way as its rivals, with you texting Terry plus your question to 81089, and getting an answer (usually) within ten minutes. It costs a quid, and is designed to settle those endless pub arguments you get while watching football with mates. Well, apart from the ones about whose round it is, anyway.

ROK promises questions will be answered with a dash of humour. We tried asking 'Why don't footballers wear tiny tight shorts like they did in the 80s any more?' and got this reply back: "Footballers have had to extend their shorts due only to fashion. Long gone are the tight shorts and speedos that we saw in the 70s. I still wear mine though."

Fancy a spot of hot smexting action?

Ever had smext on the beach? I wanna smext you up. Let's get some smextual healing. Feel free to insert your own songs with 'sex' changed to 'smext'. It's good fun.

Smexting is a new term that's been coined to describe the act of sending a text while having a crafty ciggie outside your office or the pub. It's apparently quite common since the smoking ban came in, presumably because people feel a bit awkward puffing away alone on the street (if they're in company, it's surely rude to smext at all).

We'd like a go at this mobile-related word-invention. How about plexting, which is what you do when you desperately try to squeeze off a quick text before getting on a plane - for example to a loved one? Okay, maybe we're not cut out for this dictionary lark after all...

(via MobHappy)

When is an unlimited iPhone data contract not, er, unlimited?

Getting excited about the imminent iPhone launch yet? There's one issue to watch out for though. Engadget Mobile has been digging into the unlimited data tariffs being offered in Europe by O2 (UK), T-Mobile (Germany) and Orange (France), and it seems they're not that unlimited.

In the UK, O2 has an unofficial fair-usage policy that could involve you being charged extra if you access more than 200MB of data in a month. In Germany, if you exceed your limit, it's reported that T-Mobile will cut the speed at which you browse!

We wonder how many iPhone users will keep close tabs on how much data they've used in a month though: there could be some nasty surprises in store for particularly heavy users, even though the operators say their limits have been set to ensure the vast majority of iPhone owners don't have a problem.

(via Engadget Mobile)

Nokia teams up with Reuters for mobile journalism

We've heard a lot about 'citizen journalism' in the last year, which generally involves members of the public shooting photos and/or video on their cameraphones, then sending them into newspapers or TV broadcasters. It's even been claimed the phenomenon could put proper journalists out of a job. Nokia and Reuters have other ideas, though.

They've launched a new project called 'Reuters Mobile Journalism' (although we prefer the way the website address shortens that to Reuters MoJo). It's basically an application preloaded on Nokia N95 handsets, allowing Reuters hacks to file stories from events without the need for a laptop. They've already been testing it out at events like New York Fashion Week and the Edinburgh Film Festival.

It's easy to see why putting cameraphones into the hands of journalists will result in some interesting stuff - more photo and video-related than textual. But this isn't new - savvier websites have been getting their journalists to moblog for a while now, using existing technologies and services. Still, it'll be interesting to see how the relationship between Nokia and Reuters develops - we wonder how many journalists would put up with filing content from a device with the N95's famously low battery life...

Reuters Mobile Journalism website

Facebook sued for sending saucy texts

Well, we assume they were saucy, anyway. An Indiana woman is sueing the social network for sending her unsolicited texts containing "explicit language and unsettling remarks", after her mobile operator gave her a 'recycled' mobile number, which had previously belonged to someone who'd signed up for Facebook alerts.

Even worse, she says she was charged 10 cents per message she received, and couldn't block them without blocking text messages that she DID want to receive. It'll be an interesting court case: and certainly shows one of the pitfalls of the US operators' policy of recycling numbers fairly quickly. Earlier this year, someone was given Paris Hilton's old number, and was promptly deluged with calls and texts from not-so-well wishers.

Anyway, we want to know what the unsettling and explicit remarks were. Don't pretend you don't too.

(via MocoNews)

Orange offers Bebo Mobile for £3 a month

Have you got a Bebo profile? If not, your children probably have: the social network is extremely popular with younger internet users here in the UK. Earlier this year, Bebo announced plans to go mobile in partnership with Orange, and that partnership has just been extended with a new subscription deal.

For £3 a month, Orange customers can sign up to Bebo Extra, which gives them unlimited access to Bebo's mobile internet site without paying any data charges. They'll be able to send comments via SMS, receive notifications back in return, and also send Bebo Mails by text.

It sounds like a good deal, although we wonder if this sort of thing will be free in the not-too-distant future, once users are on unlimited data contracts, and the social networks have advertising on their mobile sites. MySpace is working with Vodafone and O2, while Facebook has an operator-neutral WAP site, so mobile social networking is clearly on the up.

Bebo website

Need new glasses? Should have gone to Japan with your mobile phone...

Wow. If we needed glasses (and we're sure the day isn't far off, judging by the way we're squinting at the screen as we type this), we'd go to Japan to get them.

Why? So we could use the innovative Mobile Fitting service that's being tested in the Megane Top spectacles chain. It involves taking a photo of yourself, then combining it with glasses downloaded from the store's mobile site.

Admittedly, it's not as good as, ahem, actually trying the real glasses on. But it presumably means you can go home and try on as many pairs as you like, without any assistants getting pushy. Specsavers, launch this soon!

(via Picturephoning)

Privacy fears over Google's plans for Jaiku

Ever used Jaiku? It's a microblogging service similar to Twitter, except with more mobile features. It was recently bought by Google, but the latter's plans for its new acquisition have raised privacy fears over how much information people give up when using services like Jaiku, and what Google plans to do with it.

Why? This New York Times article explains some of the reasons. The idea of microblogging is you write about what you're doing, who you're doing it with, where you're doing it, and all the other minutae of your daily life. Exactly the sort of information that advertisers would kill for, in other words. And Google makes a lot of money from contextual advertising...

Jaiku's founders say they're alive to the implications, and will ensure users have plenty of privacy settings to retain control of how their data is used. But as these kinds of services take off, it'll be interesting to see how the balance evolves between privacy and profit.

(via New York Times)