» Wireless

Sony and Spanish based WiFi provider FON have joined forces to provide free WiFi access for PSP owners in Japan. Imagine surfing the net, watching streaming music and movies on the go! But in Japan only, which is somewhat expected since Japan has a history of keeping the goodies to themselves. For those lucky enough to be in Japan and own a PSP, they will also be able to download custom Dissidia: Final Fantasy themes which the game itself will be released in December. I wouldn’t have heard of a new Final Fantasy release if it wasn’t for this WiFi deal.

It would be great if this offer became available to us in North America, but chances are pretty slim in my opinion, at least it won’t be free. One reason is that Japan is much smaller than say, Canada, so setting up those hot spots is much easier and less costly. They are already setup in Japan which made the setup even easier. Its just a matter of integrating with each other’s system.

Although we will most likely not get this free WiFi access anytime soon. It is still good news to those living in Japan, again the Japanese always gets the goodies. Think I have one more reason to go to Japan since I have a Japanese version PSP.

Opera releases first public version of Opera Mobile 9.5 beta. First impression was it looks like a real broswer compare to the previous Opera browswer with its improved user interface. Its not just a simple facelift but it also contains new features such as panning and zooming to a particular section of a webpage, saving and/or mmsing contents (images, or the pages themselves) with a click.

Hopefully Opera will fix the few issues such as limited Flash support, no multilingual support, text wrapping etc.

Download it here

Original source from: pcworld.com

What are these wireless phone companies thinking?

In Canada, Telus and Bell will start charging customers without a text message plan incoming sms text messages starting August 24th and August 8th respectively while customers with the plan are unaffected. Surprisingly, Rogers hasn’t made that change but it has its own dilema right now with the iPhone’s data plan.

As of now, you can only purchase an iPhone at Rogers or Fido stores and it comes with a 3 year plan. The cheapest data plan is $60CAD + tax for 150 minutes of weekday talk time and 400 megabytes of data. Therefore, you are tied up with paying over $800CAD a year, 3 years just for the plan itself, that is over $2400CAD PLUS the cost of the phone itself! Even though its cheaper than the BlackBerry plan, it is still more expensive than what people are paying or going to pay in the US.

Here are the plans they offer for the iPhone:
http://www.rogers.com/web/content/wirelessproducts/iphone_voice_data_packages

To me, these wireless companies are just a group of vampires sucking as much blood (money) out of us customers aspossible. Unless there is some sort of government regulation or intervention which I doubt, as long as they are the only major wireless providers, we are stuck with this monopoly. Hopefully Rogers will lower the price for the plans when there are less customers buying the iPhone and signing up for them than expected. It is an opportunity for Rogers to stand out from other providers like Telus and Bell if it does, but what I see will happen soon is that it will start charging for incoming sms text messages as well if this goes through for Telus and Bell.

I wonder what other excuses can they come up with later. Maybe something like:
“We will start charging a monthly fee for holding onto your phone number”

Source from TheStar.com:
http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/456795

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