cellular

U.S. Cellular has just announced the LG Wine, a simple mid-tier handset with features like a 1.3-megapixel camera, Bluetooth, a one-touch speakerphone, and voice command. Appropriately, it's available in red and white versions.

You can get it for $179.95 without a contract or $29.95 after a two-year agreement and a mail-in rebate of $50.

Beefed-up cell phone networks in Washington, D.C., got their first real test over the holiday weekend--with reports of scattered outages affecting people who attended the pre-inauguration concert at the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday.

According to a story in The Washington Post, Sunday's concert-goers "sent 10 times the volume of wireless calls, text messages, pictures and videos as on the busiest hour of a typical day." Some estimates put the crowd at 400,000.

"The vast majority of calls went through on the first try," Verizon Wireless spokesman John Johnson told the Post. "We'… Read more

When I head to Washington, D.C., this weekend for the 44th president's inauguration, there's one major question burning in my mind: Will my cell phone work?

I am one of the 240,000 people with free tickets attending President-elect Barack Obama's swearing-in ceremony on the steps of the U.S. Capitol next week. And like the other 2 million or so people descending upon Washington, D.C., this weekend for the festivities, I am counting on my cell phone to not only keep me informed of important traffic alerts and happenings around the nation's capital … Read more

Pardon us for not telling you about this last week, but we were pretty busy with all the cell phone news at CES. On Friday, however, Samsung announced that its new TwoStep was coming to U.S. Cellular.

Why the company didn't break the news in Las Vegas, we don't know. Indeed, Samsung's cell phone division had a very quiet week at the show.

Also known as the SCH-r470, the TwoStep offers a slim flip phone design in orange, red, and purple. On the front face you'll find a monochrome display, music controls, and stereo speakers. … Read more

During its touch-screen phone marathon this autumn, Samsung left almost no carrier untouched. And that includes both U.S. Cellular and Alltel. Instead of the Behold, the Omnia, or the Eternity, both carriers opted for the Samsung Delve instead.

From the outside, both the Alltel Delve and the U.S. Cellular Delve look a lot like their touch-screen counterparts. They show some unique physical aspects, but front and center on both devices is an expansive touch screen with a vibrant resolution and a responsive TouchWiz interface.

Both handsets offer solid mid-range feature sets that center on multimedia. You'll find … Read more

A few years ago, I bought a fancy home phone so I could set it to forward calls to my cell. Not long after, I found a better and cheaper solution by ditching the landline completely.

I am not alone. According to Nielsen, 17 percent of U.S. households--some 20 million homes--are without a wired telephone, instead relying solely on mobile phones.

This brings up a question of what we should do with that fancy home phone. I do miss the comfort of using the big handset rather than fumbling on the tiny, onscreen keyboard of my iPhone.

Xtreme Technology … Read more

Wireless operators like AT&T and Verizon have an ingenious way to improve service to the roughly 50 percent of all subscribers who complain of poor reception at home:

Buy your own cellular tower.

For $100 and a monthly service charge, U.S. wireless carriers will provide customers with a "femtocell," a miniature cell-phone tower for the home. It's a bit galling that customers should have to pay even more to get reasonable cellular service, but it's looking like a sure bet that the program will take off, as consumers (like myself) are desperate to … Read more

(Credit: Somebody Else's Phone)

If you found somebody else's phone, would you look through it? That's a rhetorical question. Of course! Your phone is your life, at least if you're under 25, and there's nothing more interesting than the "lives of others."

The advertising firm Wieden + Kennedy London translated the idea of "cellular oversharing" into a much gushed-about ad campaign for Nokia. "Somebody Else's Phone" depicts the lives of three twentysomethings through their text messages, multimedia messaging service, and pictures, and it essentially creates a new story format: … Read more

VeriSign on Tuesday announced that it has sold its minority stake in mobile-entertainment joint venture Jamba to partner News Corp. for approximately $200 million.

The sale bumps News Corp.' unit Fox Mobile Entertainment's share of Jamba from a 51 percent stake to full ownership. And it enables VeriSign to focus on its core Internet infrastructure business, according to Jim Bidzos, the company's interim CEO. VeriSign runs the master database for such domains as .com and .net.

The joint venture was announced two years ago, when Rupert Murdoch's media company acquired a controlling stake in VeriSign's mobile-ringtone … Read more