There was a time when mobile phones were the size of a small suitcase and they were firmly tethered to automobiles. These days they're small enough to easily lose track of. If you've ever left your phone in your jacket or pants pocket, dropped it under the couch, or just pulled your hair out trying to figure out where the thing is, you've probably realized that the easiest way to locate a phone (if it's in you're house) is to dial your own number using another phone.

If you don't happen to have a second phone handy, Where's My Cell Phone can help. The web site is covered with annoying ads, but it provides one marginally useful service. If you need to make your phone ring, all you have to do is enter your number and hit the "Make it Ring" button. Your phone should start ringing a few seconds later.

Once you place a call you have to wait a few minutes before making another, so make sure to spend the 30 seconds or so that you have while your phone rings wisely.

[via TechnoSpot]

So I don't know if you've heard, but apparently there's this company named Google. And apparently they've developed some sort of a mobile phone operating system that features tight integration with online services like Gmail, YouTube, and Google Talk. And you can't get one just yet, so we decided to talk to someone who did.

Kevin Tofel of jkOnTheRun has been testing a T-Mobile G1 for the last few days. When it hits the shelves next week, the G1 will be the first device on the market based on the Google Android platform. Tofel says there's a lot to like about the G1, but there are still a few things that annoy him.

And most importantly, the platform will only succeed if Google can do a good job of attracting third party developers. The built in applications work very well, but there are still too many things missing. For example, while you can watch YouTube movies using the YouTube player, there's no video play for watching downloaded movies or videos from other web sites. Fortunately there's already a third party movie player available in the Android Marketplace. But that's one of only a handful of third party apps currently available.

You can see the phone in action and hear more of Kevin's thoughts by clicking the video above. If you're too busy to sit through a ten minute video, you can read some of the highlights after the jump.

Microsoft has launched a new beta of an application for synchronizing data from cellphones with your computer. There are at least two things which set the new Phone Data Manager apart from earlier synchronization applications like ActiveSync and Windows Mobile Device Manager:

1. Phone Data Manager Beta works with non-Windows Mobile devices. There's a fairly lengthy list of supported devices including a number of Sony ericsson, Nokia, and Motorola devices.
2. The new utility syncs your data with Windows Live Services. That means your contacts, music, videos, and photos will be accessible online from any computer with a web browser.

You can sync your phone by connecting it to your Windows XP or Vista computer via a Bluetooth or USB connection.

[via Pocket PC Thoughts]

Microsoft has announced plans to buy MobiComp, a Portuguese software company that develops applications for storing cellphone data online.

MobiComp's products allow you to perform over the air backups of your contacts, calendar, and other mobile data. The company's MobileKeeper Sharing & Communities software also lets you share and download content from social networks including Flickr and Hi5.

The acquisition is described as Microsoft's largest investment in Portugal. Nobody's saying exactly what Microsoft is planning to do with MobiComp's technology, but we'd say it's a safe bet that you could eventually see some sort of data backup/synchronization software for Windows Mobile devices, perhaps as part of the Windows Live suite of web-based services.

[via Electronista]

SkypeSync is a new service you can use to get all those numbers from your phone into your Skype list, so you can call them with SkypeOut, the Skype feature that lets you call regular phone numbers. It's built using the SyncML standard, which is supported by most recent phones, so the odds are pretty good that it'll work for your cell.

Here's how to use it: point your phone's browser at zyb.com, a free synchronization server recently acquired by Vodafone, and store your contacts there. Download and open SkypeSync (it's only available for Windows right now) and use its Synchronization Wizard to import your contacts from Zyb to Skype. Voila! You now have all your phone numbers ready for use with SkypeOut.

Obviously, the service is somewhat limited right now, since it only works with Zyb, but there are plans to support other synchronization servers soon. Right now, this looks like a decent solution if you're a big SkypeOut user, and don't want to face the prospect of manually entering every number you want to call on Skype.

Now that Firefox 3 has finally shipped, the developers at Mozilla are starting to make time for other projects. Don't get us wrong, those busy little bees are already working on Firefox 3.1, but they're also working on something entirely new: a mobile web browser.

The mobile version of Firefox, (currently codenamed Fennec -- a final name hasn't been picked yet), will use the same rendering engine as Firefox 3. In other words, any web page you can view with the desktop browser will be usable on a mobile device. That includes AJAX-heavy web applications. But nobody's pretending that you can just run Firefox 3 on a cellphone without making any changes. After all, mobile devices have small screens, slow processors, low amounts of memory, and often rely on relatively slow internet connections.

Last week we showed you a first look at a concept interface that might make its way into the final product. But it might not. So we decided to speak with Jay Sullivan, VP of Mobile for Mozilla. He gave us a run down of what's in store for Fennec, including what types of devices will be supported and when you'll be able to try the browser out for yourself.

While Google may not be ready to release its Android mobile operating system on the world yet, the company did demonstrate the latest version of its upcoming cellphone OS today.

Overall, Android has an iPhone-like look and feel. The home screen has a program launcher that looks remarkably similar to Apple's. But there are a few things that set it apart. First, the status bar that shows up at the top of every page is far more interactive. You can click and drag any item on the status bar from any program to pull down a menu that will show you missed calls, unread emails, or other information.

You can also easily customize the shortcuts on your home screen as well as the look and location of widgets like a clock. And while you can zoom in and out of web pages using the mobile browser much the same way you can with Safari for the iPhone or Opera Mini for pretty much every other phone, you can also double click on the screen to open a magnifying glass-type box that lets you zoom in on just portions of a web page.

In addition to the video above, the folks at Android Community shot a few videos demonstrating Google Maps, Street View, and Pac-Man running on a prototype Android device.

Over the past few days there has been increasing furor over a claim made by some "electro-sensitive" folks in Santa Fe that wifi in public buildings violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. Because these people are electro-sensitive (and this sensitivity can be to all sorts of electromagnetic fields, in things like cell phones, or microwaves, or, we'd imagine, things like transformer stations and circuit boxes), they can't enter public buildings due to the horrible health effects they experience. These health effects range from chest pains, to leg numbness, to shortness of breath, and headaches.

Is wifi dangerous? Are cell phones dangerous? There is some debate about various cancers that may or may not result from having a cell phone pasted to your ear and your laptop constantly humming on your lap, but most cancers don't immediately cause things like, oh, chest pain, leg numbness, or shortness of breath. The verdict is still out on long term effects at this point anyway, and we take the stance that something is eventually going to kill us. Life is too short to live in constant fear, or without an internet connection.

Panic attacks cause the above symptoms. Generalized anxiety does as well. An "allergic" reaction to wifi? Eh.

We look at it this way. Right now, we're sitting in a residential area about eight miles outside of a major city. Turning on our wireless connection and sniffing around reveals eleven wifi networks in the area. Eleven that we could in theory connect with successfully, if they are unsecured. Eleven that are not blocked by things like walls, or doors, or tinfoil hats. We are not in a business district in a city.

Can you imagine the rogue wifi signals that are shooting around Santa Fe? Do the electro-sensitive people believe that wifi respects physical boundaries, and that walking by a coffee shop or public building with wifi is different than walking into one? If so, would they walk by a coffee shop with wifi while the door was open? Would the wireless, ahem, rush out the open door? Is there any place in the US where you can be in a city, or moderately populated town, and not be in range of some wireless signal?

A little over a month after releasing a public beta of Opera Mini 4.1, the Opera team has pushed out the final version of its latest cellphone browser. The newest build is reportedly 50% faster than opera mini 4.0. It also has a handful of new features including the ability to save web paes fr offline viewing, the ability to upload and download images from within the browser, and improved page and web search features.

The final build looks a lot like the public beta, but the developers have fixed a bunch of bugs and made some changes to the page saving and address auto-complete features.

Opera Mini 4.1 is available as a free download for dozens of different cellphone models.

If you consider taking out a second mortgage on your home every month when the cellphone bill arrives, you might want to check out BillShrink. This web-based service lets you compare cellphone plans in the most useful ways possible. It shows you which plans can save you money and which companies provided the most reliable coverage in your neighborhood.

The toolbar at the top of the page lets you describe how much you're currently paying for service and then you can drag a few sliders around to show the number of lines, anytime minutes, text messages, and data minutes you need. BillShrink will then try to find a plan that matches your criteria for less than you're currently paying. If there's one that meets your needs and has a strong signal in your area, it will show up at the top of the list. If there's one with a weak signal in your area, it will move down the list a bit.

You can click on any plan to see additional details or to see comparable plans from other wireless carriers. And you can sign up for service, at which point BillShrink redirects you to the carrier's web site. The only problem we see with this service is that it doesn't account for local fees and taxes. So if you normally pay $95 per month for your phone service, you might accidentally input that value and see a whole bunch of bargains before realizing that your actual plan is closer to $75 while the rest is fees that would apply no matter which carrier you use. Not that we made this mistake the first time we checked out BillShrink. Nope. No siree.

[via MakeUseOf]

Like the idea of having access to email, traffic, weather, and news information on the go, but don't feel like spending the extra money on a data plan for your cellphone? 800PBX launched a new service that lets anyone access web content on their cellphone without a web browser or a data plan.

It's called 800 Genie, and here's how it works. You call a phone number on your cellphone and 800 Genie will use screen reading technology to read you the content of web pages and ask you for voice prompts to perform additional options. For example if you want to check your email, 800 Genie can read you a list of new messages and ask if you'd like to hear or reply to a message.

The service looks promising. But we're a little turned off at the beta website. First of all, there's a nice big button asking users to sign up for the free service. But when you click on the signup button you're asked for a invitation code. There's not even a box for requesting invitations. And there's also a nice big message at the bottom of the screen asking visitors to call 877-MY-800GENIE for more information. So we dutifully placed a call only to receive a message letting us know that the service is in private beta and therefore inaccessible.

We figured we'd save you the pain of repeating the experiment, so have a listen for yourself. Fortunately we also found a demo of the service and we've tacked that on as well.


As you can hear the process of checking your email over the phone in this fashion can be rather tedious. But if you're going to be away from your computer for a long time but can't stand to be without email access, 800 Genie does look promising. If you ever get a chance to sign up.

1. Full access to YouTube in Windows Mobile: Everyone's got a solution for playing YouTube Mobile videos on a Windows Mobile phone, but it seems no one's giving Windows Mobile users a way to access YouTube.com's full, flash video library. Oh wait, there is a solution. It only requires users to install a specific version of TCPMP and the Flash Video Bundle, an add-on to TCPMP to give it the ability to play flash video. Use Pocket IE to navigate to YouTube (a few other flash video sites are also supported). Clicking on a video will open TCPMP to play it. Easy, right?

You could also install Orb on your PC and use the Orb mobile client to find YouTube videos on the go, but that solution requires you to leave your home PC on all the time.

At first, it sounds like a texting nightmare from hell, but RSS via SMS has a place in our world through Web-Alerts, a small web experiment that may get lost in the vast internet desert that is web 2.0 failures. The service sends you a text message for every update to a chosen site's RSS feed.

The service is simple and easy to use. When you first visit the site, it'll ask your to enter a web address. If it finds an RSS feed for your chosen site, it'll ask you to enter your cell phone number. Should any updates happen to your chosen feed, a preview of the update will be forwarded to your phone. Removing a subscription is easy enough. "Just open the link in your text message and choose 'My Alerts' to remove any alert you are subscribed to." Furthermore, you can enter a keyword with your phone number so that you'll only be forwarded updates via SMS when they contain the keyword.

This could be extremely useful for someone closely watching a specific topic such as a stock broker. It could also become extremely annoying if you find yourself answering your phone every ten minutes to stop the latest SMS from incessantly vibrating in your pocket. Our advice: use wisely.

[via The Boy Genius]

As promised, Google released the SDK for the Android mobile phone platform today. There's no actual phones running Android on the market yet, but the early release of the SDK means that as soon as you get your hands on an Android phone, there's a good chance you'll be able to slap some third party applications on there without having to wait for hackers to unlock anything.

In fact, Google is encouraging third party development by giving away $10 million in awards to individuals and companies that come up with useful applications for the new mobile platform.

Of course, cellphones rely on hardware and not just software to make your life easier. But it looks like Android supports a wide array of hardware, including touchscreen devices, VGA screens, and 3G wireless connections. There's also support for 3D accelerated graphics, and MPEG-4, h.264, AAC, and MP3 audio and video files.

Apple has the iPhone, Microsoft has Windows Mobile, and Google has, well, whatever the new gPhone operating system is going to be called. Computer software companies can't seem to get enough of the mobile phone market. Now it looks like Skype has plans to partner with 3 Mobile to create a Skype branded cellphone.

3 Mobile is a wireless carrier covering Europe, Asia, and Australia, so don't expect to get your hands on a Skype cellphone in the US anytime soon. But if the phone proves popular overseas, who knows what could happen in the US market.

The phone will reportedly work just like a regular cellphone -- until you press the big button that launches the Skype application. Then you'll be able to call any other Skype user for free, whether that person is using Skype on a computer or phone. Because the calls are being routed over the internet, there's no reason to charge you for anything but data minutes (it's not clear what kind of data plans will be offered with the phone).

Skype will charge its usual rates for SkypeOut calls if you're calling anyone who is not using the Skype service. Since SkypeOut international rates tend to be lower than the rates you'll get from 3 Mobile or most other telephone service providers, this sounds like a pretty good deal. But it raises an interesting question: if the Skype cellphone model proves successful the service will put itself out of business. If most of the people you call are Skype customers you'll be making free calls all the time and Skype won't be making any revenue aside from whatever service fee it collects from 3 Mobile.