Ideas from Mark Stout

Whew, I'm not alone. JKontheRun recently ran a survey. Thirty-four percent of the people responding to their poll surf the net on their phone multiple times a day. Do you?

I've only had a Smart Phone now for about two months, and learned yesterday the impact of not having it. An accident yesterday morning rendered my phone useless. No huge problem, I bought phone insurance for just this reason. I went to the website of my provider's insurance carrier, Asurion and filled out their claim form. Their web pages says you'll likely have your replacement phone the next day, and indeed I did. it arrived about 4:30 PM today, or about 31 and 1/2 hours after the incident. After filing the claim yesterday, I called my own cell phone from a land line, and changed my outgoing message to tell callers not to leave a voice mail, but to instead call my home number. I didn't have to do that, but would have needed to check my voice mail from another phone frequently. The other concern was text messages. My provider does not offer a way to either go on to their website and ask that text messages to my phone to forwarded to my email, or alternately, gene...

At the same time we bought the Samsung Instinct smart phones from Sprint, we also picked up one of their femtocells , The Airave . A femtocell is basically a personal cell site. It is a box that looks like a wi-fi access point. It plugs into your broadband. To your phone, it appears to be a cell tower. Without it, we get a single bar in the house, with it from three to five bars depending on where in the house you are. It makes the phones useful in the house, since our street is a dead zone. otherwise. The Airave cost $99 to buy, and then $5 a month. Our previous provider, Verizon is rumored to have their own femtocell about to come out for $249 and no monthly fee. They have been lauded for the no monthly fee, but personally I feel comfortable with Sprint's five dollars a month. OK, sure after 30 months I'll be paying more for the Airwave. On the other hand, Sprint has all those $5 checks coming in each month to motivate them to keep up their end of the infrastructure. ...

From JKontheRun I learned tonight that Google has a new mobile page where you can read 1.5 million public domain books. I tried it just now on my Instinct and it works great. Go to http://books.google.com/m . I've already bookmarked a couple books I've wanted to read. As long as you have a web connection, you'll always have something to read. Update #1: I should have played with this more first. This isn't working right on my Instinct under Opera or the internal browser. On Opera Mini , it gives you a book not found error. If you click again you do get to the first page but won't advance to the next page. On the internal browser, it won't load. I have reported the error to Google's Feedback page. Update #2: (2-7-09) Google responded yesterday : Thank you for your interest in accessing Google Book Search using your mobile device. Currently, this feature is only accessible on smart phones with webkit browsers, such as the iPhone or Android phones. Ou...