Technologizer

The latest fad among governments is to pass legislation that ban texting while driving, as evidenced by the growing list of states with anti-cell phone laws. But if a new study just released by the Highway Loss Data Institute means anything, these laws don’t change much.

HLDI found that crash rates are not decreasing as a result of these laws.”The laws aren’t reducing crashes, even though we know that such laws have reduced hand-held phone use, and several studies have established that phoning while driving increases crash risk,” the group’s president Adrian Lund said. This isn’t to say that cell phone use while driving doesn’t increase crash risk — HLDI points out several studies that showed an four-fold increase there — but it isn’t stopping crashes either.

It seems as if the group is shocked by the study’s results, saying it expected to see a decrease in crash occurrences. Maybe the findings of this study are indicative that these laws are just unnecessary legislation that really doesn’t do much to contain the problem. This might be a case where good old fashioned education may play a bigger part in solving the problem, no?

“Whatever the reason, the key finding is that crashes aren’t going down where hand-held phone use has been banned,” Lund says. “This finding doesn’t auger well for any safety payoff from all the new laws that ban phone use and texting while driving.”

Seems like the HLDI agrees.

The folks over at Tmonews have got their hands on a screenshot of a rollout list for June and July for T-Mobile, and by the looks of it it will be a busy month. While most of the news revolves around new phone models, one listing is for a feature that iPhone users have grown to love: visual voicemail.

However it will be done, or what devices it would be available on, is not yet known. But official support for the feature is set for July 16th, and training for employees would begin next month.

It’s likely that we’ll see this functionality on T-Mobile’s smart devices first and foremost, such as the G1, which can already do visual voicemail through a third-party application. I’m sure to compete with the iPhone, T-Mobile will definitely add it to at least the G1 — let’s face it, that’s the intention of the G1 for the carrier.

The phone lineup looks interesting too. The Sony Ericsson CS8 will be the first, an 8.1 megapixel (wow) camera phone launching on June 24, and would be followed by a 3G version of the T-Mobile Dash due on July 1st.

Two new Samsungs would be launched for the “back to school” shopping season, the t469 and t549, both apparently slide out keyboard texting phones (get why they’re the back to school phones? Those crazy texting kids.) due the 15th.

Finally on August 12, the high-end Windows Mobile-powered Rhodium will hit the shelves. Gee, this looks an awful lot like the iPhone with a slide out keyboard, don’t ya think?

It’s worth noting by the way that all these phones are 3G capable. T-Mobile is beginning the push to get its customers into the 21st century. About time, eh?

The number of mobile device users accessing the Internet in the US at least once a month has risen 71 percent in the last year, with a total audience of nearly 63.2 million, comScore reports. Weekly and daily usage is also up 87 and 107 percent to 19.3 and 22.4 million respectively.

No doubt, the rise of the iPhone which in turn spurred competitors to better their own mobile Internet offerings has helped accelerate mobile Internet usage. The mobile web today is ten times better — and more usable — that what has been offered in the past.

What are people looking at? Increasingly its their social networking site or blog, as that showed a 427 percent year over year increase to 9.3 million daily unique users. General news and information was checked by 22.3 million daily, and entertainment news was also popular, seen by 5.5 million daily.

So let’s do a mini-survey of Technologizer users. How often are you using the mobile web? What are the three most common types of things you’re looking at?

Okay, this excites my inner nerd to no end — probably because it is one of those things seen in science fiction movies becoming reality. Korean cell phone manufacturer LG plans to debut a wrist-worn cellular phone at CES next month.

The phone will have 3G and HSDPA support, along with Bluetooth and MP3 playback capabilities. Since there is obviously no room for a keyboard on the 1.43 inch color screen that is the watchface, the device would also support text to speech as well.

Want even more geek? This puppy got a video camera on the watch face. Why you ask? For video conferencing of course. Sounds like something right out of Star Trek, don’t you think?

Availablity will come first early next year for Korea and Europe. Details on any US launch, as well as pricing, have not been announced as of yet.

Here’s one that isn’t surprising to me in the least: a New York Times investigation into text messaging indicates that it costs carriers virtually nothing to provide the service. This means those extra fees you pay just for the privilege of texting are essentially pure profit for these folks.

Even further, text messaging fees are the subject of a new Congressional inquiry that is looking into why text messaging fees have doubled over the past few years.

As late as 2005 it only cost 10 cents for a user to send a text message. Then over the next three years all carriers increased the cost to 20 cents, without much of an explanation at all.

Sen. Herbert Kohl (D-Wis.) is the chairman of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee. Kohl has asked the big four carriers to justify the costs of text messaging to consumers.

Their responses? How their pricing plans work, but not a justification of their charges to actually provide the service. Obviously their stonewalling isn’t working: no less than 20 lawsuits are currently in progress around the country over text messaging fees.

Really, it costs these carriers nothing to transmit these messages, because they are so small. Furthermore, these come at no costs to degradation of service: texts travel on what is called a “control channel.” This is the same part of the network that instructs a tower how to handle a call, and is seperate from the rest of the network altogether.

So why the exhorbitant fees? That’s a good question. There was a point in time not so long ago when carriers (T-Mobile notably) offered texting as part of their plans.. and a good deal of them too. Now, they see that we’re all addicted to it, and plan to use that to their advantage and squeeze out every last penny that they can.