T-Mobile and Yahoo! announce a strategic partnership which will see the first graphical advertising appear on T-Mobile’s pioneering Internet service. Inset shows how the mobile advertising could look on a Nokia handset. Web’n’walk, which was the UK’s first service to offer people unlimited access to the whole internet on a mobile phone, is set to carry a variety of innovative graphical ads exclusively sold and served by internet giant Yahoo! Mobile advertising is revolutionising the market by allowing advertisers to deliver more targeted messaging to consumers on their mobiles when on the move.

As pioneers of the Internet on your mobile, T-Mobile and Yahoo! will combine their expertise in the industry and knowledge of consumer habits, to enable advertisers to offer consumers targeted graphical ads when using the web’n’walk service. Mobile advertising is unique in allowing consumers the ability to interact and respond directly to the messages that advertisers try to deliver to them, when they are out of the office or home. T-Mobile and Yahoo! intend to roll out the first mobile advertisements on web’n’walk in the first half of 2008.

Phil Chapman, Director of Marketing at T-Mobile, said: Mobile advertising is a key area of development for T-Mobile in 2008 and this partnership with Yahoo! shows our commitment to making this strategy succeed. With conventional mobile marketing tools limiting the levels of interaction, banner advertising through the Internet on your mobile creates many opportunities for potential advertisers to adopt innovative marketing campaigns. We regard Yahoo! as a leader in display advertising, and with its deep understanding of the mobile space and the potential that mobile advertising can offer clients, we’re glad they are on board as our partners.

Today, the Tech lifted the curtain to unveil the new T-Mobile Samsung t819 cellular phone. Equipped with wireless, stereo Bluetooth technology, the t819 sings its own praises with features like a 1.3 megapixel camera with video capture capability, an MP3 player and a micro SD slot for a maximum of 2-gigabytes (GB) of removable memory. A slider phone that weighs in just shy of 3.5 ounces, the latest T-Mobile device has numerous messaging options, including AOL, SMS, MMS, ICQ, Windows Live and Yahoo. Furthermore, it is compatible with T-Mobile Address Book and offers the T-Mobile myFaves calling plan.

The cellular phone’s full moniker is the Samsung SGH-t819. It is available in a two-toned brown hue, with a frame that measures approximately 4″x 2″ x .5″, which makes it one of the smaller slider-phones out there. The phone should be available over the next few days and weeks at T-Mobile retail stores, as well as online at t-mobile.com. Check out the gallery below for images.

The town is poised to sell the two cell phone tower leases it owns with Sprint and T-Mobile to a New York company for $550,000, said Town Coordinator Eugene N. Phillips. The deal, which will probably close in the next two weeks, would end about a three-year process to find a buyer. Phillips said he believes the deal is a wise one because the lifespan of cell towers is limited. “We’re betting that the technology changes in the next 10 or 11 years and that the technology is no longer necessary,” he said. Town officials plan to put the $550,000 lump-sum payment into the town’s stabilization account.

The company picking up the lease is Unison Site Management of New York, which acquires wireless leases nationwide. “It will do a good job replenishing our stabilization fund, which we’ve drained over the last three years,” Phillips said. The account has about $900,000, but town officials prefer having about $1.5 million. Selectmen have previously considered selling the leases for the towers, which are located on top of the Williams Street water tank. But they declined bids about two years ago from Unison Site Management and a similar company, saying those offers were too low.

Phillips said he has been working on the project since being appointed town coordinator three years ago. The $550,000 payment from Unison Site Management allows the town to take control of the leases again in 25 years, but Phillips said he is skeptical the technology will still be used at that time. The water tank has the capacity to add a third cell phone tower, and the town will receive another payment - of about $230,000, Phillips said - if Unison Site Management finds another cell phone carrier for the site.

It all happened on my first day at NetWorld Alliance.I had just wrapped a new-employee orientation meeting and was making my way back to my cubicle when my cell phone buzzed. It was a text message from my older brother. It said: “(J)Soy rod mrkm o contsta.”
I sighed. The message was obviously Spanish and my brother — an electrical engineer who works in the materials-handling business — had just spent several weeks in Mexico on an extended business trip. He arrived back in the States yesterday.

No doubt he was now trying to impress me with that all-encompassing grasp of the Spanish language he picked up during the trip. My own Spanish vocabulary is somewhat limited (mostly to words describing products in the Mexican food industry) so I had no idea what it said. I never replied, but I brought it up with my brother during a phone conversation that evening. “I never sent you any text messages,” my brother exclaimed. “Which phone did it come from? My business phone or my personal phone?” “The personal one,” I said. “The one with the 550- number.”

“No way,” my brother replied. “That phone is still in my suitcase. I never once took it out during the whole trip.” Confused, he unzipped his suitcase and peered inside. Sure enough: the phone was missing. At some point during the trip — probably at the airport — some fiend had gone rummaging around in my brother’s luggage and stole his cell phone. Now the thief was sending text messages like a madman, possibly with the intent of taunting people on my brother’s contact list. There was no doubt that he’d soon be dialing all sorts of international calls — calls to Zimbabwe and Sweden and tiny little republics — all at my brother’s expense. There was only one thing to do.

Students returning to school this week in New York face a dilemma over what to do with their mobile phones when they enter the school property. Under a City Council law passed last September, pupils are allowed to carry phones with them on their journey to school - but not to then carry the phone into the school, causing confusion at the school gates. It doesn’t make any sense at all,” said Lashea Suggs, an eighth-grader at the Young Women’s Leadership School. “How can you bring your phone to school and have nowhere to put it when you get to school?”

In 2006, Mayor Bloomberg introduced metal detectors at some schools to help cut down on crime, and one of the items usually impounded were mobile phones. The City Council later voted to formally ban the mobile phones within schools with the aim of forcing the Department of Education to come up with a more sensible policy. In the meantime, local retailers have seized on the opportunity and offer storage facilities for mobile phones during the day - and the pupils collect their phones on the way home.

“It’s very clear that Apple, Google and other players are bringing in a lot of new directions,” says company CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo. Among these is an increasing union of device functions; while Nokia has long made smartphones that perform most of the tasks of the iPhone, such as the Nokia describes Apple as the first credible newcomer to the cellular market in years, a , Apple’s product is a unique combination of this with the easy media playback of an iPod.

More important to Nokia may be the changes Apple and Google are bringing to the cellular market. Whereas US carriers have traditionally reaped most of the revenue from cellphones, and dictated how devices are used, Apple has managed to coerce better data plans out of AT&T, as well as implement that has inspired other companies to challenge old monopolies. In Europe for instance, Nokia has used revenue splitting to get its Ovi download service hosted through Vodafone.  Google’s contribution comes in the form of the, which aims to create a universal platform across phones and carriers that may turn the latter into entities more closely resembling Internet service providers. American carriers involved already include Sprint and T-Mobile, while phone makers include the likes of LG and Motorola — notably however, Nokia has not been invited by Google, despite the fact that the former is the largest handset maker in the world.

T-Mobile has launched the first mobile-to-mobile multimedia messaging service (MMS) in the UK. The service called T-Mobile Picture Messaging enables customers to capture moments as they happen and share them straight away: Customers can create and combine personal images, sound clips or personal voice recordings and text into a single multimedia message and send it instantly from their mobile to another mobile or e-mail address. T-Mobile is the only UK mobile operator to offer a complete picture messaging service with both mobile and web-based features. As part of the picture messaging package, T-Mobile customers can store their favourite picture messages on the web where they can also access a gallery of downloadable images and create and send new picture messages from the web to a mobile or email address. Clent Richardson, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at T-Mobile, said: A picture paints a thousand words that is the spirit behind the proposition. This is a radical and hugely positive example of bringing our Get more services brand promise to life. Were adding sight to sound forever changing mobile communications. There will be endless uses for this service, creating a new dimension to instant mobile communications. T-Mobile customers will be able to capture those funny, special or compromising moments where a camera would usually be forgotten.

Leading aggregator and publisher of wireless content, is delighted to announce that T-Mobile has selected nGame’s Java QuickStart Program as the cornerstone of its launch of mobile Java gaming throughout Europe. The two-year deal sees n Game shipping one hundred and twenty J2ME games, designed for a wide variety of Java-enabled handsets, which T-Mobile will distribute in Austria, Germany and the United Kingdom. In addition, T-Mobile will also be initially using nGame’s Java Games Store platform WOTAN as its content delivery platform at launch in the UK.”nGame has consistently been a leader in offering innovative services for the wireless Internet, and is committed to providing the best micro-Java games and entertainments to users all over the world,” said nGame CEO, John Brimacombe. “We are extremely excited to be working with T-Mobile on this project, and delighted that they are launching their micro-Java service primarily with nGame titles. We are working with developers based throughout the world - in the UK, America, India, and Korea, to name but a few - and this deal enables us to bring the best of their games, as well as our own titles, to both European and North American consumers. This is by far the largest and most significant content deal yet seen anywhere in the mobile games industry.” “WOTAN is nGame’s next generation enterprise-level platform for delivering mobile entertainment content,” said nGame CTO, Dave Lloyd. “We are very pleased that this will be the first ever live deployment of a vending machine for micro-Java games. nGame QuickStart is as simple to use as a real-world vending machine, making the dispensing of Java games simple, easy and immediate. We are extremely pleased to have nGame QuickStart received so well, and delighted that T-Mobile users will be the first to benefit from this experience. We look forward to exploring how our expertise and technology can help T-Mobile offer greater value, entertainment, and enjoyment to their customers worldwide.”

High-speed wireless Internet access becomes faster, simpler and more convenient today as Starbucks Coffee Company, T-Mobile International, the wireless subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom AG, and HP officially launch T-Mobile HotSpot service in Starbucks coffeehouses. This was announced on a press conference in San Francisco with John Stanton, Chairman of VoiceStream, the T-Mobile U.S. Operations, Howard Schultz, Starbucks chairman and chief global strategist, and Michael Capellas, president of HP.

As easy as ordering their latte, Starbucks customers can check e-mail, surf the Web, watch streaming video or download multi-media presentations in the comfort of Starbucks via a fast, reliable standards based wireless Internet connection for notebook computers and Pocket PCs. Starting today, Starbucks customers can trial T-Mobile HotSpot service for free at approximately 1,200 Starbucks stores in the United States. An additional 800 Starbucks locations in the U.S. are scheduled to feature the service by the end of the year.

With an eye toward global expansion, Starbucks and T-Mobile have also initiated a six-month pilot in select London and Berlin locations.T-Mobile HotSpot service uses standards based “Wi-Fi” (802.11b) technology and is easily accessible for Starbucks customers with a wireless-ready notebook computer or Pocket PC. Backed by T-1 connections in popular venues in the U.S., T-Mobile HotSpot service is reliable and fast enough to accommodate the full spectrum of applications from checking e-mail to multi-media video conferencing with a high-speed wireless connection as much as 40 to 50 times faster than standard dial-up Internet access.

Apple has chosen T-Mobile to sell the iPhone in Germany and will release the handset on November 9.An 8GB version of the iPhone will cost German customers €399 (£279) and comes with a two-year minimum contract. The iPhone will be sold via the Telekom Shops of Deutsche Telekom and through the T-Mobile web shopT-Mobile International CEO Hamid Akhavan said: “We are convinced that we can get our customers excited about experiencing the mobile internet with the iPhone. I’m proud that Apple and T-Mobile have become partners.

The best mobile device currently on the market will soon be operating on the best network in the country.”Apple CEO Steve Jobs added: “We’re thrilled to be partnering with T-Mobile to bring the iPhone to Germany. Customer response to iPhone in the US has been incredible, and we can’t wait to introduce T-Mobile customers to the most revolutionary mobile device on the planet.”The announcement comes a day after Apple announced that O2 will be the exclusive network partner for the iPhone in the UK.

Apple is also expected to announce over the next few days that Orange has won the exclusive rights to sell the handset in France.