Wi-RAN and Beyond

Exploring the applications and potential for community building with wi-fi hotspots

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If handsets are freed from carriers, what will they do?

With all this talk about WIMAX and Google phones, plus Pulver's renewed FWD push, and getting my hands on my friend Steve's iPhone again, I'm thinking of what features of an unlocked handset on an all you can eat flat-rate data network would have to have to drive iPod like sales.

As it happens, I recently met an expat american in charge of attracting americans to the largest nightclub in Florence. He's dating my cousin's kid. We talked a lot about italian cell habits such as having multiple prepaids and "da me un squillo" i.e. ring my phone once when you get to the appointed place. Follow the link for a more rich description of squillo usage.  In his club, they just went with a voice to text phone. Speak into it, and the recipient gets a translated text. Saying "table 19 needs a bottle of wine" into the phone winds up as a text instruction to the wait staff.  A nice management feature in a crowded, rockin' club, or a noisy factory floor.  Not sure what make/model, or whether intraclub messaging is on a WLAN or not, but I'll try to find out.  If anybody knows, tell us all in the comments.

10:00 PM in Food and Drink, Web/Tech, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: 700MHz, handset, text, unlocked, wi-fi, wimax, wlan