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by Michael Fisher | March 29, 2013 7:01 AMRead OnAt the halfway mark of the last decade, the Motorola i930 was a beast. It packed a 180MHz processor, 32MB of RAM, a VGA camera, and Windows Mobile 2003 into a 167g casing more than 30mm thick. It was a hard-core, ruggedized device built at a time when rugged feature phones still commanded a premium, and durable smartphones were practically unheard-of. It also packed the fastest walkie-talkie in the industry, and a carrier label that, at the time of the phone's release in 2005, was among the most-respected brands in the United States: NEXTEL. The i930 wasn't all sunshine and polish, though: ...
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by Michael Fisher | March 26, 2013 5:08 PMRead OnThe problem with most ruggedized mobile phones is that they compromise too much in the name of durability. Due to customer typecasting on the part of carriers and manufacturers, "rugged phones" are far too often synonymous with "low-end phones." As a result, many such hardened devices have historically been relegated to the dumbphone arena. But with the rising popularity of smartphones in the business sector, and millions of Nextel customers in search of a new home in the face of the impending iDEN shutdown, Sprint finds itself in need of a rugged, walkie-talkie-capable smartphone for ...
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by Michael Fisher | December 26, 2012 7:01 AMRead OnBack when voice communication was still king, phone calls weren’t the only game in town. Some carriers offered a service called “push-to-talk” - a two-way radio, or walkie-talkie-like solution, for when a phone call just wouldn’t do. In America, most carriers found little traction with PTT. The iDEN-based carrier Nextel -now part of Sprint- saw success for a few years offering dispatch service to its customers, at one time numbering around 20 million people. These days, that number has shrunk to below 5 million, but other carriers are still trying to pick the Nextel carcass clean. ...
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by Michael Fisher | September 26, 2012 2:02 PMRead OnWe take our job seriously here at Pocketnow. In a world of manufacturers suing other manufacturers, companies (maybe) ripping off other companies, and rampant fanboyism destroying goodwill among technology geeks, there's a lot to report and comment on. We do our best to do so diligently, promptly, and with a minimum of snark-- most of the time, anyway. But once in a while, you've got to let your hair down. They can't all be hard-hitting investigative pieces on trusting your phone salesman, in-depth reviews of top smartphones, or speculative articles on air-interface technologies. ...
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by Michael Fisher | August 20, 2012 3:14 PMRead OnPicture this: you're lying in bed with your favorite tablet, catching up on the latest episode from the AMC series Hell On Wheels. You can substitute any TV show, movie, or YouTube series there, really, but Hell On Wheels is pretty amazing. Anyway, you're lying there, jaw agape at the realization that maybe the rapper Common can actually act, but you've got a problem. While the visuals are stunning on your 2012-edition iPad's Retina display, or passable on the lighter, slimmer Nexus 7's screen, you can't really hear anything. You reach to the volume toggle, hoping to avoid a repeat of ...
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by Michael Fisher | July 23, 2012 3:05 PMRead On"I'm at the beach and I can't use my phone. That sucks." So reads the note I jotted down during last weekend's visit to a Boston-area beach. The weather was perfect, the crowds minimal, and the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, for once, not too cold. It was a perfect day on the sand. Or rather, it would have been, if I hadn't been so worried about babying my communication devices. Yes, yes, I know: "leave your phones at home! The beach is a place to get away from all that! Unplug from the internet for two seconds," and blah, blah, et cetera. Normally, I'd agree; there's a time and a place for ...
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by Michael Fisher | May 29, 2012 8:35 AMRead OnRight now, I'm on a ferry, heading back home from a holiday weekend. My Samsung Galaxy Nexus sits on the duffel bag at my feet, providing a wireless hotspot for my Macbook (3G only out here on the open water; even Verizon Wireless has its limitations). It's also streaming an instrumental playlist of "writing music" to the bluetooth headphones on my head, and it beeps dutifully every few minutes, letting me know about a friend's Foursquare check-in or Facebook update, or some such. It does all this while maintaining a relatively small footprint, and presenting a fairly attractive ...
Posts tagged with: nextel