Stories about: Nextel

Are you one of those unlucky souls who enjoys decent mobile phone reception when you're out and about, but can't get a signal at home or in the office? You're not alone. Indoor phone calls have long been a weak point of cellular coverage.

Network convergence, as in unified communications across applications and between wired and wireless modes, again is a big theme at VoiceCon in San Francisco this week.

Motorola Thursday announced a radical shift in its mobile phone business, saying there would be fewer shipments of phone models early next year but that the company plans to ship its first Android smart phone by the 2009 Christmas sales season.

WiMAX has always been something of an oddball technology in the mobile data world.

The new T-Mobile G1 wireless phone, announced Tuesday by T-Mobile USA, Google and HTC, generated attention for its use of the open Android platform, but it will be locked to the T-Mobile USA network and it doesn't appear to be heavily focused on business users.

The waiting game for a mobile Internet explosion continued on Thursday at the Mobilize conference in San Francisco, but there were glimmers of reality, too.

It may be too early, or too presumptuous, to call Apple's iPhone a technology icon, but all the other major equipment makers in the emerging smart phone realm are looking to create their own "iconic" device.

The certification process for WiMax devices will allow vendors to get new products out to mobile broadband users in one-third the time it takes to put a phone on a carrier's 3G network, Intel said last week at its developer conference.

For some users, the new generation of ultraportable notebooks comes close to embodying the Holy Grail for road warriors. Their laptop-like keyboards make them more usable for typing tasks than smart phones, but they are lighter and cheaper than traditional laptops. The original Asus Eee PC, for instance, cost about US$400 and weighed about two pounds when it was introduced last October.

Yahoo has filled the two empty seats on its board of directors by picking former Viacom CEO Frank J. Biondi Jr. and former Nextel CEO John H. Chapple, the company said Thursday.

Businesses should hold off on investing in WiMAX until the technology is more widely deployed across the United States and until vendors produce more dual-mode cellular/WiMAX handsets, says a new report from Gartner Research.