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-- Bigger choice of phones for T-Mobile subscribers. T-Mobile, as a much smaller carrier than AT&T, doesn't get as many exclusives on top-line phones, and it doesn't have the iPhone. This won't be a big benefit to T-Mobile subscribers who don't have contracts -- if they want the iPhone today, they can sign up with AT&T or Verizon Wireless. But subscribers under contract would find it easier to upgrade to an iPhone.

-- Fewer pricing plans to choose from. T-Mobile and AT&T have different offerings, some of which might disappear from the market.

-- No more unlimited data plans. AT&T has stopped offering unlimited data plans in favor of plans with monthly data usage caps and overage fees. T-Mobile USA still offers "unlimited" data for smartphones for $30 per month, but slows down downloads after 5 gigabytes of traffic in a month. If the deal closes, current "unlimited" subscribers would likely be grandfathered in, but AT&T would probably stop offering the plan to new subscribers.

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The Federal Communications Commission says the fine is the largest in its history.

To forestall action by the FCC, Verizon Wireless said earlier this month that it would issue refunds, mostly of $2 to $6, to about 15 million subscribers.

The FCC started asking Verizon Wireless last year about $1.99-a-megabyte data access fees that appeared on the bills of customers who didn't have data plans but who accidentally initiated data or Web access by pressing a button on their phones.

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A similar bill already has passed the Senate.

Congress is trying to crack down on the smuggling of cellphones into federal prisons, where they can be used to direct criminal activities both inside and outside prison walls.

The bill approved by the House on Tuesday night would classify cellphones as contraband material. Currently, the devices are not specifically defined as contraband, and inmates and guards caught smuggling them into prisons are rarely punished. One report says inmates pay up to $1,000 for a cellphone. It cites a case where a correctional officer made $150,000 by smuggling phones to inmates.

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Private-equity firm Harbinger Capital Partners on Tuesday revealed details of the launch of its wireless network, LightSquared, which should cover 92 percent of the population by 2015.

But there are financial and regulatory hurdles to overcome. And in another wrinkle, LightSquared won't initially be offering conventional cell phone service, just data. It's possible to send phone calls over data connections, but that technology is not fully mature or standardized.

Still, LightSquared represents a rare new entrant in the wireless market. Only two other companies, Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc., have firm plans to build nationwide networks using the same, fourth-generation network technology that LightSquared will use. Sprint Nextel Corp., through its Clearwire Corp. subsidiary, is building a third one with a different 4G technology that's likely to get less support from equipment makers.

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The Finland-based company said the deal is "expected to significantly strengthen Nokia Siemens Networks' presence globally, particularly in the United States and Japan."

Nokia Siemens said it will "gain incumbent relationships with more than 50 operators," including top American wireless carriers and cable companies, including Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp. It will also improve its position with China Mobile, Clearwire, KDDI, Sprint and Vodafone.

Nokia Siemens Networks -- a joint venture between Finland's Nokia Corp. and Siemens AG of Germany -- has seen dwindling profits in recent years, worsened by the global economic downturn.

The new contract, expected to be completed by year-end, would improve profitability and "have significant upside potential," Nokia Siemens said.

The deal is a step in the process of breaking up Schaumburg, Ill.-based Motorola. The company has planned for years to spin off the cell phone division, but steep losses in the unit have forced it to postpone the move. It's now scheduled for the first quarter of next year.

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Like Salon colleague Andrew Leonard, I've been watching from outside the Apple World Wide Developers Conference, feeding on live blogging, tweets and other coverage of Steve Jobs' keynote this morning. (The best way to do so, by my reckoning, was following Gizmodo -- you know, the site famously under investigation for having bought a pre-production unit of the device from someone who said he found it in a bar -- which aggregated everyone else's live coverage after Apple showed who's boss by not issuing a press pass.)

And like Andrew, I'm somewhat agog at what he called "a pace of innovation in the smartphone sector that is blowing away previous examples of fast-forward technological innovation." Of course, as a gadget hound I find this stuff more entertaining than daunting.

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Can they also be deadly?

The frustratingly unresolved debate erupted again this week with the release of a $24 million U.N. study spanning a decade and covering 13 nations that suggests frequent cell phone use may increase the chances of developing rare but deadly form of brain cancer.

Worryingly, since glioma has a potential latency period of a quarter century -- longer than cell phones have been in widespread use -- even the study's authors say there is no way yet to tell how big the risk is, if there is one.

Experts were nearly unanimous in saying the results of the study are inconclusive. But the fact that it turned up even some evidence of a cancer risk may have profound consequences for a device that people have become accustomed to seeing as extensions of themselves.

From farmers in Africa who rely on cell phones to check crop reports to hedge fund traders obsessively checking Blackberries at trendy restaurants to suburban American kids spending hours calling their friends -- people around the world have come to rely on mobile phones as never before.

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OK, maybe "give" isn't the right word. Ideally, the FCC would like to reallocate the spectrum through a mechanism known as "incentive auctions." In an incentive auction, the owners of valuable spectrum use rights -- in this case, the TV stations -- agree to put their rights up for sale in exchange for receiving a share of the revenue generated by the sale.

Station owners are not enthusiastic.

From Bloomberg News,"IPhone-Weary TV Broadcasters Gear Up to Fight FCC for Airwaves":

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In the very early days of this blog, some three and half years ago, I expressed a desire for a kind of reverse-panopticon device, a way for us to coopt the technologies of surveillance and identification, so well symbolized by RFID microchips, as tools for liberty and enlightenment rather than oppression.

I wrote:

I want to wave my cellphone at a shirt hanging on the rack at H&M or a DVD player on the shelf at Best Buy or a carton of strawberries at the Berkeley Bowl, and have the RFID chip tell me everything I want to know about that product.

I mean everything. Not just all of its ingredients and every possible kind of health-related danger its consumption might pose. I also want a breakdown of the transnational production system that produced it, down to which semiconductor came from which province of which country. I want to know how much of it was produced in an environmentally sustainable manner. I want to know the wages and benefits and union status of the workers who built it or the farm laborers who picked it. I want the full scoop.

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I'm the first and only American author who's written for Japanese cellphones (and with literary intentions at that). A happy lesson in old-fashioned technique, it was a sobering one about our brave new cyber-world's eternal essential: interactivity. Most of the auteurs of keitai shosetsu are Japan's vast demographic of girls and 20-something young women, who thumb out ultra-lurid, mawkish teen romances on their cellphone keypads in scraps of manga-like dialogue, skimpy action, texting slang and emoji (emoticons). They post these skeletal pseudo-confessions in installments, under cute pseudonyms, on dedicated Web sites like Magic i-land and Wild Strawberry where they can be read for a low fee.

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I'm in a quandary, and need some help on dealing with a problem. I have a friend with a very big heart. She's always the first to step up to the plate to help out others in need. A good lady. But she has habits that drive me nuts -- sort of like how a sibling would -- and she just won't change her ways. Well, for the most part, that's just fine with me. It's what makes her who she is. She's 50 years old, and has recently acquired a cellphone, but has often borrowed mine to make calls. I have a $435 swivel phone. She ALWAYS tries to open it like a flip phone. I try to get to it first and open it for her, but it doesn't always happen, as it's usually when we're in the car and she needs to reach in the back to get it out of my purse.

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Locals were outraged. Most women slipping on a summer dress aren't hoping to star in an amateur -- or, worse yet, professional -- porno, just as most men don't expect strangers to take a snapshot of their package when they wear shorts in public. In response to the ruling, Rep. Pam Peterson, R-Tulsa, introduced a bill making it illegal in Oklahoma to take unauthorized photos of someone's private areas in public; it went into effect earlier this month. For the same reason, nearly half the states have had to enact similar laws.

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Although the debate prompted by Carr's piece has been wide ranging, the general issue at hand is whether and how our time spent online, hopping from one site to the next, affects the way we read, the way we think and the way we research (although often the discussions seem to reduce to just the question of reading online versus reading books). But I'm also interested in one aspect they touch on but don't explicitly address: the effect of the Web and gadget usage on how and what we remember.

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As the new laws took effect, drivers out West raced to buy up headsets so the gabbing could continue unabated. But as drivers everywhere adjust their talk time to the new laws, one message is getting lost in static: A hands-free phone isn't much safer than a hand-held one when you're behind the wheel.

For years, psychologists who study driving and attention have argued that switching to "hands free" is not a real solution to the hazards caused by yakking on the mobile in the car. "The impairments aren't because your hands aren't on the wheel. It's because your mind isn't on the road," says David Strayer, professor of psychology at the University of Utah, whose research has found driving while talking on a cellphone to be as dangerous as driving drunk.

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In fact, up to 80 percent of any Nokia device is recyclable and precious materials within it can be reused to help make new products such as kitchen kettles, park benches, dental fillings or even saxophones and other metal musical instruments.

I know I want my next set of dental fillings to be made from used cellphones. I think that would be pretty neat.

But the sad truth is, almost no one recycles their phone. According to a Nokia survey "based on interviews with 6,500 people in 13 countries" only 3 percent of the world's mobile phone owners recycle their communicators.

This doesn't mean, however, that they're ending up in landfills.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/07/09/recycle_your_cellphone/feed/ 12 http://www.salon.com/2008/06/02/phone_3/ http://www.salon.com/2008/06/02/phone_3/#comments Mon, 02 Jun 2008 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/sports/daily/2008/06/02/phone I have this temporary cellphone because I dropped my phone right before I went on vacation and it exploded all over the laundromat floor. Your phone number is under a dryer somewhere. A text message from Angelina Jolie ("Lv me alone!") is wedged in a coin slot.

So I ran out and bought a Virgin Mobile pay-as-you-go phone before I got on the plane. It's worked fine except for one thing: It shuts itself off when the battery's getting low. It says, "Warning: Low battery. Powering off phone." And it shuts off.

The stupid phone is shutting itself off to keep the battery from dying. Because you know what happens when the battery dies, right? The phone shuts off! We wouldn't want that to happen.

Just my luck. I bought a cellphone designed by a basketball coach.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/06/02/phone_3/feed/ 6 http://www.salon.com/2008/06/01/text_message/ http://www.salon.com/2008/06/01/text_message/#comments Sun, 01 Jun 2008 10:24:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2008/06/01/text_message I was seeing this guy who would send me text messages in the middle of the night. This might indicate a few other things about him, his love of booze and booty calls chief among them. It got so that when I heard that little double beep at midnight on a Tuesday, or 3 a.m. on a Saturday, I didn't even check to see who it was. I'd wake up the next morning to find these drunken dispatches from him, a last-call Hail Mary. "Whatcha doin?" "U still up?" All of which were variations on one crucial question: "Can I sleep with you?" I guess I'm old-fashioned; I like a guy to e-mail first.

I came late to text-messaging, and part of me never fully bought the hype. I don't have a BlackBerry, or a Treo, or an iPhone; my cellphone is so old they don't even make replacement parts, and typing out a message can feel a bit like chiseling it in stone. A while ago, I was sloooowly etching out a question to a friend at a bar -- clink, clink, clink -- when someone leaned over my shoulder. "Aww," he said, "did you just learn to do that?"

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/06/01/text_message/feed/ 93 http://www.salon.com/2007/11/12/android/ http://www.salon.com/2007/11/12/android/#comments Mon, 12 Nov 2007 20:29:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/machinist/blog/2007/11/12/android How will Google make sure its open-source phone operating system takes off? The same way Google does everything else, of course -- by throwing gobs of money and engineers at the problem.

Last week the firm unveiled Android, the programming platform it hopes will soon find a home on a phone near you.

Openness is the soul of Android's charm: Unlike most phones today, devices running Android will be able to run applications created by third-party developers. Google hopes to create on the phone the sort of open programming culture that's made the Web so great -- great for all of us as well as for Google's bottom line.

Today Google put out a sneak peek at Android in the form of an SDK -- a software developers kit that will help programmers get used to making things for Android phones.

The company also announced $10 million in prizes for developers who build great Android programs. The Android Developers Challenge offers 50 prizes of $25,000 each for the best programs submitted by March 3; some among those 50 will then go on to compete for greater prizes of $100,000 and $275,000.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2007/11/12/android/feed/ 7 http://www.salon.com/2007/08/02/google_phone/ http://www.salon.com/2007/08/02/google_phone/#comments Thu, 02 Aug 2007 16:58:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/machinist/blog/2007/08/02/google_phone The Wall Street Journal's report today on Google's plans for entering the cellphone business is a little speculative (like all reports on Google's future), but here and there you find some nuggets of fine detail:

• Google has "developed prototype handsets" that feature powerful versions of its applications, and it has "approached several wireless operators in the U.S. and Europe in recent months, including AT&T, T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless," to bring these devices to market. T-Mobile, the Journal says, appears to be farthest along in developing these plans.
• At its Boston office, Google is "working on a sophisticated new Web browser for cell phones, people familiar with the plans say."
• Google has recommended that manufacturers build phones with a host of technology to support its apps -- a camera, Wi-Fi, 3G networking, and GPS.
• "People who have seen Google's prototype devices say they aren't as revolutionary as the iPhone," the Journal reports. "One was likened to a slim Nokia Corp. phone with a keyboard that slides out. Another phone format presented by Google looked more like a Treo or a BlackBerry."

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