• In June, 12.3 million people from Western Europe and the United States visited social networks, such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, on their mobile phones. [M:Metrics report, via 3G.co.uk]
• In the UK, last year, mobiles accounted for 82 billion minutes, out of an overall total of 234 billion. The Ofcom report also said that 9% of UK households rely solely on a mobile, compared to 7% that only have a traditional landline phone.[Via SMS Text News]
• Apple may sell over 800,000 iPhones during this current quarter, beating its own target of 730,000. [Reuters]
• AT&T have finally seen sense, and will no longer send their users itemised bills (the most famous 300 pages bill unboxed by iJustine)

This week’s carnival is hosted on Darla Mack’s Days in the Life of a Diva blog, with a hand from mobilejones.

Some very interesting insight into the North American markets, with posts covering topics from how operators tie in their users (tip of the hat to a fellow Canadian!) to some figures on the US Wireless market in the first half of 2007. Some lighter content from SkyDeck pointing the finger at what’s broken in the industry.

One of our much-loved tools, Skype, has been down for over 24 hours.

Clearly, we’re not the only ones feeling a tad lost without it. Reports of team members rediscovering their vocal cords and others having to dig up friends’ email addresses have been flooding in. Some call centres have also come to a standstill due to the lack of Skype connectivity.

So what happens when you’re relying heavily on a tool to go about your business? What would happen if, for example, mobiles phones or search engines disappeared for a day?

We’ve taken mobile phones for granted in recent years, failing to make definitive plans when meeting up with friends, opting for the “Let’s wing it… I’ll call you when I get nearby” alternative. Texting friends throughout the day is like a lifeline for younger mobile users, and making calls while on the road are the norm for business users (with handsfree kit of course!) I mean, really… What else do you do when you’re on the train home and you find yourself at a standstill for an hour? Text your mates, call your mum or browse the web on your phone to pass the time.

As for search engines, as a blogger and hopelessly curious reader, I dare not imagine what a day would be without Google, Technorati or Wikipedia (or Wapedia often in my case!) I realise that it’s a luxury that such extensive indexes of knowledge even exist, and that I would continue to breathe and live without them, but they’ve grown to become a part of my routine. Losing this ability to find out inane trivia while on my mobile at the pub or having to use the paper classified listings to find a local plumber just wouldn’t brighten my day the way search engines do!

Maybe I’m too connected for my own good - my dad regularly says I need to go camping in the Canadian wilderness for a while to detox from technology. He does make a point, seeing as I can probably count the computer-free days of the past 10 years of my life on my fingers and toes, but some of us really love technology, gadgets and winning pub quizzes due to our infallible general knowledge of complete rubbish!

So why not dedicate your first Friday evening drink to the wonderful technologies we take for granted? And to the Skype team who probably haven’t slept much in the past 24 hours!

Last week Madhuban Kumar posed me a question: Is there a mobile museum anywhere, or any museum with a significant collection of old phones? So I decided to take a look. I discovered that the Contempory Museum in Baltimore was the first US museum to showcase an entire collection devoted to the cell phone and its impact on everyday life.

My Google searching didn’t turn up many more museum collections, but there are quite a few personal collections. British businessman Dr Graham Cooley has one of the largest. He lent 120 mobiles from his own collection to the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Paderborn, which claims to be the largest computer museum in the world. The phones were featured in the foyer and “constitute one of the largest such collections in Europe”.

The largest physical collection of phones that I found is owned by the mobile phone testing company Mobile Complete, to support their Device Anywhere service. More than 350 phones have been lobotomised, inserted into racks, their covers removed and wires inserted to allow remote operation and viewing over the internet. Not nice if you’re a phone but very nice if you are a mobile web site developer.

If we are talking virtual, rather than physical, then I can offer you some truly impressive collections. Mobilezoo is a new web site that has compiled detailed information on 750 handsets already – see their Evolution Gallery – which anyone can access for free. M:Metrics is a respected mobile market research firm with 1800 devices listed and viewable in their Device Tracker service. WURFL is the biggest of them all, listing 6,860 devices at last count, just technical data though, no pictures.

We certainly do hoard a lot of mobile phones. In the USA probably more than 500 million sit in the back of a drawer gathering dust, worth at least $10 billion in scrap value alone. Recellular Inc. has estimated that 130m mobiles are retired in the US every year. The British hoard a lot too: 52 million at last count.

My conclusion: if you want to create a museum with the world’s largest collection of mobile phones, just go out there onto eBay and start buying. As of today, you will only need a few hundred and you will soon be in the Guinness Book of World Records!

[Photo: Max Glanville Photo]

[tags]mobile phones, cell phones, taptu, taptology, recellular, m:metrics, contemporary museum in baltimore, technology, gadgets, phones[/tags]

If you have a Nokia phone, take a moment to remove your phone’s cover and check whether your battery sports the letters BL-5C. If it was also manufactured between December 2005 and November 2006, your battery is most likely on Nokia’s battery recall list.

As Alex at SMS Text News says, the potential short circuiting while charging “could cause the battery to dislodge. And overheat. And, although the press release doesn’t say this, overheating batteries have been known to go pop.”

You can request a battery replacement on Nokia’s website (or on your local version). The original press release is also available if you’d like to have a read.

If you’re now watching your phone suspiciously on the corner of your desk, expecting it to go boom any minute, check whether it’s one of the following models: Nokia 1100, Nokia 1100c, Nokia 1101, Nokia 1108, Nokia 1110, Nokia 1112, Nokia 1255, Nokia 1315, Nokia 1600, Nokia 2112, Nokia 2118, Nokia 2255, Nokia 2272, Nokia 2275, Nokia 2300, Nokia 2300c, Nokia 2310, Nokia 2355, Nokia 2600, Nokia 2610, Nokia 2610b, Nokia 2626, Nokia 3100, Nokia 3105, Nokia 3120, Nokia 3125, Nokia 6030, Nokia 6085, Nokia 6086, Nokia 6108, Nokia 6175i, Nokia 6178i, Nokia 6230, Nokia 6230i, Nokia 6270, Nokia 6600, Nokia 6620, Nokia 6630, Nokia 6631, Nokia 6670, Nokia 6680, Nokia 6681, Nokia 6682, Nokia 6820, Nokia 6822, Nokia 7610, Nokia N70, Nokia N71, Nokia N72, Nokia N91, Nokia E50, Nokia E60

[Via Engadget]

[tags]Nokia, mobile phone, cellphone, technology, gadgets, engadget, smstextnews, taptu, taptology, battery replacement, product recall[/tags]

If you’re based in the UK, you’ll probably agree that this Summer was less than stellar in terms of weather. In case you still hold hope that we may get BBQ-friendly weather before the season ends officially, All About Symbian writes about eight weather forecast services for Symbian phones.

In fact, only three of the eight suggestions are Symbian-only as the other five are web-based, so have a look at Steve’s post and cross your fingers for some sunshine on the weekend.

Rain, rain, go away, come again another day…

This week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted by Carlo and Russell of MobHappy fame, and includes our first contribution.

Being an RSS-reading fiend myself, I particularly liked Dennis’ review of the NewsGator RSS reader at WapReview. After reading it, I couldn’t resist checking out the iPhone version of the reader, and the verdict is positive. This goes to show how promising web apps for the iPhone are and how exciting touchscreen UI development will become.

Next week’s Carnival will be hosted by the lovely Darla Mack.

Some crafty people have been using their mobiles for purposes very different to the usual four: Phoning, texting, mobile browsing and taking pictures. We thought we’d compile a few of the more interesting ones!

• Mobile phone illumination allowed doctors to continue a surgery in a power blackout.
• Steve Garfield and Nina Simonds record together on an N95 a videocast called Spices of Life, in which they talk about good food and healthy living. [via NSeries WOM World]
• Texty singletons can find love around the corner through mobile dating services. Beep beep, time for a drink with a stranger?
• Ever wondered what your neighbourhood looked like from up above? Ricky from Symbian-Guru did too, so he attempted to send his Nokia N95 onto a maiden flight aboard a Wal-Mart $3 kite. The results weren’t as glowing as one may have hoped, but Eirik, who attempted the same experiment, succeeded in getting some great aerial shots of the area.
• In the Friday “Give me one of those!” vein, the Sony Ericsson Car-100 comes high on the list. It’s a Bluetooth-controlled car, which plugs into older Sony Ericsson phones to charge up, and can then be controlled via the keypad. Coolest gadget or what?
• Phones come with more features than ever. Not this one. It doesn’t even come with voice, sms or a camera. It’s a M:ssage “phone”, which reacts to text messages by vibrating accordingly. It’s produced by phone | not phone and we can’t figure out whether it’s a real product or a design project for a Dundee University student. Well, it’s certainly unusual! [via TechDigest]
• And finally, the Finns have embraced the mobile phone culture to its full extent, include a yearly Mobile Phone Throwing World Championship, hosted by the town of Savonlinna. Nothing quite says “time for an upgrade” as seeing how far your old phone will fly. See the photos of past competitions in their full glory. [Thanks for the links, Tom]

What are some of the more bizarre uses of mobile phones you’ve seen in the past?

Making phone calls from your mobile, or even receiving calls, while abroad has always been a bit of a guessing game, having little clue what your monthly bill will look like when returning back home. However, from today onwards, mobile operators must offer EU subscribers tariffs of no more than 49 euro cents (66 US cents) a minute for cross-border calls within the 27-nation bloc, while receiving a call should cost no more than 24 cents.

The EU commission made it clear that they would not hesitate to name and shame companies who do not comply by the September 1st deadline, enabling users to lodge complaints with the national authorities.

“Also under the new rules, when a customer enters another EU country the subscriber will receive a text message saying what rate their operator applies there.”

This is the best news to come out of the rule changes - Enter a new country and rates will be presented to you in a clear manner that allows you to count exactly how much cash you’re burning when your mother in law phones while you’re roasting yourself on the Costa Del Sol.

All in all, a positive step for consumers. We can go back to spending our money on cheap local booze instead of saving up to pay the dreaded phone bill when we get back home!

[AFP on Yahoo, via Emily at textually]

The latest shipping of hard drives arrives to the office, ready to be filled with freshly crawled goodness.

• Spending a lot of time commuting? Why not write the next great novel like Bernocco, who typed an entire novel on his mobile phone during his daily commute. Apparently done using T9 predictive texting, therefore not even written on a QWERTY keyboard. Phew, talk about RSI thumbs!
• Om Malik looks at mobile email addiction in the US - RIM’s Blackberry tops the list of addiction-fueling devices, and 59% admit to checking their email in bed, 53% while in the bathroom. But more alarmingly, 37% check their email while driving.
• Mobile-Review looks in great details at the new Sony Ericsson k850i, the company’s latest flagship device, equipped with a 5Mpix camera and a somewhat unusual design.
• Are you on Facebook? Why not join us for a chat as part of the Taptu group?