Monday, February 28, 2005

GSM, SMS, mobiles and other such thoughts

I'm in the market for a GSM connection - mainly because my CDMA provider (Reliance - which is excellent, by the way, and which I can't live without for its near perfect data service which connects to my Vaio to the world when I'm travelling) refuses to provide email to SMS facilities. This is something that GSM providers seem to have done a long time ago (and which I was using till I shifted to CDMA). Its pretty useful - you can use it to allow people to send you short email (with info, alerts calls for help etc) that will then be forwarded to your mobile as an email. You won't need to be logged in to anything, just carry the phone around and it would beep the email out to you.

So I'm in the market for a GSM connection that provides cheap SMS services - so that I can use email to SMS (which uses incoming SMS that is any way free) and also use Yahoo and MSN Mobile services which allow me to get Yahoo/MSN messenger posts via SMS. I just saw Airtel's "MTV" plan and it says 30p for a local SMS. If anyone has any thoughts on this please let me know.

The other day I managed to get my cousin a Nokia 6230 for Rs 9500. It seemed like a good deal and she's now flashing the mobile around for all world to see. The mobile is pretty cool and has almost everything one could want from a mobile (FM, mp3 player, video camera, applications, bluetooth etc).

I wonder why Nokia calls its phones by numbers and not names. For example, I had to actually Google to find out what was the model of the Nokia phone we bought last week. And 6230 could well be 6630 or 6620 or any of the hundreds of phones from Nokia that have a name starting with "6". To test this I actually randomly typed in "nokia" followed by a random 4 digit number starting with "6" in Google and every time it turned out an actual Nokia model.

Maybe in the case of Nokia they actually ran out of names, considering that they release a new model almost every other second.

But why are even other companies infatuated with numbers? Samsung calls its mobiles "SGH-d415" and "VM-A680". Are we supposed to say "my mobile is a capital S, capital G, capital H, hypen, lowercase D, 4, 1, 5"???

Thats like calling an iPod by its manufacturer's serial number. Is it easier to say "iPod Shuffle 1GB" or would you rather have the "M9725LL/A"? (which is, by the way, the actual model number of the iPod Shuffle 1GB)

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