MobHappy

I pointed out on Monday how Dennis at Wap Review had discovered that Sprint has rolled out a lovely transcoder — a la Vodafone — that sends a dummy user agent to web sites, instead of the proper user agent of their customers’ handsets. The latest update was that people could ask for their sites [...]

You might remember the stink that was raised last year when Vodafone decided to break the mobile web by using a transcoder that sent sites a user agent for a PC browser, rather than the proper user agent from their customers’ mobile browsers. This renders user-agent based auto-detection useless, undoing the hard work of developers [...]

We talk about flat-rate data plans all the time, but on Tuesday, three US operators announced flat-rate voice plans. For about $100 a month, subs on Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile can now get unlimited national calls, and T-Mobile will throw in unlimited SMS and MMS to boot. Sprint had announced trials of a flat-rate plan [...]

I posted yesterday on the new that AT&T was selling SIM-only service, but apparently still required customers to sign a two-year contract. AT&T says now that the language on its online store talking about the two-year contract was a mistake, and that customers don’t generally need to sign a contract for SIM-only service. GigaOM says [...]

Please see the update to this story — AT&T says you don’t need to sign a contract to get SIM-only service. Unless you’ve been on Mars, you’ve noticed all the talk in the mobile industry about “openness”. Perhaps as part of its push to be “the most open wireless company in the industry”, as its [...]

Over on GigaOM, Chetan Sharma has a guest column called The Operators vs. the Media Brands that’s well worth a read. He talks about how the two industries are converging, but how difficult it is for operators to become media companies, despite their comments to the contrary. The biggest point I took away from it [...]

A Canadian oil worker managed to run up an $85,000 phone bill with Bell Mobility after erroneously thinking he could use his handset, and its $10 unlimited internet plan, as modem for his computer. We’ve seen this sort of story before, dating back to Joi Ito’s GPRS roaming bill in 2004, and more recently with [...]

Open, open, open. It’s the buzzword of the moment in mobile, thanks to the likes of Google and Verizon. Operators are talking about how they’re open, how they want to foster innovation and new business models, and how they love openness and so on. But then pops up BusinessWeek with a story on how US [...]

There’s been some good stuff in the FT over the past few days, featuring some insights from the leaders of China Mobile and Vodafone — the world’s largest mobile operators by subscribers and by revenues, respectively. First, from last week, China Mobile chairman Wang Jianzhou on changing business models. He says operators need to innovate [...]