The Motorola Milestone gets reviewed by the folks at Techradar. Head over to this post to read the review. The GSM variant of the Motorola DROID sports a dual-band 3G support for Europe and Asia. It runs on Google’s open-source Android OS 2.0 and packs a large 3.7-inch touchscreen, 5MP camera, microSDHC slot, Wi-Fi and GPS. It has a side-sliding design that allows for a four-row QWERTY keyboard.

The slick interface, the QWERTY keyboard, the premium build quality – all these things go into making the Milestone a decent phone. But it lets itself down at times by lacking any real differentiating features (apart from the cool phone portal) and that lip – well, the less said about it the better now.

We’d give the Milestone a B+, as it could try harder but the effort we’ve seen is hard to fault and if you picked this up and kept it in your pocket (providing its your phone) you wouldn’t be disappointed

What could be better than the original BlackBerry Tour? Well, the BlackBerry Tour2 obviously. We’ve just got a hold of one and will be putting it through our normal thorough review processes, but in the meantime, here are some first impressions:

• Physical size is nearly, if not identical to the original BlackBerry Tour
• The trackpad works great, just as you’d expect
• We guessed the original Tour was slightly underpowered, and we were right. Fortunately the Tour2 seems to use the processor found in the Storm2, and that’s a welcome improvement. In the short time we’ve been using it, there aren’t many slowdowns that we’d normally get on the Tour, and the device feels much more snappy
• The keyboard remains at greatness status
• Wi-Fi works like any other BlackBerry

All in all a much-needed upgrade to keep Verizon and Sprint’s BlackBerry lineup current, and it might even be the device that sways me from my BlackBerry 9700… Photos in the gallery!

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Already available from O2, Orange and even Tesco Mobile, the UK’s third largest carrier, Vodafone, finally announced this morning that it will begin selling the ubiquitous Apple smartphone on January 14th. Vodafone subs will be able to snag either the iPhone 3G or the iPhone 3GS for free on all tariffs over £35 and £45 respectively. Both of these prices assume a 24-month contract, but an extra £5 will shave off 6 months. Anyone interested in tethering should pencil an extra £5 into their monthly budget as that’s what Vodafone says will buy you the right to 500MB of data for tethering. One must pay to play, we suppose.

When we say we have specifications, boy, do we mean it. One of our connects has sent us the full rundown on Motorla’s Opus One (their first iDEN Android handset) that we revealed a little while back. The features on the device are actually pretty reasonable, and we’d imagine it to sell for a reasonable attractive price-point at release. The Motorola Opus One will run Android 1.5 with iDEN service enhancements, make use of a “Zeus” CPU, and will feature a 3 megapixel autofocus camera.

Detailed list of full specs after the breakage!

* 3.1″ hVGA 320×480 capacitative touchscreen display
* 3 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash
* Accelerometer
* Proximity sensor
* Wi-Fi 802.11b/g
* Bluetooth
* microSD card slot
* 2.5mm headset jack
* Home, Menu, Back, Speaker buttons are capacitive buttons with haptic feedback
* iDEN PTT & PTX
* Android LBS which is integrated into the iDEN GPS engine
* “Enterprise email”
* Plastic-molded housing with some rubberized texture finishes
* 58mm in width, 118mm in length
* 100g weight
* 512MB Flash / 256MB of RAM
* 64k and 128k iDEN SIM card support
* A-GPS
* Motorola dual-mic technology noise-canceling for noisy enviroments
* Flash Lite v3.1.x
* Some of the preloaded apps include: corporate email client with ActiveSync support, MOTONAV navigation app, barcode scanner, and document viewer.

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Years ago was the prank call ancestor: the prank ring. A young boy rang the doorbell and ran away. It was a child game with almost no consequence.

Nowadays technologies have evolved. When was the last time your doorbell rang with nobody behind the door? A long time ago I am sure. But when did you receive a prank call on your home phone line or cell phone line? It is so easy to make prank calls. There are more and more of them. It is often difficult to know the real risk when you receive a prank call. You never know if it is a joke made by a bored teenager or by an insane person potentially dangerous for you and your family.

So your best move is to take action and show the prankster that you will not tolerate his behavior. The way to react is to run a reverse phone number lookup to identify the caller. Obviously you need the phone number of the caller. You get it by looking at the call display on your phone. If you can not get access to the number because it is displayed as a “confidential number” or “private number” you may ask help from your phone service provider by providing him with the date and the hour of the prank call.

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Ever since Alexander Graham Bell magically transmitted his voice into the back room of his science lab, home landlines have been an immovable fixture in the American home. But more and more, some people are cancelling their landlines and letting their cell phones do double duty. Recently, Ivan Seidenberg, the chief executive of Verizon Communications, told a group of investors that the home landline is a thing of the past. He told the group that his company is already making plans to reorganize itself to address this growing defection from the home landline. But as Mark Twain once commented on the premature publication of his own obituary, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” So before you cut the cord to the trusty home phone, consider the following: Many families have eliminated their landlines only to return to reconnect a few months later. There are lots of reasons why this trial separation simply isn’t working out. Reasons people are coming back to their landline (more…)

In this recent economy, more and more people are being pushed out of the work force and into starting their own businesses. For some, this sudden career change has been exciting. For others, it has been scary. But for everyone, it’s been a learning experience. And one thing that everyone has to quickly learn is how to make their telephone pull its weight in their new business ventures.

For instance, you may want to add a dedicated phone line to your home for your new business. Or you may, at the very least, just change the way you answer your phone. The simple “Hello” is now changed to “Gonzales Enterprises” or “Williams Landscaping, may I help you?”

Once you have made your decision on the best way to handle how you answer the phone, the real work begins. A professional tone on the phone is essential, and proper, business-like etiquette is key. Here are a few basic tips:

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You and your family are sitting down to dinner and like clockwork, the telephone rings. The voice on the other end of the line speaks in a slow, robotic voice, like someone reading a fill-in-the-blank script. He is soliciting donations on behalf of some wonderful-sounding cause like, say, the “American Firefighters’ Gifted & Talented Amputee Fund.” You are asked to contribute whatever you can. Just give the guy reading you his script your credit card number and he will do the rest.

Not all of these calls are scams. Some are on the up-and-up. But both varieties can easily be eliminated and your dinnertime can be family time once again. Just head over to https://www.donotcall.gov, register your phone number and most of these cold-call solicitations will magically go away. Another smart thing is to upgrade your phone package to include features like Caller I.D.

However, some of these nuisance calls may persist. The more unethical the culprit behind the scheme, the more likely they will find your number and dial it. And there goes your dinnertime.
Spotting the bait

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Let’s say it again, “Lines, stations, and voicemail.” This is the basis for all business phone system purchases. If your salesperson is thorough, he will discuss each of these elements with you.

1. How many incoming telephone lines will your business need?
2. How many telephone stations will there be at the business?
3. Do you need voice mail?

How many telephone lines do I need?

Let’s take one step back before we answer this question. First of all what is a telephone line? A telephone line allows your business to make and receive telephone calls. Each telephone line has an assigned phone number(s) (e.g. 555-555-5555) that allows other people to call your business. Telephone lines are provided by your service provider and are connected directly to a telephone or business telephone system at your place of business. Types of telephone lines that you will encounter include analog, digital, and VoIP (see blog post “What kinds of lines can I add to a phone system?).

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Now a days, several business processes are outsourced across the country and across the continent. After all, we all want success and growth from financial perspective. Numerous business processes are outsourced everyday to a different part of the world, in that case daily errands for business updates or face to face conferencing is next to impossible. Teleconferencing has made this impossible task absolutely possible. Significant number of companies researched on easy way of communicating with offshore clients and thus invented more than one web conferencing tool. You can easily avail conferencing services from these companies for your teleconferencing requirement anytime, anywhere.

A web conferencing tool is very simple to use. Moreover, the high end technologies applied makes it more convenient and easily accessible from any platform (supports all Operating System). All you require is a computer with Internet connection to establish the setup of a web conferencing tool. In some rare case, you might have to install a software to run the web conferencing tool.

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