SMSing
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Texting while driving irks NY senator
First came a ban in New York against cellphone handset use while driving, but now texting behind the wheel may face the same fate. Yeah, we agree on this one -- after all, texting takes your eyes of the road unless you have some speech-to-text thing going on in that handset. Anyhoo, New York senator Carl Marcellino wants SMSing while driving banned due to the recent deaths of five young girls in auto accidents attributed to texting while driving. Washington state already has banned SMS use while driving, and with a recent Zogby Poll concluding that one-third of all people between 18 and 24 years old have sent texts while driving, we'll most likely see this kind of ban coming to more states.
Italy bans cellphones in classrooms
With almost every cellphone these days featuring music ringtones, video cameras and text messaging, school officials in Italy have apparently had enough of all this mobile nonsense. The country has taken the rather drastic (or reasonable, depending on how you look at it) measure of banning schoolchildren from using mobile phones in class. In other words, all those class-disrupting ringtones and incognito cam and video shoots will now banished from all institutes of public education -- and with punishments for breaking the ban including phone confiscation all the way up to bans from taking final exams, the deterrent factor is reasonably high here.
Samsung vows to improve SMS experience
We've seen SMS come a long way in the last 10 years. What once was a phenom largely used in Europe's ubiquitous GSM systems has become a global sensation used from small kids to aging grandparents. Raking up billions of text messages a month qualifies SMS as critical mass, yes? Anyhoo, Samsung wants to complement or even shove aside text messaging interfaces like T9 and Motorola's iTap and create a Gmail-like "text threaded conversation" using a new guided process for in-phone text messaging services. Samsung's new patent includes processes like mapping phone numbers from incoming text messages to stored pictures of the sender and creating SMS threading that emulates an IM interface. Yes, we all know IM and some SMS chat apps are available on hundreds of millions of recent phones, but nothing is beating the quantity of sent and received text messages using conventional means. Samsung may have this new "interface" on its phones "very soon;" we hope on the new Ultra units.[Via Unwired View, thanks Staska]
