Feeling blue about BT's Bluephone
So one of the big reasons we were so big on BT's new Bluephone service — which basically lets your cellphone use a Bluetooth base station to hook up to a landline connection whenever you're at home or the office, and then uses regular cellular networks everywhere else — was that it was supposed to give you all the advantages of having both a landline and a cellphone. BT says that anyone using Bluephone at home will get to make calls at the landline rate — so far, so good. But the problem is that they're also saying that anyone who calls you will get charged the mobile rate for the call no matter whether you're at home (when you're supposedly connected to a landline) or not. Ok, so maybe it's not the lamest thing we've ever heard of, but anyone who has ever lived in Britain knows that it costs a lot more to call a cellphone there than it does to call a landline (unlike here in the States where it costs the same to call any kind of phone). Anyway, the service doesn't actually launch commercially until next year, so there's still a chance that BT will change their minds.