Thought Garage

Quite a remarkable journey for a Cell, from a heavy brick luxury device to an integral part of our daily lives.

Today marks the 25th Anniversary of the first commercial cellphone call in history. On October 13th 1983, Ameritech executive Bob Barnett called the grandson of Alexander Graham Bell using the now legendary and bricktastic Motorola DynaTAC 8000X.

Here’s Gizmodo modified cellphone timeline highlighting this historic event. 

Source: 25 Anniversary of the First Commercial Cellphone Call Timeline

You can carry an ipod, olympus recorder, Palm PDA, a cell phone, a digital camera, a gaming console, a GPS navigator, a jump drive, a laptop to access internet, …………….. or you can have a smart phone that can do all of these and more. Smart Phones for sure are redefining the Mobile life styles. Cellular Life Styles Apart explores the M-powered life styles.

AT&T Raises Messaging Rates
Effective March 30, AT&T customers who do not subscribe to a bundled messaging plan will have to pay $0.20 per SMS and $0.30 per MMS. The cost of sending each will rise by $0.05

In CBS Test, Mobile Ads Find Users
CBS plans to announce on Wednesday that it is trying one of the first serious experiments with cellphone advertising that is customized for a person’s location. Its CBS Mobileunit is teaming up with the social networking service Loopt, which allows its subscribers to track participating friends and family on their mobile phones.

Apple’s iPhone is 3rd most shipped smartphone
According to a recent report from Canalys, Apple’s iPhone is the third-best selling smartphone in the world. The iPhone had a 6.5 percent market share worldwide during the fourth quarter

Americans Recycled less than 10% of Mobile Phones
Only 9.4% of Americans who bought new mobile phones last quarter recycled their old handsets, a survey from iSuppli Corp’s consumerTrak service says. This is double the number of phones recycled in the third quarter of 2007 but well below the numbers hoped for

Will Watch Ads For Free Games
The vast majority of people — 90 percent, to be precise — will watch ads if it means they get to play games for free, according to a report presented by RealNetworks at the Casual Connect conference in Amsterdam.

Here are the latest statistics on Mobiles from my Cellular Life Styles blog. I have updated the graphs with the latest information available from Cellular carriers as per the 4th quarter reports of 2007.

Average Monthly Charges

Sprint is still leading with the highest ARPU about $59, though the carrier is loosing on subscriber base. Cingular, the new at&t is leading in the subscriber base, closely followed by Verizon.

Mobile Subscribers

Source: Cellular Lifestyles » Average Monthly Charges

As I am getting busy with working on my startup, I don’t think I can continue to blog separately at Cellular Life Styles anymore. So to make my life easier, I will be combining my Cellular Life Styles blog with Thought Garage in the next few weeks by uploading selective posts from the blog.