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President-Elect Obama is known to love his Blackberry. However, Verizon Wireless President and CEO Lowell McAdam found out this week that a number of Verizon Wireless employees (without authorization) accessed and viewed President-Elect Barack Obama’s personal cell phone account. Granted, the account has been inactive for several months. The device on the account wasn’t a [...]

Do you have a camera-enabled phone, but don't know what to do with all of those captured images? Would you like to share those images with family and friends? Well, T-Mobile and Parrot have come together to launch the T-Mobile cameo, a MMS photo frame, that allows anyone to send photos from their cellphone to the picture frame. The T-Mobile cameo is available starting today for US$99.99 with a US$9.99 monthly recurring charge for unlimited messaging.

Carriers may envision all types of devices and appliances being embedded with wireless connectivity but vendors don't necessary share that view. Mobile carriers might drool at the prospect of linking their subscribers to their networks by embedding technology into every device from a cell phone to a refrigerator, but the vendors that build the devices see things a little differently. Not every device needs embedded wide area network connectivity or even mobility: WiFi might just do the trick for a lot of non-commercial devices--at least for the start. "I don't think we're going to be looking at this so much in the consumer space...maybe your car (with GSM) but I'm not sure your home appliances," said Kyp Walls, director of product management at Panasonic Computer Solutions Company. Panasonic laptops connect to the mobile network. This field has been plowed already by PC cards and USB dongles but new software flexibility makes it possible to plant the software into the devices themselves for enterprise and government customers with a "need to connect everywhere" who find mobile connectivity is "a little addictive; you feel like if you didn't have connectivity in the taxi and airport and everywhere else you couldn't do your job," he said. Qualcomm's Gobi initiative, which lets IT managers provide global mobile connectivity by using devices that can be reconfigured in the field to support mobile operators and mobile broadband technologies including EVDO and UMTS, is a big reason the software can move from external to internal. Gobi's customer list includes computer makers Acer, Dell, Hewlett Packard, Lenovo and Panasonic along with all the major carriers. "That used to be a barrier for people to adopt an embedded solution because they couldn't commit to a particular carrier. Gobi absolutely eliminates that barrier for embedded wireless technology," Walls said. Another way to enable network interconnectivity is to use a company such as Jasper Wireless which has "created an MVNO look-alike where they're independent of carriers," said Arun Bhikshevsvaran, CTO and vice president of North American strategy for Ericsson. Since Ericsson embeds mobile modules into laptops now and it plans to move to other consumer electronics in the future. But having an open network makes it easier to focus on building and certifying cross-platform modules. "If I certify the module for Lenovo...

I have to say sorry to any readers who have been wanting to see more posts here on my blog, but my last week has been consumed by the T-Mobile G1 as you can see in my review with over 260 images and 5 videos posted over on my Smartphones & Cell Phones blog. I wanted to mention it here since my other blog is still quite new and many readers here may not have yet subscribed to my other blog. I also wanted to mention it here because I think the Google Android OS will go further than just the mobile phone with talk that it could challenge the embedded Windows CE OS seen in enterprise and other devices.

The smartphone, once the must-have gadget for the well-equipped business person, is now so passé that Cincinnati Bell Wireless is offering a "family plan" for families with two or more BlackBerry-like devices. Probably the first wireless carrier that's gone out of its way to link family members through smartphones, the carrier's offering combines a standard voice plan, unlimited data and text messaging options into one plan starting at $30 a month for the first data user and $15 for every user after that. And who said teens only want iPhones? Now they can have Crackberries just like the big boys and girls. For more: - see this article Related stories: The 5 Top Selling Smartphones Americans use their smartphones for Web browsing

In today's tough economic climate, having powerful leadership can be critical to a company's success and longevity. A powerful person can turn a critical deal into a reality. They can redefine an entire industry's business strategy. And they might even be able to influence the way consumers think about wireless technology. How do you determine a person's "power" quotient? That's a tricky question and one that the FierceWireless editorial team has pondered quite a bit lately. We think someone is powerful if they wield the right mix of influence, business savvy, leadership and technical innovation. But they also have to have that something extra--whether it's a charismatic personality, brilliant mind or down-to-earth approachability that makes people want to work with them, for them, or just follow them in the news. As I head to Chicago for the Wireless History Foundation dinner tonight to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the wireless phone, it seems appropriate to introduce you to our latest endeavor--the 25 Most Powerful People in Wireless. This is a compilation of who we think are the movers and shakers in this industry. These are the folks who shrewdly plot the path that many of the other industry players follow. We will be revealing five of our 25 picks every day this week, starting with No. 21-25 today and ending with the five most powerful people in the industry on Friday. Be sure to check our list every day to see who made the cut. You may not agree with all our picks but I can assure you that this list was not compiled lightly. The Fierce editors scrutinized every person we selected to make sure we could justify their position on our list. Nevertheless, I encourage you to write or comment and let us know if you disagree with our picks or think we've been negligent by not including someone. When you take a look at our list, you may notice that it's not particularly diverse. We realize that and yet we think our list of the 25 most powerful people in wireless accurately depicts the state of the industry, which so far is still notoriously male-dominated --particularly in the high-ranking positions at many companies. We hope that trend changes in the years ahead. Click here to see the first five members of FierceWireless Most Powerful List. - Sue