One of our much-loved tools, Skype, has been down for over 24 hours.

Clearly, we’re not the only ones feeling a tad lost without it. Reports of team members rediscovering their vocal cords and others having to dig up friends’ email addresses have been flooding in. Some call centres have also come to a standstill due to the lack of Skype connectivity.

So what happens when you’re relying heavily on a tool to go about your business? What would happen if, for example, mobiles phones or search engines disappeared for a day?

We’ve taken mobile phones for granted in recent years, failing to make definitive plans when meeting up with friends, opting for the “Let’s wing it… I’ll call you when I get nearby” alternative. Texting friends throughout the day is like a lifeline for younger mobile users, and making calls while on the road are the norm for business users (with handsfree kit of course!) I mean, really… What else do you do when you’re on the train home and you find yourself at a standstill for an hour? Text your mates, call your mum or browse the web on your phone to pass the time.

As for search engines, as a blogger and hopelessly curious reader, I dare not imagine what a day would be without Google, Technorati or Wikipedia (or Wapedia often in my case!) I realise that it’s a luxury that such extensive indexes of knowledge even exist, and that I would continue to breathe and live without them, but they’ve grown to become a part of my routine. Losing this ability to find out inane trivia while on my mobile at the pub or having to use the paper classified listings to find a local plumber just wouldn’t brighten my day the way search engines do!

Maybe I’m too connected for my own good – my dad regularly says I need to go camping in the Canadian wilderness for a while to detox from technology. He does make a point, seeing as I can probably count the computer-free days of the past 10 years of my life on my fingers and toes, but some of us really love technology, gadgets and winning pub quizzes due to our infallible general knowledge of complete rubbish!

So why not dedicate your first Friday evening drink to the wonderful technologies we take for granted? And to the Skype team who probably haven’t slept much in the past 24 hours!

Last week Madhuban Kumar posed me a question: Is there a mobile museum anywhere, or any museum with a significant collection of old phones? So I decided to take a look. I discovered that the Contempory Museum in Baltimore was the first US museum to showcase an entire collection devoted to the cell phone and its impact on everyday life.

My Google searching didn’t turn up many more museum collections, but there are quite a few personal collections. British businessman Dr Graham Cooley has one of the largest. He lent 120 mobiles from his own collection to the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Paderborn, which claims to be the largest computer museum in the world. The phones were featured in the foyer and “constitute one of the largest such collections in Europe”.

The largest physical collection of phones that I found is owned by the mobile phone testing company Mobile Complete, to support their Device Anywhere service. More than 350 phones have been lobotomised, inserted into racks, their covers removed and wires inserted to allow remote operation and viewing over the internet. Not nice if you’re a phone but very nice if you are a mobile web site developer.

If we are talking virtual, rather than physical, then I can offer you some truly impressive collections. Mobilezoo is a new web site that has compiled detailed information on 750 handsets already – see their Evolution Gallery – which anyone can access for free. M:Metrics is a respected mobile market research firm with 1800 devices listed and viewable in their Device Tracker service. WURFL is the biggest of them all, listing 6,860 devices at last count, just technical data though, no pictures.

We certainly do hoard a lot of mobile phones. In the USA probably more than 500 million sit in the back of a drawer gathering dust, worth at least $10 billion in scrap value alone. Recellular Inc. has estimated that 130m mobiles are retired in the US every year. The British hoard a lot too: 52 million at last count.

My conclusion: if you want to create a museum with the world’s largest collection of mobile phones, just go out there onto eBay and start buying. As of today, you will only need a few hundred and you will soon be in the Guinness Book of World Records!

[Photo: Max Glanville Photo]

[tags]mobile phones, cell phones, taptu, taptology, recellular, m:metrics, contemporary museum in baltimore, technology, gadgets, phones[/tags]

What are you up to on Monday, 10th September 2007?

I hope you’ll be saying that you’ll be attending the Mobile Monday Global Summit in Helsinki, Finland.

Mobile Monday is a global community of people working on the mobile industry, scattered across 40 cities. Once a month, on Mondays (no, really?), each city hosts an event discussing a topic relating to mobile, from phone widget development to how we might be using mobile phones 5 years down the line.

The Global Summit gives us an opportunity to get together once a year to catch up with colleagues and friends from other Mobile Monday cities. This year’s panels are very interesting, covering topics like The Future of Mobile Marketing and Social Media & Mobility.

Steve and I will both be attending, so if you’re also going, leave us a comment here to let us know!

If you have a Nokia phone, take a moment to remove your phone’s cover and check whether your battery sports the letters BL-5C. If it was also manufactured between December 2005 and November 2006, your battery is most likely on Nokia’s battery recall list.

As Alex at SMS Text News says, the potential short circuiting while charging “could cause the battery to dislodge. And overheat. And, although the press release doesn’t say this, overheating batteries have been known to go pop.”

You can request a battery replacement on Nokia’s website (or on your local version). The original press release is also available if you’d like to have a read.

If you’re now watching your phone suspiciously on the corner of your desk, expecting it to go boom any minute, check whether it’s one of the following models: Nokia 1100, Nokia 1100c, Nokia 1101, Nokia 1108, Nokia 1110, Nokia 1112, Nokia 1255, Nokia 1315, Nokia 1600, Nokia 2112, Nokia 2118, Nokia 2255, Nokia 2272, Nokia 2275, Nokia 2300, Nokia 2300c, Nokia 2310, Nokia 2355, Nokia 2600, Nokia 2610, Nokia 2610b, Nokia 2626, Nokia 3100, Nokia 3105, Nokia 3120, Nokia 3125, Nokia 6030, Nokia 6085, Nokia 6086, Nokia 6108, Nokia 6175i, Nokia 6178i, Nokia 6230, Nokia 6230i, Nokia 6270, Nokia 6600, Nokia 6620, Nokia 6630, Nokia 6631, Nokia 6670, Nokia 6680, Nokia 6681, Nokia 6682, Nokia 6820, Nokia 6822, Nokia 7610, Nokia N70, Nokia N71, Nokia N72, Nokia N91, Nokia E50, Nokia E60

[Via Engadget]

[tags]Nokia, mobile phone, cellphone, technology, gadgets, engadget, smstextnews, taptu, taptology, battery replacement, product recall[/tags]

If you’re based in the UK, you’ll probably agree that this Summer was less than stellar in terms of weather. In case you still hold hope that we may get BBQ-friendly weather before the season ends officially, All About Symbian writes about eight weather forecast services for Symbian phones.

In fact, only three of the eight suggestions are Symbian-only as the other five are web-based, so have a look at Steve’s post and cross your fingers for some sunshine on the weekend.

Rain, rain, go away, come again another day…

This week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted by Carlo and Russell of MobHappy fame, and includes our first contribution.

Being an RSS-reading fiend myself, I particularly liked Dennis’ review of the NewsGator RSS reader at WapReview. After reading it, I couldn’t resist checking out the iPhone version of the reader, and the verdict is positive. This goes to show how promising web apps for the iPhone are and how exciting touchscreen UI development will become.

Next week’s Carnival will be hosted by the lovely Darla Mack.

Poking around Flickr today, I came across an interesting chart of the most popular cameraphones within the Flickr community.

Chart taken from Flickr: Camera Finder page

I don’t know about you, but the results don’t surprise me much – the Sony Ericsson k-series & Nokia N-series are arguably the most popular camera phones at the moment – at least in my experience and surroundings.

What excites me about cameraphones is the type of photos people are taking, and the quality of the memories they create. By going to the Camera Finder page and selecting a phone of your choice, for example the SE k800i, you can browse through pictures taken using that phone’s camera – photos of smiling children, breathtaking landmarks and memorable nights out.

They might not all be works of art, but they’re our lives, documented in pictures!

Last week, we gave a few tips and highlighted some resources available for those new to designing for the small mobile screens.

Dan Appelquist left a comment linking to the W3 Best Mobile Web Practices flip cards, which are the cheat sheets of mobile web design. They’re an invaluable resource for a designer who wants to understand the different challenges of the mobile screen.

Having had a look at these, I couldn’t let this resource sit only in comments, and wanted to share such a useful tool more prominently. Thank you, Dan!

In the past few weeks, I’ve spent a vast number of hours in the car as a passenger – mostly on the M25, completely stationary, desperately looking for a source of entertainment. You can only spend so long counting red cars, changing CDs and playing “I spy…” before getting a bad case of cabin fever.

So I thought I’d browse a few of my favourite blogs on a borrowed Orange mobile, instead of my usual T-Mobile web’n'walk, but came to the realisation that my usual reads were blocked. No bloglines, Seth Godin or access to my own blog either. I appealed with Orange that the sites should be reviewed as, surely, I wasn’t posting lewd “adult content” by Orange’s definition. All requests were turned down!

While on the road, without an account number at hand, Orange customer service could not make the change for me and I was unable to turn off Safeguard and resume regular surfing. I was destined to be limited to a few websites until I returned home. It was a looong journey…

Now, I’m not picking on Orange – It just happens to be the only one I’ve had problems with. I’m clearly not the only one getting annoyed with networks defaulting users to being mobile-nanny’ed.

While it’s fair enough that users known to be underage are limited to a range of websites – since parents aren’t able to view browsing history or set parental control as one would on a desktop computer – it’s impractical and annoying for the rest of us mobile surfers.

Once I returned to a desktop computer, it was a doddle to turn off Safeguard. If you’re with Orange, you can follow the steps below to do the same.

Turning off Safeguard on Orange

• Log in to your Orange account
• Either sign-in using your mobile number and password, or
• Register to access your account details online
• Enter your mobile number and click the radio button saying “I don’t have a password and would like to register”
• If you have your mobile with you, Orange will send you a text message containing a short code which will confirm the mobile is in your possession
• Once you’ve logged in to your account, you’ll find the adult content settings under Your Details
• Select “Change” at the bottom of the page to change your settings.

Congratulations, you’ve turned off Orange Safeguard and can now browse freely!

If you’re with a different operator, why not contribute by telling us how you’ve done it or what limitations you face by default? Do they bother you or are the websites you need already whitelisted?

A bunch of phones and touchscreen tablets, originally uploaded by thatcanadiangirl.

This is what it looks like when we start testing websites on a number of devices.

We’ll try them on phones ranging from the newest, swishest phones, as well as the much older, small screen phones because we want to be sure you get the best user experience possible, no matter what kind of phone you’re using!