Thinking of getting someone a cell phone as a gift for Christmas or Hanukkah this year, but not sure what’s popular? There are quite a few models to choose from, and it’s not easy to tell which phones are hot and which are last years news. To offer a little help, we thought we’d offer up the cell phone models getting the most buzz so far in 2007 (yes, we’ve included the iPhone).

But we want your opinion. What cell phone model would you like to receive as a holiday gift this year? Cast your vote below!

Crave highlighted an announcement from Sprint and Telenav this week about their upcoming location-based service, dubbed Sprint Navigation. While Sprint currently offers the TeleNav GPS service as an application add-on for a $9.99 monthly subscription fee, Sprint Navigation will now be available directly through Sprint data plans.

The service will be included in the existing Sprint Power Vision Ultimate Pack and the Sprint Power Vision Business Pack data plans, as well as a new data plan called the Sprint Power Vision Navigation Pack. If you have a different data plan, you may still use the service a la carte, for a $2.99 per-day fee.

In addition to the features highlighted in the Crave excerpt, Sprint Navigation will also offer the following:

• Ability to enter destination by speech rather than using text or phone number
• Spanish-language option
• Pre-trip planning site

Happy trails Sprint users!

]]> http://www.mobilemammoth.com/mobile-websites/mobile-navigtation-from-sprint/feed/ 0 http://www.mobilemammoth.com/mobile-websites/ncaa-scores-on-your-cell-phone/ http://www.mobilemammoth.com/mobile-websites/ncaa-scores-on-your-cell-phone/#comments Mon, 05 Mar 2007 05:51:48 +0000 MobileFreak http://www.mobilemammoth.com/ncaa-scores-on-your-cell-phone



March Madness is upon us, and if you haven’t used any of the mobile score alert services yet, now is a great time to start.


We posted a recent article on getting Super Bowl Scores on your cell phone, and many of the services mentioned there also provide NCAA basketball score alerts.

Update: We Found a Free Option for Sports Alerts!

While the CSTV service described below does an excellent job, it does cost money. And who wants to pay?

So we dug deeper and found a free, yet very reliable, mobile sports alert service from 4INFO. They have a simple demo of their service here. As you’ll see on their site when signing up, they have an interesting mobile alert service for the NCAA tournament this year. You can select to receive updates from your favorite team, or select the “Tournament Pass” option.

Single Team:

Select your conference, then your team, and elect to receive scores at different game intervals. It also includes an Update Trigger, which provides an update in the last few minutes of the game that it considers to be a potential upset.

Tournament Pass:

This option includes an upset alert, as well as an updated final score at the end of each remaining NCAA game. A great way to follow your standings in your tournament pool.

Again, the only cost comes from your carrier’s text messaging fees. So test it out on the remaining NCAA tournament games and let us know how it stacks up.

(OK, now back to the paid option that we originally wrote about…)

Best Premium (Paid) Option for NCAA Mobile Alerts

However, the one service that offers the most cell phone alerts for all college sports is CSTV. I started using CSTV to follow my alma mater and a few other schools in 2004, and I consistently received the halftime and final scores of those games via a text message within about 10 minutes. This was using a Sprint cell phone plan on an LG phone.

CSTV’s mobile score alert service supports the following carriers: Alltel, Boost, Cingular, Dobson, Nextel, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, and US Cellular. Of course, confirm that your cell phone plan includes text messaging (SMS).

The service costs $3.99 per month, and provides about 10 messages per month,
depending on the settings you set.

Try it out for March to follow the 2007 NCAA Basketball tournament this year, then let us know what you think! Did you get the NCAA scores on time? Would you use it again?

]]> http://www.mobilemammoth.com/mobile-websites/ncaa-scores-on-your-cell-phone/feed/ 2 http://www.mobilemammoth.com/mobile-websites/super-bowl-scores-on-your-cell-phone/ http://www.mobilemammoth.com/mobile-websites/super-bowl-scores-on-your-cell-phone/#comments Thu, 01 Feb 2007 13:16:00 +0000 MobileFreak http://www.mobilemammoth.com/super-bowl-scores-on-your-cell-phone



Don’t you hate it when your non-sports-loving side of the family plans a non-sports event during a big game? If you find yourself in this situation for Sunday’s Super Bowl XLI between the Bears and the Colts, fear not. MobileMammoth is here to help with resources to help you keep track of the big game.

NFL Wireless from NFL.com

The league’s NFL Wireless offerings do provide a few different options fulfilled through their partners. One option is simply to navigate to the www.nfl.com URL from your cell phone browser. Like many large sites today, nfl.com detects that you are browsing from a mobile device, and displays a mobile-friendly page. There are seven menu options including News, Scores, Stats and Help. Navigating to the Scores link, and then to Super Bowl, it presents you with a clean, simple display of the score, as you can see in the image to the right.
Of course, I don’t want to have to check the score myself every 10 minutes. Bring the score to me. Tell me when something happens. Me, Me, Me. For this, NFL.com has partnered with Sprint to offer the NFL Network channel on Sprint TV. While this package does include alerts, clearly it provides much more than our topic of getting NFL scores on your cell phone. So let’s look at some other options.

Super Bowl 41 Scores from SportsAlert.net

SportsAlert.net offers three different score alert packages, with fees ranging from free to $20 per year. There is no charge for the “Standard” package, which provides final scores to the sports and teams selected upon registration.

The “Custom” package lets the user select specific sports, and teams within those sports, to receive live scoring updates. You can set it up to receive scoring updates upon each score, after each period, or after lead changes, for example. This service also enables you to get scores on-demand by sending specific text messages with the team name your are interested in. In addition to scoring updates from the NFL, you can also select teams from NCAA Basketball, NCAA Football, NBA, NHL, and Major League Baseball.

Finally, SportsAlert.net also provides a “Premium” package. At a rate of $20 per year, you can select a seemingly unlimited number of teams within the sports listed above. If a user initially selects the Custom package and selects 3 or more teams, they will automatically change that to a Premium package so that it is more cost effective for the user. It’s nice to see someone looking out for their users.

Sports Alerts from Yahoo! Alerts

Of course, may of the larger Web portals/search engines/communities also offer mobile alerts. The description of the Yahoo! Alerts service from their page here is as follows:

Yahoo! Alerts enable you to get score updates on your favorite teams sent directly to your cell phone or pager! You choose your teams and when you want the alerts: start of game, every score change, when game ends, etc. Never miss crucial game updates while working or traveling.

So if your niece’s birthday party might possibly hover past kick-off time on Super Bowl Sunday, get yourself on one of these services now.
What mobile alert service do you subscribe to? How instantaneous are the updates?

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