I assembled this guide out of necessity. It’s the only way I can decipher some of the e-mail I receive from readers.

Frankly, I should count my blessings because e-mail communication is as high-tech as I go. Meaning I’ve never text-messaged. And, the Good Lawd Hisself willing, never will.

It’s bad enough that some fools feel sooo compelled to reach out and touch someone that they walk around with a cell phone at their jaw every waking minute. Or, even worse, with one of those hideous hands-free devices impaled in one ear like a cruel medical experiment gone awry.

But at least these people speak honest-to-gosh words.

Not so in the world of text-messaging. Texters have a language of their own, and it’s worming into everyday English.

My introduction to this nuttiness began when I started getting e-mail from somebody named LOL.

Such as: “Your column today was funny! LOL”

Or: “Have you ever considered counseling? LOL”

Or: “Do they actually pay you to write that $#%*!? LOL”

I finally asked if anyone else in the newsroom was getting e-mail from this LOL person. When the catcalls subsided, I realized LOL was text-speak for “laughing out loud.”

(At this point, it is permissible for children to guffaw at Old Man Venable’s utter stupidity - after they have looked up “guffaw” in the dictionary. Oops, I forgot; kids don’t know what a dictionary is these days. Forget I mentioned it.)

In any event, that’s why I keep the cheat sheet.

With it, I’ve become familiar with a few of the more common buzzwords, like IMHO (”in my humble opinion”) and IDK (”I don’t know”).

Alas, some trick me every time. Whenever I see SWIM (”see what I mean?”), I instinctively think it refers to my morning habit of stroking laps in the West Side Y’s pool.

Even worse are the emoticon doohickeys.

I always have to consult the cheat sheet if an e-mail contains an “:-)” or an “:-(” or an “;-)” because I never can remember which means what.

(For the sane who haven’t bought into this New Age gobbledygook, those symbols translate to “happy,” “sad” and “wink,” respectively. I think.)

Of course, it is incumbent upon any geezer-in-training to gripe about members of the younger generation. Their clothes are scandalous. Their music makes no sense. Their manners are atrocious. Blah-blah-blah. This has been going on since 400 B.C.

But it does trouble me that text-messaging marks yet another chapter in the dumbing-down of the masses.

There’s nothing wrong with short, simple declarations. Ernest Hemingway, who knew a thing or three about putting words on paper, was a master of brevity.

But imagine how the world of literature would have been robbed if Santiago, addressing his giant marlin in “The Old Man and the Sea,” had merely said “BFF, LY” instead of, “Fish, I love you and respect you very much.”

BY SAM VENABLE

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Since 2005, rates to send and receive text messages on all four major carrier networks have doubled from 10 cents to 20 cents per message. This percentage of increase is on par with similar price hikes at the gas pump as crude oil prices skyrocket. In 2005, Americans paid on average about $2.27 per gallon for gas compared with more than $4 a gallon today.

Last October, Sprint Nextel was the first to introduce the new price of 20 cents per text message. AT&T and Verizon Wireless soon followed with their price hikes going into effect this spring. And this week Engadget reported that T-Mobile USA will match the other big three wireless operators in jacking up SMS texting rates to 20 cents per message. The price increase goes into effect August 29.

On Tuesday, AT&T announced that texting will cost new iPhone users more than it had previously. The old iPhone plan included 200 text messages in the $59.99 voice and data plan. But plans for the new iPhone 3G that hits store shelves next week will cost $5 extra for 200 text messages, bringing the total price of a comparable voice and data plan on the new iPhone 3G to $74.99 a month. (This is with the $69.99 “Nation 450″ bundle plus $5 for the 200 text messages.)

The new wave of price hikes comes just one year after all the major carriers raised individual text messaging rates from 10 cents a message to 15 cents per message.

So what’s with the 100 percent price hike in two years? Well, there’s nothing that has changed in terms of the cost associated with delivering this service. In fact, text messages cost carriers very little to transmit. And when compared with what carriers charge for transmitting other data services, such as music downloads or surfing the Web, the text messaging rates seem exurbanite.

Carriers limit the number of characters that can be transmitted in a text message to 160 characters. Each character is about 7 bits, which works out to a maximum of about 140 bytes of data per text message. This is peanuts compared with the size of sending or receiving an e-mail or downloading an MP3 song over a cellular network.

One blogger has done the math. If the same pricing was applied on a per-byte basis to downloading one 4MB song it would cost the user almost $6,000 to download a single song via SMS texting.

One can easily assume that the mark-up on a text message is several thousands times what it actually costs carriers to transmit this little bit of data, considering that mobile operators are only charging $30 to $40 a month extra for mobile data plans that offer 5MB worth of data per month.

The reason that carriers are charging so much for text messages is because they can. Even at 15 cents and 20 cents a pop, people are willing to pay for it. The carriers are also trying to get consumers to sign up for text messaging packages and unlimited plans that vary in price from $5 a month extra for 200 messages to $20 a month extra for unlimited texting on AT&T’s network, for example.

The massive price markup on texting and the growing popularity of texting have resulted in huge profits for mobile operators. Verizon reported that for the first quarter of 2008, its wireless customers spent $11.94 a month on data services, an increase of about 33 percent from a year earlier. The carrier didn’t break out what percentage was spent on text messaging versus other services, but there’s a good guess that a lot of the additional revenue from data came from texting. In total, mobile data accounted for about 20 percent of all wireless sales for Verizon’s first quarter.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like consumers have much legal recourse for getting carriers to adjust their pricing to a more reasonable rate. There’s nothing illegal about charging as much as the market will bear for any service.

But that doesn’t mean that consumers like it. What do you think about the high cost of texting? Are you feeling the pinch in your wallet yet? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the “Talk Back” section below.

The Calgary native may not be a household name, but among geeks who program in Java, a computer language Gosling co-created at Santa Clara, Calif.–based Sun in 1995, he’s someone to be worshipped. Some fans have trouble speaking in his presence. Others tug at his clothing to convince themselves he’s real. And among the 1,000 or so members of the Java Community Process program who toil to improve the language, he’s considered a god.

This awe of Gosling is all due to the wild success of Java, which the 53-year-old Canadian designed to work on a wide range of hardware platforms. Bits of its code are embedded in countless web pages in the form of tiny programs called “applets,” which do everything from updating sports scores in real time to calculating mortgage payments. Many cellphone games are Java-based. Banks rely on the language to process financial transactions. NASA uses it to select landing sites on Mars. Sun, which generates about US$13 billion in annual revenue by selling servers, storage devices and support services, estimates Java runs on billions of devices around the world.

But Gosling appears ambivalent about his creation. Sure, Java has allowed Gosling to feed his insatiable curiosity. He’s been able to visit famous research facilities such as CERN, the particle physics lab in Geneva, and met fascinating people, including Father Michael Gardener, a priest who walked across Nunavut opening schools. (They met when both were awarded the Order of Canada in 2007.) But Gosling is uncomfortable being called the inventor of Java, since many people have contributed to the language. And during presentations outside the company, he sometimes feels like Vanna White, someone used to jazz up the show. He’s constantly in demand, which often prevents him from doing what he truly loves: writing software, an activity he finds so engrossing he can do it straight through the night. “In some sense, the success of Java was one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me,” Gosling says.

These days, Gosling’s role at Sun, which he joined in 1984, is to be a rabble-rouser for Java. At Sun’s annual JavaOne conference in May, Gosling loaded rolled-up T-shirts featuring one of his designs — an adaptation of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks painting, but showing Sun mascots seated in the diner — into a giant slingshot and launched them into the audience. He also hosted a showcase of Java applications, including Tommy Jr., a Toyota Scion that drives itself. But the event happened in the wake of disappointing quarterly results by Sun, which is raising questions about the company’s investment in Java and, as a result, Gosling’s importance to the company.

Gosling describes Sun as “a family of people just kind of doing crazy things.” In the early ’90s, he led a group charged with the ambitious task of developing a programming language for the next generation of computing. The team settled into an off-site office and — after 18 long months — emerged with “Oak,” named after a tree outside Gosling’s office. Sun’s execs thought the device-independent language would be ideal for personal digital devices and digital television equipment, but those markets failed to go mainstream. A demoralized Gosling considered leaving Sun. But Bill Joy, one of Sun’s co-founders and then-vice-president of research and development, realized Oak’s anti-virus properties would make it especially useful on a new technology platform called the World Wide Web. Joy and Gosling convinced Netscape to incorporate Sun’s new programming language — renamed Java — into its popular browser. Sun released Java’s code to encourage programmers to develop applications, and, soon after, Java took off.

But Java’s value to Sun during the ’90s helps explain the questionable link between the programming language and the company’s bottom line today. When Java was a fresh idea, Sun’s sales force could leverage the curiosity of CIOs to pitch them on the company’s servers and support services. Now that buzz from Java has worn off. It’s become so common that it’s not a differentiator that Sun can use against its competition, which includes giants IBM and Hewlett-Packard. Java works as well on Sun servers as it does on IBM. Of course, the language would never have been so successful without this feature. But Dana Gardner, a principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, a tech consultant in Gilford, N.H., says he has yet to see evidence that Java’s popularity has directly translated into Sun’s financial performance.

Java clearly has an image problem. For one thing, Sun gives away its programs to run and develop Java applications, as well as OpenOffice (an alternative to Microsoft Office) and OpenSolaris (an operating system). With Sun’s US$1-billion acquisition of MySQL earlier this year, the company added a popular database to its open-source arsenal. Sun also provides the programming code of its software. This encourages adoption and entices people outside of Sun to contribute to improvements. “One of the reasons Java has really strong security is tons of people have pored over the source code looking for problems,” Gosling says.

The computer language also works behind the scenes. “Most people are using Java apps every day, all the time. They just don’t know it, which drives our marketing people nuts,” admits Gosling. Nevertheless, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s CEO and president, sees tremendous value in tying the Java brand more closely to his company. Last year, the ponytailed exec changed Sun’s stock ticker on the Nasdaq to JAVA from SUNW. “The number of people who know Java swamps the number of people who know Sun,” he said in his blog about the change. As for the value of computer language to the company, he wrote, “Java means limitless opportunity — for our software, systems, storage, service and microelectronics businesses.”

Others aren’t so sure. Paul Massie, the senior director of information technology at Santa Clara–based Genesis Microchip, whose display image processors are used in televisions and computer monitors, boils Schwartz’s strategy down to one of getting “the Sun brand everywhere and the money will follow.” He quickly adds, “I think he’s seriously mistaken.” Massie says Schwartz hasn’t demonstrated — or properly explained — how Sun can make money from the open-source model, holding up the company’s recent financial results as proof. He doesn’t buy the fact that having experience with Java or Solaris persuades people to buy hardware or services from Sun. While he recently bought some Sun servers, it wasn’t because he has experience using Java. “For US$20,000, it was simply a really good price-performance ratio at the time,” Massie says.

Schwartz insists an open-source approach to Sun software is the way to capture hardware and service sales. And now he has a new tool to promote. Sun’s latest much-hyped open-source offering is called JavaFX. It’s a programming tool to build “rich Internet applications.” Some of its features include the ability for users to drag applications from their web browsers permanently onto their desktops. (A demonstration of this elicited whistles and applause at JavaOne.) Its applications will be able to show high-quality audio and video. Although not in the initial release this fall, JavaFX will eventually allow software developers to monitor how people are using their own applications, such as which functions are most popular.

Following the JavaOne announcements on JavaFX, shareholders questioned the value of the initiative to the company’s bottom line. As one person put it, “OK, so how does Sun make money and add shareholder value?” Techies may love Sun, but investors are not so happy with its performance. Its stock has fallen 24% following Sun’s most recent quarterly results. Management had promised mid-single-digit sales growth, but reported a 0.5% decline. After six consecutive quarters in the black, Sun was once again in the red, with a US$34-million loss. Management revised its operating margin target to 7% from 10% for the end of fiscal 2009, which will be helped along by the elimination of up to 2,500 jobs by Q2 next year. Schwartz blamed the loss on the slowing U.S. economy, which forced American customers to postpone large orders. Shareholders vented their anger on Schwartz’s blog: “Don’t you feel shame?” wrote one, while another ever so eloquently typed, “You suck J.S.” Morgan Stanley analysts in a research note said, “With the restructuring story derailed and no real catalysts for revenue growth this year, JAVA is likely dead money for longer than we expected.” Gosling, for one, was annoyed by the reaction. “If you looked at how the company did around the world, almost everywhere we did really well,” he says.

If the company continues to lose money, expect changes. Sun may be forced to significantly cut its research and development budget, which hovers around US$2 billion per year, about the same as it was in the heady dot-com era. That means making some tough decisions about who gets what. Sun could cut investment into Sparc, the company’s proprietary microprocessor chip, walking away from a no-win fight with Intel, which boasts an R&D budget nearly three times as large as Sun’s. That might relegate Sun to competing in the low-margin commodity server market, but it could return to its roots as a tweaker of off-the-shelf technology. The company followed this strategy in the ’80s, having tremendous success in the market for workstations, powerful PCs used by scientists, professionals and engineers. Back then, co-founder Scott McNealy said, “What’s proprietary to us is the art of making a Ferrari out of spare parts.”

Sun could also cut its Java budget. Without promoting Java, Sun certainly loses a way of getting its name out there. But it could consider doing that the old-fashioned way: advertising. Sun spent only US$25 million on ads last year, which is dwarfed by its competitors: IBM spent US$1.2 billion, and Intel spent US$1.9 billion.

Gutting Sun’s Java budget would also likely mean a different role for Gosling. He could quietly spend his days writing code for Java as a member of the open-source community. It’s not hard to imagine him enjoying that, nor is it difficult to picture Gosling pursuing new intellectual pursuits. When asked if he’d like to end his career with Sun, Gosling chuckles and says, “It’s hard to tell, but I have a long list of things I want to do that aren’t Sun-related.” If another programming language supplanted Java, that wouldn’t necessarily bother him. “If someone came up with a language that’s actually kind of cool, I’d run over there and check it out.”

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To say that Spain is crazy for cell phones is an understatement. Approximately 44 million people live in Spain, but in January of this year the number of cell phones in the country reached 50 million. There are more phones than people here. While Americans might also be addicted to the cell, the Spanish relationship with the cell phone has evolved differently from ours for reasons that are clear and others that remain a mystery.

Cards, Phones and More Phones
The mobile phone isn’t just a communication tool but also an omnipresent character in Spanish culture. Proof of this is seen constantly on television. Commercial after commercial begs you to send SMS code XXXX to whatever number to get the latest Rihanna ringtone or the anthem of the Barcelona soccer team for your phone. Or to get a popular reality show logo for your cell phone wallpaper. Or to comment on a topic on the news.

Here in Spain, this is what most people think of when you say “mobile content.” A lot of money is spent on accessorizing the mobile by ordering games over SMS or on being afforded the right to see your comment crawl across the TV screen when you’ve got something to say, moments after sending a text message to your favorite show. I can’t see most Americans shelling out money for this kind of thing, but Spain leads the entire European region in purchasing this type of “content.” Recent projections show that Spaniards will download over 17 million games for their cell phones this year over WAP or SMS. Like a pampered pet, the cell phone is forever in hand, and is being primped and well taken care of by its owner.

When I first came to study in Spain in 2002, it didn’t take long for me to get a cell phone. My roommate at the time, another graduate student, produced one for me after gasping at the fact that after 3 days in the country I still didn’t have a mobile (what I didn’t tell him is that I didn’t even have one in the U.S.). He quickly pushed a standard issue Nokia on me with SIM card included, and told me what my new phone number was. I didn’t get it. How did he do that? Did he work for the phone company? His answer: “Cards!”

Examples of cell phone wallpaper

He was talking about a pre-paid SIM card, which allows for a cell phone line with no contract and virtually no relationship with the provider. Unlike in the U.S., you can easily get pre-paid SIM cards in Europe and get talking immediately. In countries like the UK or Germany, you can even buy a SIM card out of a vending machine. You use up your minutes on the card, and then “charge up” the card later at an ATM machine, a grocery checkstand or an Internet cafe. Unlike in the U.S., nearly half of cell phone users in Spain are not under contract with any carrier. Some people have one cell phone with a SIM from Vodafone, and another with a SIM from Orange or some other carrier.

My roommate’s generosity in gifting me a cell phone and telephone number was appreciated, but it was no skin off his nose. He had several handsets lying around as he constantly replaced the older ones with newer ones with better features. I thought this was specific to him but realized soon that most of the people around me in their mid- to late 20s had the same obsession.

I remember asking another roommate, on more than one occasion, if the cell phone she had was new. The answer was almost always yes. The bottom line seemed to be that because cell phones were so accessible and the relationship with the carriers so no-strings-attached, there was an incentive to always get a new one. Not being under contract or getting penalized gave these guys the ability to upgrade their phones when they got tired of them (which was quite frequently). They could then exploit the new features of their devices to the max with add-ons they ordered off TV.

Spain: Land of SMS
A few days into my new Spanish life back in 2002, someone said to me: “I’ll send you a message” I had no idea what they meant. An email? A message in a bottle? Whatever. Later that evening my phone made a beeping noise and there it was: a message. An SMS message. I hadn’t heard of one nor seen one before, but I soon found out that they were — and are — the language of choice in this country. Spaniards of all ages must spend half of their waking hours sending text messages, and they were doing it back then, when I hadn’t a clue what SMS was.

As if adjusting to a new country weren’t enough, I then had to learn a new language: text messaging. While Americans were in the dark ages of SMS, Europeans had long since embraced the technology. And that’s why Spaniards’ SMS messages — much more evolved — often look like ciphers requiring the intervention of some code expert. Ask someone to go out with you, and they might reply “NT1D” (“I don’t have a cent”). You might tell them you’ll pay and will meet them “>o<” (downtown). If they ask why you are so kind, answer “pqtqm” (“because I like you a lot”). Good thing there’s a dictionary.

Pre-paid SIM cards are easy to get

This strange code has developed over the years as a way for young people to communicate within the standard 140-character limit for text messaging and to save money on their pre-paid cards by only having to send one instead of multiple messages. Along with the jargon in Spanish, it has developed in parallel (but to a lesser degree) with the other official languages of Spain, such as Catalan and Basque.

Such has been the influence of SMS language here that linguistic experts are calling it “the biggest revolution in the language ever.” The same thing has happened in other parts of Europe, and recently French President Nicholas Sarkozy lamented “what text messaging is doing to the French language.”

Whatever it has become, in the beginning it was just a way to save money when communicating. Another very interesting (presumably Spanish) cost-related work-around that I was introduced to and quickly adopted was “the missed call.” If you are going to meet up with someone, they might say “I’ll do a missed call when I get there.” That means they will ring your cell when they arrive so you know to look for them.

The missed call means neither phone is charged a cent, and saves the caller 15 cents or so normally spent on a text message — perfect if you don’t have any more credit left on your phone card. As you might imagine, this isn’t a perfect science. If two people are just calling and hanging up on each other back and forth and not really communicating any information of substance (like their exact location), you still might not find the person you’re looking for.

Different Mobile Histories
When I returned to the U.S. the following year, I brought text messaging with me. Attempting to evangelize people I knew, I found that not a single friend in my inner circle knew what I was talking about. My close friend Andrea, now an ardent text messager, commented recently that she remembers the first time she received an SMS — from me. I remember her saying at the time “I didn’t know my phone could do that kind of thing!”

Why didn’t Americans catch on to this sooner? In looking for the answer, I found several theories. One mobile marketer in the UK, Troy Norcross, wrote something back in 2006 which seems to make a lot of sense. He said that it boiled down to two things: ubiquity and cost. Until recently it wasn’t possible to send messages to another carrier’s number in the U.S.

“Until April 2003 there were no inter-carrier agreements for text messaging,” Norcross wrote. “So if you were on Verizon you couldn’t send a text message to a subscriber on the Sprint network. The problem in the U.S. was further complicated in that there are at least three different mobile network technologies in use.”

And calling in Europe is just a lot more expensive than it is in the U.S. You can easily burn through a 10 euro mobile phone card in less than 10 minutes. With costs like that, it just isn’t realistic to make calls if you don’t have a cell phone contract. So people found a way around it, and it was SMS.

I asked tech consultant and blogger Michael Mace, who wrote a very detailed and enlightening blog post about the differing mobile cultures, why he thought the use of SMS in Europe evolved the way it did.

“Fixed-line phones were hard to get in Europe and expensive, so mobile phone usage took off there much more aggressively than it did in the U.S.” he said. “Prices for texting in Europe were lower than prices for phone calls, so people had an economic incentive to text. In the U.S., mobile service was not as reliable as in Europe, fixed-line phones were cheap, many more people had PCs, and IM was completely free. So texting never became the big force here that it is in Europe (and in much of Asia).”

SMS in Asia is extremely popular; analyst firm Gartner recently projected that the region will send 1.7 trillion text messages in 2008. In Korea for example, according to a study published late last year, Korean youth opt for SMS over email even though email is free, with people considering email “outdated.” On the other hand, in Japan, mobile email is far more common than text messaging.

Some people have several cell phones in their collection

Going Beyond Texting
Upon returning to Spain to live five years later, what’s interesting to observe is that while so much has changed in the mobile space in the U.S., not much has changed here. People are still constantly upgrading their cell phones and texting all day long, and still ordering ringtones and screensavers for their phones. But other ways of interacting with the mobile haven’t caught on or at least not as much as back home.

Here, most all of my friends are professionals but none carry Blackberries and none have an Internet data plan on their phones. They don’t surf the web on their devices, and they don’t send emails. A 2006 study estimated that only 300,000 workers in Spain used mobile email) and most don’t do anything except call and text.

Because Spain seemed so much ahead of the U.S. in using mobile for something more than just calls, one would think that media consumption on phones would be the next logical step, but that hasn’t been the case. In 2002, Americans didn’t know what SMS was but in 2008 we are texting, watching videos, reading RSS feeds and even using VOIP on our cell phones. In Spain, most people are doing none of that — but you will see a grandmother shoot off text messages like a teenager.

Europe is a large and diverse region, and Spain shouldn’t be considered by any means the country that sets the standard for what’s going with mobile content in the EU (though Barcelona does host Europe’s biggest yearly mobile conference, testament to the interest in the topic here). What I have seen happen here is that people adapt their mobile habits to their circumstances. If calls are expensive, they use SMS. And if calls are so expensive, so are data plans, so forget about using the mobile Internet. So media is inevitably left out of the mobile equation.

This begs the question: where does this leave the iPhone — the mobile Internet lover’s phone — which will be arriving here next month? It’s hard to say. I think the shiny newness factor could go over well here, but the inability to text properly on the last version of the iPhone has been blamed for weak sales in Europe.

But I also think that when it comes to content, most people here will rely on their traditional regimen of print newspapers for news and TV and standard Internet for entertainment, unless Spain follows the most recent trends in Europe, which show mobile data growth of 40% in the EU compared to last year.

What do you think? Why do you think cell phone use varies so much from region to region and culture to culture? What are people using the phone for in Europe that they aren’t using it for in the U.S. or vice-versa? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

By BUZZ MCCLAIN, F ort Worth Star-Telegram

Last update: June 2, 2008 - 9:14 PM

My 13-year-old daughter ran into the dining room in an excited state. “Watch what my cell phone can do.”

She dashed to the entertainment center and held the phone up to one of the speakers. The radio was set to the local pop station and the song was Jordin Sparks’ “No Air.”

“Now look!” she said, showing me her phone’s screen.

And there were the words: “Jordin Sparks (featuring Chris Brown), ‘No Air.’”

“Pretty cool, isn’t it?” she said, clearly pleased with herself.

“That’s impossible,” I said. “Try this.”

I put on a CD of songs I’m using in my French studies as she dialed 1-866-411-7664. In a minute, her phone spelled out “Alain Souchon, ‘Les Regrets.’”

That prompted me to make a phone call.

“The technology used by 411-SONG is licensed from a British company called Shazam,” said Sina Khanifar, a wireless expert.

“The song recognition works by recognizing a ‘musical fingerprint’ from the music being sent, and matching it to a database of more than 2.5 million songs,” Khanifar said. “The service uses patented technology from Shazam that can recognize songs even when cell phone audio quality is very low.”

Once the song is matched, your cell-phone service provider — which renames the service to suit its brand — will also tell you how to obtain related content, such as ring tones and wallpaper.

Of course all this costs money. Identifying a song ranges from 99 cents to $1.99 on most services; a monthly all-you-can-ID subscription is $3.99 via your service provider.

But you probably didn’t even know your phone could recognize songs, did you?

There are other things your cell phone can do that you probably didn’t know it could. And there are also things you might have heard can be done but really can’t. Let’s separate truth from rumor:

In case of emergency

Rumor: If you call 112 from anywhere, you are connected to an emergency operator who will respond to your call. This will work even if your key guard is on.

Truth: Um, first, the keyguard wouldn’t open on our LG enV when we pushed 112. When we manually took off the key guard, all we got was a “call cannot be completed as dialed” message. Best hope 911 is available.

Pardon this interruption

Rumor: Your cell phone can cut short a meeting or a date or other unpleasant activity.

Truth: When you register with www.popularitydialer.com, you can program it to call your cell phone at a specific time. Your phone rings, you answer it, and then you go through a prerecorded, entirely fake conversation with prompts on the other end. You get five calls for free.

Unlocking your car

Rumor: If you lock your keys in your car, call someone who has the spare key fob with the remote lock-unlock button. Have them press the unlock button while you hold your phone up to the car, and the doors will open.

Truth: Boy, wouldn’t this be great if it worked? Sadly, it did not, several times on our Suburban and Prius. Luckily, we were just testing it and not actually stranded somewhere.

Need a reminder?

Rumor: You can send reminders to yourself to take your medicine. Or buy bread. Or anything.

Truth: Jott.com is a dictation and transcription service that lets you call in messages to yourself; after you’ve dictated a 30-second message, it turns it into an e-mail or text message to your chosen end destination. So when you dictate “Pick up the kids from preschool” into your phone while you’re driving, it winds up as an e-mail on your office computer. The service is currently free.

Low on batteries

Rumor: Your battery is low, and you are nowhere near a recharging power cord. Just dial *3370#, and your battery will, somehow, get half of its juice back.

Truth: The online posters of this rumor never say what you hit after the code: Send? OK? Pwr End? We tried them all with a somewhat low battery, and nothing happened. Oh, wait, a second number to try is *4720#. Guess what? More of the same. What does work, sometimes, is to turn off your phone for a few minutes and turn it back on. You often get just enough power to call to say you’re going to be late.

Hit by lightning

Rumor: If you are hit by lightning while carrying your cell phone, injuries will be more severe.

Truth: Examinations of folks hit by lightning who were carrying a cell phone or other electronic device — iPods, too — showed more severe burns than usual. There even have been trace burns that follow the trail of the wires to the earbuds.

Updating your blog

Rumor: You can update your blog from your cell phone.

Truth: Yes, once you set up an account at www.blogger.com, you can post updates and photos via your cell phone by sending missives to goblogger.com. From there, you get additional routing directions. You can also create a new blog via cell as well. The service is free.

Want to bet?

Rumor: You can settle a wager or dispute with your cell phone.

Truth: All you have to do to get the answer to anything, at any time, from any place, is to register with www.mosio.com. Members of the Mosio “Qniverse” (question universe) are standing by to look up your answer. You can ask about locations, recommendations, trivia and more. Pretty cool, and it’s free.

Truth: Um, first, the keyguard wouldn’t open on our LG enV when we pushed 112. When we manually took off the key guard, all we got was a “call cannot be completed as dialed” message. Best hope 911 is available.

Truth: Examinations of folks hit by lightning who were carrying a cell phone or other electronic device — iPods, too — showed more severe burns than usual. There even have been trace burns that follow the trail of the wires to the earbuds.

Updating your blog

Rumor: You can update your blog from your cell phone.

Truth: Yes, once you set up an account at www.blogger.com, you can post updates and photos via your cell phone by sending missives to goblogger.com. From there, you get additional routing directions. You can also create a new blog via cell as well. The service is free.

Want to bet?

Rumor: You can settle a wager or dispute with your cell phone.

Truth: All you have to do to get the answer to anything, at any time, from any place, is to register with www.mosio.com. Members of the Mosio “Qniverse” (question universe) are standing by to look up your answer. You can ask about locations, recommendations, trivia and more. Pretty cool, and it’s free.

Three of the new phones have exchangeable front and back colors, and all the phones feature a stylish design, bold colors, and multimedia options. The new phones have exchangeable front and back colors, and all the phones feature a stylish design, bold colors, and multimedia options.

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) on Friday unveiled four phones in its new Supernova line that focus on personal style and versatility.

More Personal Tech InsightsWhite PapersThe Friday ITch: Season 2, Episode 1 Demo: MagicJack Three of the new phones have exchangeable front and back colors, and all the phones feature a stylish design, bold colors, and multimedia options.
The flagship 7610 Supernova is a slider, and it has a 2-inch screen. Users can get Web-based e-mail on the phone, and it has Bluetooth 2.0 capabilities. It also has a WAP 2.0 browser that can use EDGE wireless networks.

The cell phone also sports a 3.2-megapixel camera with an autofocus feature and dual LEDs for flash. This can be used with the Theme Colorizer application, which allows users to get a color for the phone’s wallpaper by capturing a picture. The 7610 can also record videos, and the photos can be uploaded to Flickr or with Nokia’s Ovi service.

For entertainment, the phone has a digital music player, a built-in FM radio, and an MPEG-4 player. Music and movies can be side-loaded through the MicroUSB port onto the 64 MB of internal memory. A MicroSD slot can also be used for additional capacity.

The 7610 will support U.S. frequencies, and is expected to cost about $355 before carrier discounts.

The 7510 Supernova is a clamshell device that’s a slight step down from the 7610. It has many of the same features as the 7610, but it only offers a 2-megapixel camera, and has only a single LED for flash. Nokia said the device should cost about $284 before discounts, and it supports U.S. wireless bands

The candy-bar-styled 7310 Supernova drops flash entirely for its 2.0-megapixel camera, but it retains the other features of its counterparts More of an entry-level device, Nokia said it works on U.S. networks, and it would cost about $244 without discounts.

The 7210 Supernova rounds out the list, and it has many of the same features as the 7310. The major difference is that it’s the only Supernova device that doesn’t allow for swappable covers. It does have a glossy finish as opposed to the textured look of the other phones. It should cost about $189 before discounts, and it doesn’t support U.S. bands.

Still, there are some genuine tricks with cell phones, which for some reason continue to be among the best-kept secrets in technology.

You can buy a bigger battery and talk two or three times as long without recharging. In terms of longevity, phone batteries are rated in millamp hours (mAh or mh), the typical battery being around 500 mAh. However, most manufacturers offer more powerful replacements, and you can also by non-OEM batteries from Internet outfits like factory directcellu lar.com For example, a 1400 mAh battery for a Motorola Razr costs a mere $27 if you shop around on the ‘Net, almost tripling the life of the original unit. With my original battery plus a new oversized one, I can get almost a week of talk time between charges.

About the only downside is that oversized batteries ugly up sleek phones. Most are thicker than normal and require a replacement battery cover that bulges out from the back of your phone. Still, do you want a live phone or a dead fashion statement?

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You can back up your phone numbers and texting addresses to the ‘Net or to your PC. And you can enter new numbers from a real keyboard.

I’m still surprised at how many people don’t understand how and why this all works, and think they need some fancy PDA and data plan. Even cheap phones can store hundreds of phone numbers. Most folks never use this capacity because 1) it is a pain in the neck to enter data and 2) it is a pain in the neck to lose all your work if you change phones.

I pay Verizon $3 a month to back up my phone data every day to its Web site. I can log into my account there and edit the contents of my phone, add new numbers, then download the data to the phone. If I switch to a new phone within Verizon, I can clone my numbers to it. I also have a copy of Susteen’s Data Pilot software and cables ($70 to $80), which lets me plug the phone into my PC and edit and download phone numbers, calendar info, ring tones and other goodies directly to any other phone, including my wife’s or, and if I switch providers, to any new phone I get.

You can switch phones online. It wasn’t too long ago that you had to pay a hefty fee and talk to service personnel to disable a damaged phone and install a new one, the presumption being that in all but the rarest cases, you’d be buying a phone from the same company that sells the service. Providers have bowed to reality and allow you to install compatible equipment you bought elsewhere. Register for your provider’s Web site. After that, you just punch in the unique alphanumeric code of the new phone (generally found under the battery), and it switches your number over. You may have to download some program updates, but that’s about it. So it is quite feasible to own a backup phone, quickly activate it when the old one fails and download your old phone directory in minutes.

Where to get a backup phone? Next time you upgrade, keep your old phone; it will work just fine in a pinch. You can also find replacements online. Discontinued models can be quite cheap - I just picked up a brand new but identical replacement for my ancient Motorola from Verizon for $50.

You can use your cell phone as a broadband modem for connecting your laptop or desktop machine to the Internet. As with switching phones, this is getting easier. It used to be expensive, since providers wanted to sell dedicated data plans for $50 or more a month - in addition to your regular phone bill. You can get this today for as little as $15 per month, though it could be bundled with other services you may not need, and you’ll face restriction on volume. Or you may be able to connect for just the cost of the call.

There are a lot of variations here, so you’ll need to do some research to find the best method and deal. For example, some phones will connect wirelessly to a PC via Bluetooth; others will require a data cable like the one you use to download phone numbers. Service can be as slow as an old phone modem (14.4 kilobits per second, sometimes free) or broadbands speeds of up to 1.4 megabits. And some don’t work at all. If your cell company doesn’t officially support your brand of phone for data services, you can sometimes find workarounds on the ‘Net. The best, most up-to-date source for this is Howardforums.com.

Finally, an obvious one that I’ve been using for years: Any cell phone will throw a little bit of light. But set your wallpaper background to plain white, and you have a nice little long-life flashlight that’s always with you.

In her new post, Zigler will oversee all NBC Universal entertainment sites, and will continue to head the NBC Universal Digital Studio and NBC Digital Entertainment, including NBC.com.

Zigler is highly valued within the company for her “extensive experience in both marketing and programming,” according to Ben Silverman, co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and Universal Media Studios.

Zigler has served as EVP of NBC Digital Entertainment and New Media since August 2006, where she was responsible for leading the NBC.com digital team in strategic efforts to connect NBC’s prime time, late-night and daytime programs to Web users.

She added the NBC Universal Digital Studio, headed by Cameron Death, to her portfolio in April 2008.

Previously, the veteran NBC marketing executive was promoted to EVP of current programs at NBC Entertainment in June 2005, where she oversaw the production of NBC’s slate of comedy and drama series.

Separately on Monday, NBC Universal announced the redesign and expansion of the NBC Universal store online.

The newly revamped marketplace attempts to offer viewers a better experience for browsing, locating, and quickly purchasing both physical and digital products, from wallpapers to subscription services.

The redesign also marks the launch of the official online store for Olympics-related event merchandise in anticipation of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

I have watched quite a few and my best one has to be “seven words you can never say on television” so funny I wet myself, George Carlin lost his life due to heart failure and he will be sadly missed but never forgotten, he had a history of heart troubles and went to Santa Monica’s St. John’s Health Centre on Sunday afternoon, he went there because he was complaining of chest pains, he later died that evening. Carlin is a genius and produced 23 comedy albums, three books, 14 HBO specials and a few TV Shows; he has also been in a few movies.

George will no doubt want us to continue listening to him and what better way than having him as a ringtone on your mobile phone, we are just answering to people’s requests and that is why we are doing this. Make your own MP3 Ringtones / Realtones from any song by George Carlin with ToneBee Ringtone Maker using your own MP3 or CD. No Software - No Contracts - No Tricks. FREE for a limited time. In just three steps you can create ringtones from any MP3 songs you have on your computer, simply: Visit ToneBee

Our prayers are with George Carlin and all our thoughts are with family and friends, RIP George.