Today, T-Mobile went nationwide with an interesting service called T-Mobile HotSpot @Home (I guess @Home trademark was up for grabs?). To summarize, this service allows you to use your wireless router to connect to the T-Mobile network.

In other words, it uses Wi-Fi internet to make and receive calls, text messages, et cetera instead of the neighboring cell tower. Pretty cool? Yeah, this is an awesome feature.

For homes in choppy coverage areas, such as mine, this service could be an invaluable solution to bad reception.

Technology

This technology, being fairly new, is currently only available on two T-Mobile phones.

UMA, the telecommunication system that HotSpot @Home is based on, allows seamless switching between cellular network and wireless internet connections.

That’s right, you can start a call while at home, grab your things, hop in the car, pull away and never miss a beat. The only hold-up will be a short audio drop which comes back within a second.

Summary

The service costs a little bit extra, but it allows you to make and receive unlimited calls. Currently, via a promotional offer you can add it for $10 for a single line or $20 for a family plan. When the offer ends, the service will be $10 more.

While I’m not a T-Mobile customer, it’s great to see at least someone in the cellular industry innovating so I give them props for that. For T-Mobile though, this innovation is a necessity as they have the smallest network and thus, more spotty coverage.

Update: Demo video by PhoneScoop is available! Watch it here.

via Yahoo! News

If you watch TV, you’ve probably heard of Helio, a new niche cell phone company that has been airing their commercials like crazy, especially on MTV.

Not surprisingly, the company doesn’t have its own network. Instead, the service is built on top of Sprint’s already existing CDMA network. Having access to such a big and powerful network, Helio offers quite a big range of features from web browsing, using the fast, EV-DO technology, to the coolest built-in GPS service that pinpoints exactly where you are anywhere in the world and plots the location on Google Maps, allowing your friends (using the same service) to find you easily using the Buddy Beacon.

All this is pretty hi-tech, which means they’re aiming for a younger crowd that would actually enjoy and want all these features. More specifically, they’re targeting the young social networking crowd and there’s no cooler way to network than to know where all your friends are at any moment (yay GPS).

More on GPS

I thought of Helio today after reading Paul’s article about phones with built-in Global Positioning Systems and his prognosis about this feature to be more popular in the future. He also proposed some interesting services that could be built on top of GPS + maps, including recommendations of restaurants depending on your location.

Features like this would actually be beneficial to more than just teens on MySpace (which by the way is built in their latest phone Ocean), but also to the rest of us. If marketed correctly, parents would want to get Helio family plans to always know where their kids are located (with child’s permission of course). Businesses could easily keep track of workers (I believe Nextel already does that). Families can find cheapest gas in their area and find the best route to work from that gas station. Possibilities are endless.

Services utilizing GPS?

A whole world of opportunities opens up when you combine mobile phones, GPS and the internet. A brand spanking new service called Down2Night (review soon) could definitely have some fun with these features. How many times do you find yourself sitting in a boring empty bar while overpaying for watered-downed drinks? If you’re over 21 and like to go out, you’ve bound to run into this problem in the past.

Down2Night solves this problem by sending you all the hottest spots for the days you choose straight to your phone via a text message. The service is already very useful and I will sign up when I move to San Francisco, but imagine sitting in that boring bar, pulling out your cool GPS-enabled phone, hitting up their website and in a less than a minute, find other local bars with directions, specials, pictures, ratings, etc.

iPhone + GPS

This is something I will definitely miss in the upcoming iPhone as no mention was given about a built in GPS feature (yet Google Maps is integrated). Perhaps it’s something we can expect in iPhone 2.0, but who wants to wait that long?

After some Googling, I found that apparently, Cingular (now AT&T) and Apple are jointly working on various applications for the phone that will be available not long after the initial release. You can also use WiFi to approximately find your location using the hotspot you’re connected to. Even more, using the built-in Google Maps, you can simply select where you are currently located, but all these options are just extra steps that GPS can solve automatically and that’s what a consumer would want (I know I do!)

Conclusion

I agree with Paul: This is definitely something to keep your eye on as it’ll be huge in the coming years. While writing this post, I’ve already jotted down some ideas that will be revisited in the near future. If you’re an entrepreneur, keep your eye on this. If you’re a techy consumer, you’ll want these features on your next mobile device.