ArchiveMay, 2007

…here comes Li Ying. A student at East China Normal University, Li will debut in June as the mobile phone anchor at Shanghai’s Fifth Media, the first 24-hour live channel tailored specifically for cell phones.

CCTV.com reports that Li Ying beat out competition from other local universities at the first Mobil Phone Anchor Competition last Sunday and will become the first anchor of her kind in China (and probably the world). In China, cell phones are known as the “fifth media� after newspapers, broadcast (radio), television, and the internet.

Fifth Media is a subsidiary of Dragon New Media Group, one of China’s largest Chinese-language media and entertainment groups.

If you’re like me, you have one or two friends (or clients) who will just keep calling your cell phone, but you don’t want to turn off or silence it completely because you’re waiting for another important call. Now Sprint allows you to “silence” just those one or two people – by changing their ring tone. With a new Sound Effects ring tone called Silent Ringer, Sprint lets you still receive those calls but not be interrupted by them.

The best part? The ring tone is free – just visit the Sprint Digital Lounge to download.

According to a May 16 announcement by RIM CEO Jim Balsillie, BlackBerry cell phones equipped with Wi-Fi capabilities will be available later in 2007.

This official announcement will be good news for the many BlackBerry aficionados wanting to make their favorite home-away-from-home (or office-away-from-office) device more productive in more places.

While rumors about a Wi-Fi-enabled BlackBerry have been floating around for a few years, other cell phone manufacturers - like Nokia and Motorola - began offering Wi-Fi-capable models to the wireless public as early as 2006.

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A comScore survey released today revealed that two-out-of-three mobile TV subscribers are male, and nearly half are under the age of 35. The study measured attitudes toward the burgeoning new mobile media, and included the views of over 2,000 cell phone users.

The detailed data highlights several interesting trends. For starters, 56% of mobile TV users say they prefer to watch an “entire TV show” rather than condensed content designed specially for mobile devices — that seems to contradict some industry assumptions about the consumption of video via cell phone. In addition, 53% of the folks surveyed prefer “general content” (like news) to “focused content”.

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