 Delving into the world of mobile phones |
This week's Digital Planet is out and about looking at the latest in mobile phone technology. Gareth Mitchell and Bill Thompson meet Motorola's top engineer at London's Symbian Smartphone Show and find out what happens to your old phone when you recycle it.
Solar powered mobile phones and wind powered base stations are just some of the latest ideas from the mobile phone maker Nokia
Digital Planet speaks to Padmasree Warrior, the company's chief technology officer about the future of the mobile world and the latest in smartphone development.
Some 896 million mobile phones were sold last year across the world according to the GSM Association, but what happens to the old handsets?
Less than 4% are recycled in developed countries.
Those handsets that are though can be completely reused says Sarah Bond from Fonebak - a company that specialises in phone recycling.
It is now possible to send text messages in Ethiopia after a two year block by the government; however these have to be in Roman characters.
The local languages though use another alphabet - the Amharic alphabet - and now Ethiopians will be able to buy handsets that actually use these letters.
Digital Planet spoke to Elizabeth Blunt, the BBC's Addis Ababa correspondent, about the complexities of introducing this new language to the mobile world.
Introducing a new language to the SMS world is very difficult, particularly as it could be argued that we are still a long way off having mastered English on the mobile phone.
Do you get frustrating with predictive texting? Does it come up with silly suggestions that leave you no option other than switching that function off?
Digital Planet met up with Andrew Glen from KeyPoint technology - a company which is developing "intelligent dictionaries" for smartphones.
But can this software learn quickly enough to be of significant use?
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