Business travelers traveling overseas with a mobile phone that supports international roaming should be aware as to how some calls are billed. Many people assume, incorrectly, that if they allow a call to ring and then go to voicemail, they won’t be charged.  In actuality, such inaction might result in a billed call due to a phenomenon known as “tromboning,” a process where the call goes through an extra circuit to get to its destination (imagine a trombone player pulling out the slide, thereby creating an extended route from mouthpiece …

We’ve recently heard from multiple business travelers who used their T-Mobile G1 smartphones on overseas trips.   All had a common complaint: they followed T-Mobile’s recommended guidelines to turn data roaming off yet they still received a bill for hundreds of dollars of data usage during the trip.
A report from our client RJ, a road warrior who flies to Europe several times per month, was typical.  After purchasing his new G1 and turning data roaming and data synchronization off, his bill for data roaming was $319.55.  T-Mobile customer service did agree …

The landline phone, while nowhere near extinction, is something that fewer and fewer people rely on.  Where are all of your phone numbers stored? Your mobile phone, of course.  How do your friends reach you? Same answer. Besides, you can’t send a text message to a landline phone.
But what if your mobile phone gets poor reception at home or the plan you are currently on doesn’t support hours of catching up with friends?
T-Mobile HotSpot @Home is a fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) service offering that allows you to make unlimited domestic calls …

It’s been said that the telephone is one of the most important business tools ever invented.  Today, given the popularity of the mobile phone, that statement is more true than ever.
Why is it then that many business travelers fall off the communications grid when they travel internationally?
Perhaps the greatest reason is the fact that the United States has multiple mobile telephone standards (the two most popular are CDMA and GSM, but there are others as well).  The rest of the world, with the exception of Japan and some parts of …

RESEARCH IN MOTION BLACKBERRY PEARL
Both T-Mobile and Cingular offer the BlackBerry Pearl by Research in Motion, although only T-Mobile has the new white Pearl.  The Pearl is an 88 gram quad-band device with a 240×260 color display.  It supports GSM/GPRS and EDGE (Enhanced Data for GSM Evolution) and includes a memory expansion slot for a MicroSD card.  It supports BlackBerry e-mail, public instant messaging via AOL, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo, corporate instant messaging (Lotus Sametime), an HTML browser, and uses RIM’s SureType keyboard technology.  Phone features include voice activated dialing, …