FCC says Airlines responsible for Testing Cell Phone Safety During Flight

Nicholas Sabatini, the FAA's associate administrator for aviation safety, told the subcommittee. "If an air carrier is willing to take the time and incur the expense of testing and verifying that the cell phone usage presents no in-flight interference problems, our rules allow an air carrier to permit such devices."

An Airline MVNO is one way around the problem of having to constantly certify lots of phones. An airline MVNO could focus on the best business travelers and offer a compelling voice and data package and focus on high-end devices from RIM, Palm and devices running Windows Mobile. A lot of executives would pay for a WiFi/Cellular offering that let them use their phone in the air and WiFi in the airport.

Google Send to Phone Extension

Last week, Google released a Firefox extension that makes it easy for users to select text on a web page and send it to a mobile phone as SMS message(s). Sending messages via the Google Send to Phone extension is free, and many phone plans also allow subscribers to receive messages for free.

I ran a few tests, and it seems to work well. You highlight the text you want to send, then click on a phone icon (installed by the extension) in the upper right hand corner of the menu bar. The phone icons opens up a browser window where the text can be modified and where you enter the phone # and carrier.

It works well, and I now use it frequently. It will be great when they have integrated it with the AutoLink capability built into the Google Firefox Toolbar which I will write about some other time.

There is a company called Vazu that built similar functionality. They are still around, but their business model is made more difficult by Google's move.

Some Nits:
- A right click option to send would be nice and more intuitive for many users
- Remembering phone #'s and carriers would be nice. Not requiring the carrier would be even better.
- The biggest improvement could be made by counting the characters that are about to be sent. Messages larger than a single SMS message are broken up into multiple messages, but it would be nice to know when you are going over the limit. The problem with multiple SMS messages is that they do not arrive in order (not Google's fault), and it makes them hard to read as a continuous message on the phone.
- There's a checkbox for not resizing the window which could be removed.

GSM Cell ID Spotting with Placelab

Placelab is an interesting open source effort from Intel. Placelab provides technology and research to determine location using WiFi, Bluetooth or GSM Cell ID. I spent some time this weekend working on the GSM part of it. The larger GSM cells appear to be about 1 sq. mile in places I checked. This implies that there is sufficient accuracy for applications that don't require precise location, such as local search. Most of the search applications to date that have used cell ID location have failed because of a poor user experience and not location accuracy.

I also found a couple of small errors in the documentation. In placelab.ini, there is a parameter called "placelab.cellphone" which should be "placelab.btgsmaddress".
In addition, it is also necessary to add ../lib/BlueCove.jar at the end of the classpath directive (-cp) in runany.bat. The second item was identified here.