Mountain View Cellphones

by www.mountainviewcellphones.com

Sprint recently introduced a great loyalty and a great program for new customers.  It’s the Sprint Premier program.  This is the best program in the world for loyal customers that spend more than $69.99/month on cell phone service and families spending more than $99.99/month.

Some great advantages:

1.  Equipment upgrades for the primary line EVERY YEAR.

2.  Promos and coupons to save more.

3.  Advance notice of products and new services.

4.  Entry to special contests to win more prizes.

5.  Sprint plan optimizer to change your plan without contract extension.

This is a great deal.  A new phone every year at the lowest prices for the best and higher paying customers.  Fabulous.

This is unmatched by ATT, Verizon, and T-mobile.  In fact, I’m kind of worried as to how they are going to pay for all these new phones.

There is a small catch…you need to have a stellar payment history to qualify and have plans that are high enough.

3/19/2009 by www.moutainviewcellphones.com

It’s now very feasible and inexpensive to use your mobile phone to process credit card transactions.  This only works with Nextel, Blackberry, and Windows mobile devices, but it’s a very elegant and fast solution. 

You only require software that cost $100 for the phone and a merchant account to process credit cards.  We have great partners who can give goods rates for processing if anyone is interested.

All you need to do is activate the application, put in the credit card number, process, and you get an authorization and capture in 3 seconds.  It’s very fast. 

To improve the system, you can buy an additional portable bluetooth printer and swipe for $150.  This provides the ability to get a full swipe rate for the card (generally about 0.25% better) and print a receipt for customer right on the spot. 

This is great technology we can help your organization with.  

Lastly, with Sprint Blackberries, you pay about $20/month less than ATT and Verizon and you get GPS navigation for free.   Now, you can get where you are going and you can transact at the lowest rates.  Any questions, feel free to inquire with us.      

3/13/2009  by www.mountainviewcellphones.com

Clearwire announced their anticipated rollout of the WiMax network in the coming years.  I did some numbers to quantify the estimated population that will be covered by its roll out (beyond Portland and Baltimore).  Given the coverage maps from the website, the network areas extend beyond the city proper so I took the metropolitan area population estimates (data from Wikipedia).

Existing Markets: 10.1MM

Portland 2,000,000

Baltimore   2,600,000

Seattle  3,263,497

Honolulu  371,657

Charlotte 1,897,034

This year growth:  26.6MM

Atlanta  5,278,000

Chicago 9,500,000

Philadelphia 5,800,000

Las Vegas  1,986,146

Dallas/Ft. Worth 6,100,000

Next year growth:  35.8MM

New York  18,815,988

Boston  4,400,000

San Francisco  7,000,000

Washington DC  5,300,000

Houston 5,600,000

Now, I could be underestimating some areas, but we have about 72.6MM from Wikipedia numbers for the surrounding metropolitan areas of these cities by 2010 announced.  They have many other smaller cities already lit up from the previous Clearwire, so we can add about another 10.0MM to be generous and about another 5.0MM in yet to be announced locations, and we get about 87.6MM people covered.  This is still behind the 120MM announced by 2010, so I think there must be more cities to be announced at the end of 2009 when they have some data about their progress to see test the rate of expansion.

What’s also important to notice about their plans is that they are targeting the large regional areas for service.  For domestic business, people travel to and from these major regions so they will have cover at the destination.

Though the numbers currently don’t add up to their press release, I think the roll-out is still to early to predict.  The roll-out could be much faster if the adoption rate of the Wi-Max service was much faster than anticipated.  Given the great rates and mobility offered by this solution, it has the chance to be the sole Internet provider to many customers and to take away business from DSL service in hoards.  This is especially true for small businesses that are held captive to DSL service where cable doesn’t reach (we happen to be such an operation currently but we are not alone, we have a phone number we don’t use just for DSL service).

Provided we are in a recession/depression, a conservative roll-out plan is the wise business strategy and to match cash burn with cash flow as much as possible is reassuring.

Lastly, their balanced roll-out will be necessary to keep device manufacturers interested in providing WiMax devices.  Broadband data cards are a great first start and should be able to carry the business for 1 year, but beyond this, we should be expecting devices that leverage the new bandwidth in innovative ways…that SKYPE/Google Voice mobile phone?

3/4/2009 by www.mountainviewcellphones.com

From Wireless Week: 

 But analysts from GC Research think that Palm’s new webOS, which will premier on the Pre, is all that matters.

“Our research indicates the platform is better architected – as far as developers are concerned – than Windows, Symbian/Series 60 or BlackBerry. We believe that the platform will provide much higher performance than generally believed, and that Web developers will find it extremely easy to develop or translate their code to webOS. We believe based on technical considerations that the webOS developer community will grow quickly, turning Palm into a major contender in the smartphone space.”

My initial thesis of Palm WebOS going after the larger web development community may actually come true.  The WebOS appears to be better than anticipated and better than the IPHONE.  Go PRE go…. 

3/4/2009 by www.mountainviewcellphones.com

There has been a rumor in the blogosphere about the PRE release date on March 15th by Sprint.  This is incorrect.  The release of Palm PRO is on the 15th of March. 

The blogosphere has gotten to hyper on the PRE release.  Sprint and Palm need time to make this a very successful launch, build up inventory, get as many bugs as possible out of the software, and to place promotion and ads with the major networks.  This all takes time to do it right.  The earliest we can see the PRE is May or June time frame this year.

The PRO is launching on the 15th not the PRE.