Verizon Wireless announces Mobile VCast, Ringback Buddies and more
11 comments
Filed in General, Verizon
On the eve of the upcoming CTIA in San Francisco, Verizon Wireless yesterday jumped the gun and released information about several new mobile services. Here is a brief description of some of the new things “The Network” has in store for us:
- Social Life. A social network aggregator that allows you to access several social networking sites, such as My Space, LiveJournal,and Photobucket, from a single interface. Noticeably missing from the list of supported sites is Facebook and Flickr. You can view messages, post comments and even set your profile picture to an image taken with your phone. The service is $1.49 monthly and will be available on Get It Now phones.
- Ringback Buddies. Targeting the teen crowd, Verizon will launch, Ringback Buddies, a Facebook application that lets you view and share the music that you your friends enjoy and purchase that music directly. Once purchased, you can assign the music to a friend so that person can hear their favorite music when they call. Ringback tones incur an annual $1.99 fee and the Ringback tone service costs $0.99/month.
- CityID. Got an LG Voyager, then you will be able to see the originating city and state of an incoming phone call. The service will only support 20,000 cities at launch. The service will cost $1.99 monthly. We ponder this service and ask why would we want this?
- NY Times through the VZW Portal. Now targeting the business users, Verizon will deliver NY Times content that will include blogs, news, movie show times, and stock quotes directly to Mobile Web enabled handsets. This service will be offered as part of the Mobile Web data package; either $15/month for Unlimited access or $1.99/MB for pay as you go data usage.
- Mobile VCast. Targeting the new handsets with full HTML browsers, Verizon has launched a mobile version of their VCast service. You can share the videos through a social network like Twitter, email a link off to friends, create a playlist, and save videos to a favorites list. Once again, Mobile Vcast in included as part of a Unlimited data package. Designed mainly for the LG Dare and LG Voyager, Blackberry and Windows Mobile users can also access Verizon VCast videos from your mobile browser. This Mobile Vcast service is live now so you can point your browser to m.vcast.com to check it out.
That’s all for now, folks! Stay tuned for more announcements as CTIA begins.
Tags: CTIA, mobile services, Ringback, social networks, VCast, verizon wireless
more nickel and dimeing for mainly stupid stuff, same old Verizon.
Permalink | Reply
LOL, Dtest54 I was just going to share those exact sentiments.
Nickel and Dime for everything. Somehow they managed to make having the best network not that important anymore.
Permalink | Reply
The City ID is because VZ won’t allow anyone to access/update there LIDB/CNAM database (wireless or land line) so they’ll only deliver the city/state ID for calls that don’t originate on there network. And now since they are not making any money on LIDB lookups since other carriers won’t pay them 2 cents per call they are going to charge there own customers.
Permalink | Reply
Wipe your @$$ $3.909 per month!!! How much of my paycheck would they like!
Permalink | Reply
i just tried the mobile vcast and it seems to be better quality than youtube. finally!! something i can watch at work..
Permalink | Reply
The iPhone already does the City/State for unknown numbers, it’s kind of sort of not totally useless but I wouldn’t pay $2 for it.
Permalink | Reply
Wow!!! Big Red charges for everything. On other phones like the iPhone, if the number is not saved in the phonebook, it will display the state of origin.
Permalink | Reply
Sprint entertainment lineup was tops on anywhere with at least 8 live channels at least 50 different on demand options
Permalink | Reply
Ringback should be a banned feature until they allow custom Ringbacks as opposed to Kanye samples.
Permalink | Reply
And my hatred for VZW grows further. Sure, VZW is my carrier, but I truly cannot wait until my contract ends. Charging for every single feature that should really be free is just ridiculous. They may have the best overall network, but since that doesn’t apply where I go to school, it’s really not even worth it.
Permalink | Reply
it’s the name of the game - they charge you everywhere they can … they market all the bells and whistles as costing very little, but if you stop to add up all the ‘only $1.99′ services, you realize that you’ve paid a few hundred extra dollars at the end of the year for basically fluff services. meh.
Permalink | Reply