Consumer Guide for Today's Media

In yet another striking example of the power of investors, Motorola has decided to split into two entirely separate companies to appease cries for improved market shares.

Photo from ABC News

Investors have been urging Motorola to increase profits ever since its chief executive Ed Zander warned them about potential losses in 2007.

Make that former Chief Executive Ed Zander; the new Motorola split 86-ed him.

The company recently changed its profit estimate from between $11.6 billion and$11.8 billion to between $11.8 billion and $12.1 billion.

In the land of billions, those two projections are drastically different.

As quoted in Soft32.com, Bernstein’s Paul Sagawa stated that the profit drop was linked to a war between Motorola and Nokia. Each company is battling it out in markets where phones are becoming increasingly cheaper.

“What I want to hear is that they comprehensively address their cost structure,” said Sagawa. “They need to understand that they can’t win a price war with Nokia.”

It seems as though Motorola has sustained enough wounds to retreat and redraw the battle plans.

The two new entities will be Mobile Devices and Broadband/Mobility Solutions. Both will be publicly traded.

Will the new split appease the investor gods? Or is Motorola flogging a dead horse on the battlefield?

With the two new companies, Motorola has the opportunity to sharpen their focus in two different areas.

Little else is known about the functions of the two other than Mobile Devices will make the physical phones while Broadband/Mobility Solutions will encompass the technologies supporting the phones.

If each new company can restructure their management and improve their individual productivity, they may get back on track.

I have a love/hate relationship with texting. First off, I hate to talk on the phone, so texting is a convenient way for me to tell a person the ONE thing I want to tell them without having to deal with actually listening to any boring peripherals and tangents such as his/her thoughts or feelings (kidding?).

A machine of death playing innocent

I am also a cruel, cruel hypocrite when it comes to other people texting. I can’t stand it when someone is texting while I am talking to him/her in person and I think those that text in the movie theater should be waterboarded in a pool of their own blood (kidding?).

What has made me most nervous about texting ever since I joined the bandwagon is that it is corroding the English language. Even in my cleverest of friends, I have noticed an increase in incidents of misspellings and downright horrible word usage. I get it; texting is meant for shorthand and slang and nobody wants to hear me complain. However, I have always made the extra effort to use capitalization and punctuation in my text messages because I don’t want a cavalier attitude towards grammar in that realm to bleed into my daily usage.

As it turns out, my uncharacteristic, self-righteous prudishness may have safe guarded me from turning into a freakish zombie who converses solely through inane emoticons.

A recent Mercury News article, citing a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, says two-thirds of high school and middle school students have “accidentally used instant-messaging style in their academic work.”

Two-thirds!

The article also states: “A quarter admitted they have used smiley faces and other emoticons in their papers. Half confessed to informal punctuation and grammar, and four in 10 take typing shortcuts such as "LOL" to express "laughing out loud.”

Smiley faces in academic papers? What the hell is going on?

I don’t know about you, but if I were a teacher grading a stack of papers, I would incinerate any assignment containing a smiley face while gleefully texting “OMG, U R @ an F in my class! ☹”
Amanda Lenhar, senior research specialist at the Pew project summed it up eloquently (and sans emoticon) by saying:

"Now the teachable moment for parents and teachers is to talk about what makes informal writing and what makes formal writing - and what's appropriate in each of those spheres.”

Lenhar is right, and more compassionate than I, in asserting that we should take this opportunity to explore slang and make sure the blurring of situations in which it is applicable does not take place.

OK, so that’s one danger of texting that seems fairly mild, but how do you feel about your texting gadget controlling you while you sleep?

A story in the Statesmen explores the new and eerie world of sleep-texting. Apparently, people are actually texting so much in their daily lives that they are able to go through all of the rather complex motions to send text messages in their sleep. Another troubling point is that they are able to do this largely because they sleep with their phones!

So some of you might be thinking, “Well, texting is gradually assassinating my school work and social functions and taking over my body while I slumber, but…eh, it’s a small price to pay for being able to send concise messages to my friends while suffering through a boring lecture.”

Well…did you know that texting also KILLS??!!! [cue dramatic music and sounds of text typing followed by screams/explosions]

A Google search of “death by texting” yields several stories of pedestrians killed by people driving while texting.

This picture is metaphorical

A few odd exceptions include a prison guard who was too busy texting to stop an inmate from being beaten to death

And then there's the college student who fell 50 feet to his death while trying to sit on a balcony ledge during a particularly precarious bout of texting.

Obviously, these cases are rather extreme and involve some poor judgment ☹. Like many useful inventions, the cell phone and its texting capabilities are best used in moderation and with common sense. I’m hesitant to suggest any blanket legislation barring texting while driving, but I also don’t want to collide with some texting teen who eulogizes me with “OMG just killd sum1! Not kewl!”

In short, think before you text and live in the serene knowledge that, provided your phone doesn’t spur you towards a lemming-like path to carnage, you will live long enough to die from the tumor your phone has already implanted in your salivary glands

TTYL!

Admittedly, I can’t imagine a reasonable use for this device other than the George Costanza attempt in Seinfeld to record what people say about him after he leaves the room. That being said, this is pretty cool: the audio technology company, skyestream, is offering subscribers to get in on a little espionage with the SkyeSpy application.

Basically, SkyeSpy lets the user interact with his/her phone to receive audio that the phone is picking up in its area. With the application, you can essentially leave your phone in a room and if the phone detects any sound, it will automatically record the audio which the user can hear from a different number. You can also call your own spy-phone during recording and it will silently answer to allow you to hear real-time audio.

Think of a use yet? I know I have; variations on the Costanza ploy come to mind. I’d love to be able to casually leave my phone at a friend’s get together only to hear what was said after my departure. I think there is a bit of eavesdropper in all of us and it would be hard to use this newfound power for good rather than evil.

Of course, skyestream maintains the service is for other lame uses such as baby monitoring. Booo! We all know it will be used for better, more sordid purposes than waiting to hear junior burp.

I can envision this being used in the dirty-dealing, backstabbing world of politics. Imagine the new world of sound-bytes that could be opened! Obviously, standard privacy laws apply, but once you’ve caught somebody saying something they thought was for a limited audience, the effects could be pretty damaging once they get out.

The service seems pretty reasonable for such gadgetry. A trial use is only $1 and it can be purchased for $18.

It sounds a bit too good to be true, like x-ray glasses from some dime store comic. Even if it does work,I can see it being fun for the first few days, but the novelty probably wears off after a bit. Of course, the previous statement could be a red-herring to make you think I won’t consider buying the service and you’re being recorded RIGHT…THIS…MOMENT…

Not really, but I think we’d all do well to mind our tongues from now on out, even when we think we’re behind closed doors.