Around the world freely in 160 days

Starting in New York City on September 18th 2007, Alex Boylan and Zsolt Luka started on the journey of a lifetime.

Its been a long ride covering more than 40 000 miles and after just over 160 day they have successfully managed to circle the globe for free using nothing but the hospitality shown by fans from around the world. The guys today arrived safely back in New York City, bringing to an end the 6 month trip around the world.

During this amazing journey Alex and Zsolt made hundreds of new friends, saw amazing places and learned some exciting new things.

The guys even went so far as to test out some great new mobile technology. After a stop over in South Africa the guys implemented the newly launched fringME! widget onto their website. A Nokia N95 was sponsored by fring and away they went. Although life on the road was fast and furious and mobile internet connections somewhat slow and sometimes outright junk. The guys did not despair and made the regular effort to keep trying despite the sometimes poor experience, this early stage beta testing helped fring pave the way for revolutions in future technologies and for this the fring team would like to thank them.

Thank you and Welcome home guys!!

Nominate fring SA Blog

Hey guys

Just a friendly reminder that this is the last day to nominate your SA Blog of the year - So if you haven’t already done so please nominate this Blog for this years SA Blog Awards.

fring now supports the motherload on UIQ

A few days ago we released fring V3.30.6 for Symbian handsets, the new version had many great new functions, the sad news to some though was the fact that V3.30.6 only supported Symbian handsets.

At fring we believe in freedom of choice and we know that not everyone uses Symbian handsets, so in a quest to bring freedom of choice to even more fringsters we worked around the clock and have just released the latest version of fring for UIQ handsets.

The wait may have been long, but let me tell you it was well worth it, as of today fring version 3.30 for UIQ has the following additions.

1. The much anticipated fring file transferring - swap files with any other fringster or PC buddy (currently MSN only, but more to come shortly)

2. Improved chat functions - you spoke, we listened and using your ideas and suggestions we’ve created new fring chat feature s making the experience even closer to your PC chat sessions - give it a try - you won’t be sorry

3. Real time chat notification -See when your buddies are typing in real time.

4. fring language localization. (fring in 6 different languages) - English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Italian, Russian – what can I say ? You asked for it, we translated it BTW: fring will automatically install the default language based on the handset language; you can always go to the settings menu to change your language manually.

5. and the one many of you have been waiting for fringtones & Vibrate

Go on guys get the latest version here then have fun and please tell us what you think.

Create your own power with nanogenerators.

Scientists in the US have developed microfibre using nanowires that can be used in the clothing industry, when worn by a person the fabric can generate enough energy to power a cellphone or iPod.According to Zhong Lin Wang, roughly “80 milliwatts per square meter” of fabric is generated. The only big hurdle at the moment is that the nanowires do not like water and currently the team is looking for a solution so that the fabric can we washed.

Nanowire technology is really heating things up in the mobile industry and I personally can’t wait for the day when I can charge my fring handset via my t-shirt.

Worm attacks Nokia Symbian S60 handsets

A nasty little worm known only as the “SymbianOS Worm” has been infecting handsets world wide. The virus which runs on Symbian S60 devices attaches itself to your contact list and mails itself out to all your contacts.fringsters be warned, this can seriously drain your airtime balance. The virus sends out a MMS which contains either of the following files Beauty.jpg, Sex.mp3 or Loce.rm. Lets face it, if where dumb enough to open sex.mp3 then you deserved to be zapped. If you recently received such a file don’t open it, the virus can easily be deleted by simply deleting the MMS, however open it and your contacts and phone bill are doomed.

If it’s too late and you need serious help this may be the best place: smobile systems

Thanks to our Spanish Blogger for this update.

fring makes new friends at Mobile World Congress

As mentioned in an earlier post fring attended the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. We got a few early pictures back from the guys on location and as you can see the guys were very hard at work making new contacts and deals. We will update everyone with more news and pictures from the conference in a few days.

Roy working hard as usual and this year he is bringing home a whole new crew

Shocking statistics revealed about cable theft

Communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri recently revealed that theft of copper cables cost Telkom R195.5 million during 2007, Fibre optic losses where about R5.5million during the same time period.

The recent estimates exclude lost revenue usually made from phone calls.
This loss is estimated at about R368.1 million bringing the total loss during 2007 to about R569 million.

This basically means that roughly 10 942 jobs where stolen by cable thieves during 2007. (Estimate calculated using basic salary of R52000.00 PA per worker) The stats above only include theft of Telkom cables. Total theft across all networks including Eskom and Spoornet is about R5 billion per year.

fringsters, not only is cable theft bad for the economy it also negatively effects our fring experience. Lets all work together to stop this epidemic. Please do you part by reporting cable theft today!

To report Telkom cable theft call: 0800 124 000

Opera mini clocks 35 Million cumulative users

Don’t you love a great success story? Just a few short years ago Geir Ivarsøy and Jon von Tetzchner sat together and founded the little know software company called “Opera Software”.

Within just a few short years the company has grown from 2 guys in a basement to over 423 staff members in 44 countries. Sadly after only a few years of seeing the growth of Opera Software Geir passed away from the Cancer. Things at Opera though did not slow down and if Geir where here today he would be proud to see just how huge Opera and especially Opera mini has become.

In a press release in April 2006 Opera mentioned that they had 2 million users, In less than 2 years things have changed dramatically though. Opera mini recently clocked more than 35 million cumulative users and current growth stands at just over 100 000 downloads a day.

Opera’s CEO - Jon von Tetzchner, was recently quoted as saying “Opera Mini proves that consumers have the power to change the industry. When you download Opera Mini, you cast a vote for a better mobile Web experience. Operators and device manufacturers all over the world have listened and are now helping to shape a new era of openness.” intomobile.com

Opera mini revolutionizes mobile browsing, and includes some very elegant features include desktop like rendering of pages and amazing zoom function to allow for easy reading and viewing of pages.

fringsters Opera mini is still available freely here. Get it today!

Nokia unveils N96, N78, 6620 and 6210 at Mobile World Congress

Nokia is starting the year off with a bang, they have just unveiled four new handsets at this years Mobile world conference in Barcelona.

The new handsets include the Nokia N96, N78, 6220 Classic and 6210 Navigator.
According to Nokia planned roll out of these handsets is scheduled for the second and third quarters of 2008. fring will work around the clock to support these new devices.

Other great release from Nokia at this years show includes Nokia Maps 2.0 and the exciting new media sharing services Nokia officially calls Ovi.

Fringsters things are rapidly heating up at Nokia this year and we will continue to update you as we receive further updates.

To bad I missed this years conference in Barcelona, would have been really cool to play around with these great new handsets from Nokia.

Vodacom quietly rolling out 7.2 Mbps HSDPA

Goodnews or badnews?

First a little Goodnews! According to our friends at mybroadband.co.za Vodacom has been quietly upgrading many of its towers from 3.6 Mbps to 7.2 Mbps.

MTN recently announced that their 3.6 Mbps and 7.2 Mbps networks are live in selected locations, Vodacom at the same time announced that there 3.6 Mbps network was available country wide.

In a surprise move Vodacom delayed officially launching their 7.2Mbps network rather opting to slowly deploy the network properly before launching.

Vodacom’s new 7.2 Mbps connections is currently only available in Gauteng, Cape Town and Durban to a few selected trial users. The selected users are currently playing around with the new speeds and some have reported that speeds are significantly faster than Telkom’s DSL 4 Mbps.

A recent poll on mybroadband.co.za also showed that if competitively priced 75% of users would choose Vodacom’s 7.2 Mbps connection over Telkoms 4 Mbps ADSL. (These stats where taken after 433 votes had been counted)

Now for that Badnews!

As if Eskoms load shedding isn’t causing enough problems in the Country, Telkom announced that their submarine cable to Malaysia has been damaged, (this is the 5th submarine cable to be broken in a two week period world wide) then a few days later cable theft syndicates had cut another cable leaving Telkom with only one international data line. This huge lack of bandwidth is causing a severe internet backlog and it is being felt right down the chain. We can only hope the new fibre cables that are “in the pipeline” will bringing much needed data to our shores sometime soon.

At the moment though if you are using Vodacom’s 7.2 Mbps, MTN’s 7.2 Mbps or Telkom’s 4 Mbps connection, it seems for now we are all on the same sinking ship.

lets hope things improve real soon.