Phone Bulletin

With the job market stagnant and unemployment still high, many Americans are well-versed in the job application process. They know how to perfect their resumes, prepare for an interview, and search out poorly-advertised opportunities. They probably also know those things that can set them back in the search process: cover letters with mistakes, an off-putting attitude, and any distractions that impede their job search.

Among these distractions many people would consider tech gadgets such as smartphones. While smartphones certainly have a wide range of excellent uses, they are also the ultimate distracters, capable of turning your attention away from friends, meetings, errands, and – of course – your impending job search. So how can a smartphone help the employment process, besides simply providing web-browsing access? Well, as always, there’s an app for that. No matter what your career goals or needs, there’s probably an application out there designed to help you out.

Here are six of the best and most creative job search applications out there:

-Interview Buzz

This app provides common interview questions and a variety of interview tips, ranging from body language to dress to salutations. Furthermore, with Interview Buzz, a user can save comments and mark certain questions for later review.

-Resume PRO

An easy-to-use resume builder, Resume PRO gives smartphone users the ability to quickly upload information and make a resume or standard cover letter. Both documents can then be saved as a PDF for later use.

-Job Finder

There are many job search apps out there, and such internet stalwarts as Career Builder and Monster.com both put out popular products. But only a few applications provide aggregate listings that are drawn from all the major job search engines. Of these, Job Finder is one of the best out there.

-LinkUp

LinkUp is similar to Job Finder in that it pools job information from various websites. But rather than focusing on employment databases, LinkUp gets its data from over 22,000 company websites. It combs these websites daily and then posts any new openings on the app.

-LunchMeet

If you’re looking for networking opportunities, especially with like-minded professionals in your area, LunchMeet may be able to facilitate a gathering for you. It operates by using data from LinkedIn.

-Resunate

Resunate is an application that will read and analyze your resume to insure that it will get through electronic filters and actually get read by a live person. It does this by looking for keywords and comparing them against the job description.

These are just six of the many job search applications out there. While sitting at home and wasting time on your smartphone may certainly impede your search process, this does not mean that the phone cannot be used to further your goal. If you’re currently seeking a job – or if you think you may in the near future – you might want to give these apps a look.

While Ice Cream Sandwich is in many ways already “so last year,” chances are that most users of the brand new Android operating system will be introduced to it this year. With that said, many Android users familiar with older generations of the OS are still unsure as to what is distinctly different about Ice Cream Sandwich over Honeycomb and Gingerbread. Let this article help you sort it all out. The following are the most important new features of Android you ought to know about:

Revamped User Interface

The latest Android interface is much more elegant and user friendly than previous incarnations. As far as customization is concerned, homepage button and widget sizes are entirely up to you. All the while the bold vibrant colors of the latest OS contrast beautifully with the default glossy black shading and background.

Beaming Between Android Devices

Beam is a new technology for Android that essentially enables users to share content such as map directions, photos, and music files with each other without plugging anything in. It’s especially useful for those with multiple Android devices as it allows for instant transfer of data between the two.

Enhanced Control Over Network Usage Monitoring

One notorious problem of many smartphone owners is keeping track of network usage and avoiding the penalties accrued from going over data limits. The latest version of Android gives users a much more detailed and nicely designed breakdown of network usage.

Evolved Gaming Possibilities

While most people will prefer their PS3 or Android tablet over a smartphone to play video games, trends are making it apparent that consumers are spending more money on downloadable games on their phones instead of traditional platform titles. Those with Ice Cream Sandwich will be able to plug a controller into their phone, among many other gaming-focused additions.

Improved Voice Recognition Technology

With competition coming in the form of the iPhone’s Siri app, the Android team understood that the clumsy voice recognition tool featured on former versions needed to improve. While far from a personal assistant app, the new voice recognition technology for Android is a much needed improvement, featuring more controls during recording and better editing features.

Futuristic Facial Recognition Security Feature

While you may think this is an instance of saving the best for last, the truth is that while this new feature is certainly the coolest of all Android updates, it’s far from optimum. Good for a demonstration, in practice this “security” feature can be cracked with a photograph, or unusable in low light. Regardless, it’s a first generation technology that’s sure to improve with time.

Ice Cream Sandwich isn’t going to be making history. But those who designed it certainly made some improvements over former versions of the Android operating system. While many factors go into deciding whether or not to buy a new phone, rest assured that for the most part the new additions to Ice Cream Sandwich make it a certain selling feature for the phones that carry the OS.

If you’ve ever asked your Siri what the meaning of life is and received an ambiguous answer, the reason could be that Siri feels lonely, cut off from the vast panoply of incredible apps that could be sharing the workload. Why should Siri have to do everything? From music to data storage to place-based messaging here is a list of apps that can greatly improve the utility of your smartphone:

Spotify—Spotify is the free music database we always dreamed of, and now you can have it on the go. If you’re okay with a little of advertising here or there, you can essentially have every song ever made for free. A mobile database of millions of songs that are accessible any time of day. Not a bad deal.

Dropbox—Dropbox is a free cloud service for storing and sharing data. This is an easy way to bring all of your documents, photos, and videos into one place and make them accessible online or offline to work colleagues, friends, or clients. It is also an invaluable tool for collaborative projects, file synchronization, and data backup.

Pandora or Last.fm—These two music streaming apps are both very popular and essentially offer the same service, utilizing different algorithms. They both allow users to create playlists based on recommendations and pre-stated musical tastes. Your best bet here is to download both for your smartphone and see which one works better on your particular device.

Foursquare—A place-based messaging service that revolves around the idea of checking in at a location and receiving points for doing so. Foursquare is a social network but it’s importance to you could be much more based on its advantageous financial opportunities, as many local businesses offer discounts and promotions based on Foursquare use.

LinkedIn—Get rid of your business cards and resumes, the future of employment networking is LinkedIn. Having it as an app makes your phone a mobile career finding device. You no longer need to carry around a rolodex of your business connections. Keep your resources, business and job leads consolidated in one place while also networking with other professionals in your line of work.

So the lesson here is that if you use Siri for your iPhone, you shouldn’t have to ask her questions about music, file storage, local deals, or business connections. There are a wide variety of apps that will help you with these sectors of your life. The apps listed above represent excellent tools for business organization, personal recreation or both.

AT&T, once just steps away from acquiring T-Mobile and becoming the world’s largest and strongest mobile provider, probably now wishes that it had never proposed the deal in the first place. Last month, the initial merger plans were not received favorably by the Department of Justice, which announced its intentions to oppose the deal and fight AT&T’s efforts in court. This action stood to kill the proposed $39 billion merger; to win the court case, the DOJ would merely have to prove that a combined company of AT&T and T-Mobile would hurt the public interest by limiting competition in the mobile industry. Experts predicted that this would be easy to establish, insuring that the deal would not proceed any further in its current form.

Regardless, AT&T planned to fight the DOJ by continuing litigation and by selling off T-Mobile assets – up to 40% of the company, some predicted – in order to insure that the merger mobile provider would not be large enough for the DOJ to prove, during the court battle, that the merger would decrease competition. It was expected that AT&T would look to sell T-Mobile assets in pieces and to small providers, thereby insuring that it was increasing overall competition just as it simultaneously sought to decrease it.

That plan, however, now appears to have fallen through. In recent weeks, AT&T was in talks with Leap Wireless International, Dish Network Corp., MetroPCS Communications, and several international buyers, all of which were interested in carving up sections of T-Mobile. But talks with Leap Wireless have reportedly now fallen through. According to reports, Leap Wireless believes that AT&T will never win DOJ approval for the merger, even if it sells off 30 to 40% of T-Mobile assets. Consequently, the company does not want to make financial commitments to a deal that stands to fall through. In light of Leap Wireless’ withdrawal, other suitors have ceased negotiations as well, effectively giving AT&T no place to dump those excess T-Mobile assets.

When AT&T goes to court in the coming months, then, it will likely present the DOJ with a merger proposal that has not been modified much from the original – a proposal that is almost certain to fail. At this point, the company may be best suited to drop the case, try to renegotiate the settlement it owes to T-Mobile, and try to move past this whole debacle. AT&T needs to look to the future, after all, and it appears increasingly clear that the future does not include T-Mobile.

Last Tuesday, the National Transportation Safety Board made a landmark recommendation to United States lawmakers, calling for a complete ban on the use of cell phones by drivers of moving vehicles. The ban is certainly based on a reasonable level of evidence: distracted driving deaths on American roads would actually be dropping if it weren’t for the added factor of increase cell phone use. Over 3000 people were killed last year due to cell phone related distractions, while investigators contend that the number could be much higher by virtue of the fact that dead drivers are unable to confirm whether or not they were distracted by a cell phone. It’s a modern habit that seems to be doing more harm than good. Read the rest of this entry »

When comparing the relative strengths of smartphone models, there are plenty of data points and indicators that can be used to support any particular company or platform. You can use market share, sales data, revenue figures, and more temporal numbers, such as quarterly shipments and retail sales. When comparing Apple and Android, the two major players in the mobile world today, these indicators, taken together, paint a blurry picture of relative strengths. Yes, Android has a larger market share, and yes, Apple still enjoys greater revenues. Yes, all signs indicate that Android continues to grow, but the iPhone 4S was a big success, next year’s iPhone 5 stands to be even more sought-after, and few would argue that Apple remains the industry’s standard-bearer.

Amidst all this fog of war, industry experts and analysts have begun looking to application information to determine relative strengths in the marketplace. The number of apps sold, created, and regularly used can be a potent indicator for current success and future growth, according to past studies. This metric has been applied to the Windows Phone, which currently stands at a distant third in the market. Data showing a rapid increase in app creation and sales spurred analysts to predict continued growth and vitality for the Windows Phone in the coming year.

But for Apple and Android, the app comparison is wrought with complications. In other words, app data for the two is hard to compare, since Apple tightly regulates its applications while Android does not. This has led to frustrations with Android, since the platform’s apps are an easy target for malware. But it has also caused some developers to grow tired of Apple, who resent that the company imposes deadlines for submitting apps before the Christmas holiday. A delay in gaining approval or a glitch found post-submission could translate into thousands of dollars of lost sales on Christmas Day, when apps are downloaded at a far higher rate than normal. At the end of the day, all these benefits and detriments aside, the Android and Apple app platforms function so differently as to make comparisons difficult.

But this difficulty does not extend to specific apps that can be seen as indicative of the market – and, consequently, of the Android-Apple battle – as a whole. These are apps that most users have on their phones and access regularly, the foremost among them being Facebook’s app for smartphones. Facebook makes an application for both Apple and for Android, and the company has historically favored those it made for the former. Facebook launched its app for Apple a year before it launched to Android – 2008 vs 2009 – and, since then, the iPhone app would regularly be the first to get an update. This trend, however, has suddenly shifted in recent weeks. Just after news came out that Android’s Facebook app had surpassed Apple’s in users and in activity, the social media giant released its Timeline update for Android almost a week before it did the same for Apple.

This is a small indicator, to be sure, but it remains a notable one nonetheless. If Facebook continues to favor Android, there is a good chance that this reflects the preferences of developers and of users, at least in the short-term, as the industry looks towards next year. Either way, it should make for an interesting 2012.

If you have any money invested in RIM, the company who makes the once popular Blackberry line of smartphones, it’s probably a wise decision to unload your stock as soon as possible. Things are not looking up for the phone manufacturer and won’t be getting better any time soon. According to a report from CNN Money, their stocks are down 77 percent and are at their lowest since 2004.

After a worldwide service outage and several failed product launches, it looks to be the end of the line for the once iconic Blackberry. What could have been one of the top names in this next generation of smartphones has been reduced to a shadow of its former self. In order to fully understand why the Blackberry name has been dragged through the mud, it is important to take a look at some of the mishaps the RIM corporation has taken over the past several years. Read the rest of this entry »

Whether you have an iPhone, Android, Blackberry, or even a Windorws powered phone, there is a good chance you have downloaded and installed the Spotify app. Spotify is the revolutionary software that enables users to access virtually any song at any time through their computers or smartphones. While the sheer music sharing capabilities of the service are spectacular, most people don’t realize the implications and modifications their smartphones will receive if they upgrade to the premium service.

Increased Storage Space

Because you are accessing Spotify from a cloud server, the storage space on your smartphone is free from large MP3 files. This gives you increased access to your phone and allows you to fill your storage space up with more apps, software, photos, and other files that will make your smartphone more than just an MP3 player. According to an article on CNN, Daniel Ek considers music to be an important part of life and should just occur naturally without limitations such as hardware space.

Limitless Virtual Library

Along with the increased storage space, Spotify gives you access to things you have never even considered listening to. On the fence about purchasing a new album? Don’t worry because you can listen to it for free through Spotify. By paying for a premium subscription, you are giving yourself access to instantly customizable collection of playlists.

A Pandora Substitute

Most small businesses and restaurants use the streaming Pandora service in order to keep their customers entertained. While this service was a unique and innovative feature in the past, it has since become antiquated and obsolete because of Spotify’s radio capabilities. According to Wired, the new Spotify radio feature allows users to pick a genre or artist and continually skip songs in order to get the playlist that works for them. Pandora and Last.fm allow only limited access on smartphones, which means more people will be flocking to Spotify’s easy to use service.

Complete Cloud Integration

If you are ever with a music snob or even if you hear a good song on the radio, you no longer have to commit the title and artist to memory in order to listen to it later. By searching for a song while you are out, you will have access to it in your car, at work, at home, and anywhere else you can access the Internet. Instead of fumbling around with actual MP3 files, you will have simple access to everything via the cloud.

The people thought that MP3s were going to be the end of the digital music revolution were completely off. Spotify has rendered the MP3 obsolete and given those with access to 3G or 4G networks a completely versatile and convenient method to access any type of music they want. If you consider yourself a music fan an have not signed up yet, you are missing out.

As you may have heard, AT&T’s proposed $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile USA has hit a roadblock – a roadblock that may not be penetrable. After weeks of speculation regarding the antitrust issues posed by the deal, the Department of Justice announced its opposition and its intention to battle the merger in court. Legal experts predict that the DOJ will emerge victorious, effectively killing the deal. After all, they say, the DOJ only needs to prove that the merger would significantly reduce competition and, consequently, be detrimental to the public interest. The size, consumer base, and marketplace power commanded by a marriage of AT&T and T-Mobile would likely make this easy to prove.

Even with this writing on the wall, AT&T has announced its intention of fighting the case in court. This means that there are a range of possible outcomes: AT&T could win outright, it could win by selling off T-Mobile assets and appeasing regulators, it could lose and revert to the status quo, or it could lose and enter into a joint venture with T-Mobile. These are the main possibilities, although there certainly are more out there.

So what does this mean for the consumer? How will the market change if each one of these outcomes came to pass? On that note, here is a quick breakdown:

AT&T Wins The Case Outright

This is an unlikely outcome, as aforementioned, but if it came to pass it would probably have the impact that regulators fear. With the inclusion of T-Mobile, AT&T would quickly become the dominant player in the mobile industry. It would control most 4G phone plans, not to mention smartphones overall, and it would be well ahead in terms of market share from its main competitor, Verizon. Whether this would result in increased rates is impossible to say with certainty, but competition and consumer choice would surely decrease.

AT&T Wins After Selling Off Assets

AT&T has reportedly explored selling off T-Mobile assets – up to 40% — in order to gain DOJ approval. These assets would be sold to small mobile providers, thus insuring greater competition in the marketplace. For the consumer, however, AT&T would still catapult to dominance in the industry. There may be more options for people who are flexible with their phone choice, but those who want the hottest new smartphones will increasingly find themselves turning to AT&T.

AT&T Loses, Reverts to Status Quo

It would be incorrect to assume that the status quo means that nothing will change for the consumer. If AT&T loses the case, it owes $4 billion in break-up fees to T-Mobile. Analysts predict that T-Mobile would use this cash to shore up its network, improve its marketability, and gear up for another sale. This time, the sale would probably take the form of a merger with Sprint. For the consumer, this would mean three major players in the industry: AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint/T-Mobile. The three way battle for dominance would heighten competition and possibly drive down prices.

AT&T Loses, Enters Into a Joint Venture

If AT&T cannot succeed in buying T-Mobile, it still may choose to enter into a joint venture between the two companies. While this certainly has its pros and cons for the mobile providers involved, the impact on the consumer is likely to remain small. For all intents and purposes, AT&T and T-Mobile would continue to have a good deal of independence. There is a chance, though, that some stores may be closed.

The actual outcome of the case remains to be seen, not to mention the effect it has on the mobile phone consumer. It’s quite clear, though, that the proposed merger stands to considerably shake-up the industry, for better or for worse. For that reason, we’ll be closely watching.