Blackberry Becomes a Racing Cert

It’s a Bank Holiday here in the UK, so we’ll be back with more news tomorrow. In the meantime, we leave you to ponder on a couple of points from the mobile world. The first is the news that the Queen has apparently become somewhat addicted to the Blackberry she bought a few weeks ago, to the point where it is driving her husband, Prince Philip to distraction. Not for checking her email – surely, she has a man to do that sort of thing – but for checking the racing results. Given the news, it can surely  only be a matter of time before Her Majesty starts distributing her Christmas Message via SMS. Sure, it would only give her 160 characters to play with, but that might help her keep it to the point.
On a less positive note, I have had two pieces of SMS Spam in the past week. The first came from a company called NoWorriesLoans.com, offering me “loans for any purpose, even if you have Bad Credit!” NoWorriesLoans.com is part of a company called ‘Phones on Finance’ which, to my knowledge, I have never had any dealings with, making the SMS approach illegal under the Privacy in Electronic Communications laws. At least they gave a phone number to call to opt out of further text messages, suggesting ignorance lies at the heart of the campaign, not that that’s any excuse.
The second was of a rather more dubious nature, offering a “Popstar SexVid!”and a link to a Wap site hosted by blingmob.com which I declined to follow. In this case, with Blingmob describing itself as “The mobile Internet’s most entertaining portal”, they really should know better,
In my experience, SMS Spam hardly amounts to even a trickle at the moment, but two messages in a week suggests it could be ramping up. If so, it’s bad news for everyone.
To all our readers in the UK, enjoy the day off if you're having one. If so, stop reading this and get down the beach.

David Murphy
Editor