Try as I might after comparing at least a dozen deals for home phone service, I’ve yet to find any situation that will yield to me no monthly line charges. Because I rely mostly on my mobile for phone communication, I’ve been hoping to limit the size of my monthly home phone bill by finding a greatly reduced plan. I concede that I’ve positively failed in this pursuit. I have managed to find several great deals for cheap phone calls with the assistance of noted United Kingdom consumer assistance for home phone service website Home Phone Choices. I had used Home Phone Choices once before when trying to find the best deal for a new phone line and to be honest I could of saved myself a great deal of trouble by checking them for all of the best deals on lines first. While free line rental has continued to elude me, I have discovered what I call virtual free line rental. This price reduction is achieved by packaging by service from one of the United Kingdom’s major phone line providers with other needed services such as my television and broadband connections. Once again I saved myself a great deal of time as I found all several money saving opportunities for television, home phone and broadband explored and explained at homephonechoices.co.uk.

The phone – which features an 8.1-megapixel camera, music player, high-speed web access, Google Maps, and a touch-screen interface – will be the “flagship handset” in Sony Ericsson’s 2010 range.

Sony Ericsson said that the X1 will boast a new “user experience platform” that enables people to organise their contact information, social networks and personal media through an “open, human and intuitive user experience”. The interface – known as the UX platform – will be overlaid on the existing Google Android foundations to provide “unrivalled” integration of social media services, and Sony Ericsson says it will be the first mobile phone to “truly humanise the way people interact with their phones”.

There are simple precautions and software available online that can dramatically reduce the annoying spam you get. Below are some rules when dealing with spam:

• Do not reply.
• Never buy anything from a spammer.
• Avoid forwarding chain letters or petitions.

The spammer can find you:
• When you Post a message on a newsgroup
• Give your address to an online retailer or your own website or when you sign up for an internet service
• By asking a spammer to remove your address from the mailing list.

After the recent revelation by Dell that it has generated over $3 million in sales from Twitter, it’s easy to think that the service is an easy way for a retailer to make money. Habitat, however, found out how easy it can be to get it wrong when it began tweeting last week.

Twitter users can use its ‘hashtag’ function to identify the topic(s) of their tweets by adding tags preceded by a hash symbol to their tweets. Those interested in the topic can then follow or search all posts containing that hashtag in order to keep in touch with the latest developments.

Habitat’s first tweets took advantage of the large numbers of Twitter users following hashtags such as #iPhone, #mms and even #Mousavi to widely promote special offers, reports Social Media Today. Examples included:

HabitatUK: #Mousavi Join the database for free to win a £1000 gift card.

Habitat’s misuse of the hashtag function has caused outrage amongst Twitter users, who see the messages as little more than spam. “It’s hard not to label @HabitatUK as a spam-bot. Terrible thing to do to a premium brand,” says one Twitter user.

The messages have now been deleted from Habitat’s Twitter account and a spokesman told Sky News Online “This was a mistake and it is important to us that we always listen, take on board observations and welcome constructive criticism. We will do our utmost to ensure any mistakes are never repeated.”

Really good news for all mobile phone customers. This is what we looking for years.

The world’s biggest mobile phone makers announced a deal today agreeing to a universal standard phone charger that will work on millions of handsets made by different manufacturers.

Until now, phone makers have included a charger with every new handset, often with each charger only working on one type of device. From next year, everything from the iPhone and the BlackBerry, to phones made by Nokia and Sony Ericsson, will be made to work with a single charger that will work across many different brands of phone.

Ten companies, including Apple, Motorola and Samsung, have pledged to start making phones that can be charged using a single charger from next year. For phones sold in Europe, the manufacturers will adopt the micro USB connector across all their devices, already the standard on handsets such as the BlackBerry.

“It’s a small thing, but a big issue for the consumer,” said Ernest Doku, an analyst for mobile phone comparison site, Omio.com. “It was simply a foolish situation. But phone makers wanted to have their own technology for each phone to be stay a step ahead. It’s good for the manufacturers to swallow their pride, as this will be for the end user’s benefit.”