Holiday phone calls..

no more...I wrote this while traveling to Peru this past Christmas but just now getting to publish it. I turned my phone on Christmas day to find one voice mail, I guess nobody loves me? until about thirty text messages from friends wishing me a “merry xmas” came through. Some were your regular SMS text messages, and some MMS which included pictures, animations and even sound. Some were directly sent to me, others were sent to the entire phonebook. So it seems we have gone from sending cards in the mail, making phone calls Christmas day, scheduled ecards to now sending holiday cheer through our cell phones. Why wouldn’t we right? For us forgetful ones we can get these out as we are opening gifts, that way nobody will think I forgot about them. Sending an ecard is an option but I doubt anybody is checking their corporate or personal email Christmas day. It’s mobility, getting your message to virtually anyone anywhere in the world if you are a GSM subscriber like me. I was in Peru on my Cingular cell phone and got these messages when I wanted it and had the option to accept them or deny them.
GSM allows you to take your cell phone anywhere in the world pretty much and be able to roam of networks and receive calls, well in this case more text messaging at a cost of course but being able to have this option may be priceless.

To me it’s about the flexibility and mobility that enables me while roaming between networks to receive calls. I guess I didn’t really see the importance of this until this trip where having my blackberry not work was pretty annoying, and getting txt from friends made me feel at home too. It's a good thing we have associations like GSMA, I recently read about their trials since NexTone's IP Multimedia Exchange (IMX) powered four of the seven GPRS Roaming Exchange (GRX) carriers' trials. These trials which to many operators around the world is highly important as they plan on using IMS to handle multimedia services such as messaging, Talk over cellular, video sharing, and gaming in the future.
Now that the holidays are over I’m looking through pictures of friends and I notice one thing. Everyone is holding a cell phone! Either talking on it or sending a txt or juts getting ready to do either one.. where has the excitment of talking to your friends and family over the holidays gone? as long as they remember it's what counts I guess