In a national park, the call of the wild: Is it cellular?
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As he hiked up a steep trail winding into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park a few days ago, Don Barger reached into his pack, pulled out his cell phone - and turned it off.
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Imagine watching TV on your handheld while sitting around a campfire. Or making a free telephone call over the Internet from your mobile phone while strolling down the street.
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E-mail, text message or cellphone call? Making contact can be an adventure.
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By Dan Sorenson, The Arizona Daily Star, Tucson  Sep. 15--There's something croaking at the International Wildlife Museum.
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For campers at Isle Royale National Park, sighting a gray wolf is a rare and thrilling experience. At least, it has been.
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A corridor of the wild through the high country of North America - Yellowstone to Yukon - is becoming a reality.
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By SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS  Santa Clara, Calif.- If the Internet can reach the middle of the Amazon jungle, then it can probably reach anywhere.
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âIf lovinâ this phone is wrong,â pines Etan Horowitz , âI donât want to be right.â He calls iPhone âthe most fun and easy to use gadget Iâve ever laid my hands onâ and says that âcarrying it in my pocket made me feel connected to the world the way I do when Iâm surfing the Internet on a high-speed connection.â In fact, âSafari, the iPhoneâs Internet browser, lets you display up to eight Web pages at once, and itâs easy to move among them.â Horowitz âwas also impressed by the battery life, which gave me nearly six hours of talking, Internet browsing and video watching before I needed to charge it.â
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By Steve Grant, The Hartford Courant, Conn.  Feb. 11--The Adirondack Park in upstate New York is nearly 6 million acres of rugged country -- bigger than Massachusetts -- though it is not one mass of contiguous wilderness.
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Not since the introduction of the cell phone has the plain old home phone been in for such upheaval. The device long used for landline calling, recording voice mails, and storing phone lists may find itself replaced.
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The airwaves that carry billions of calls, text messages and e-mails have become one of the hottest corporate properties. Not only are they in demand  by a nation of 240 million mobile-phone users, they are also in short supply.
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(InfoWorld) - Forget isolation and relaxation. For the seriously connected geek of today, vacations just aren't what they used to be. An informal and completely unscientific poll of InfoWorld readers revealed that -- although a few certified techies unplug completely when on vacation -- most elect to stay at least somewhat connected with their regular life; thanks to the ever-broadening range of cellular and wireless networks, most of them can. [See InfoWorld's Top 10 geek vacation list.] Jeff Helm witnessed the transition at one vacation spot: "I first took the family to Pigeon Forge (near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park) in October 2001. I walked across the hotel parking lot to the new public library to get on the Internet and check mail. I was told I would have to fill out a form, pay $5, let them hold on to my driver's license, and swear that I wouldn't 'conduct any business' or credit card transactions of any kind." Fast-forward to August 2006: "We went to the same hotel. I got out of the car to check in, and my PDA gave an audible report that it found a wireless signal. Yes, the same library was now beaming invitations to connect to the Internet to everyone in the area. Every hotel â¦ did the same. I checked e-mail at the outside mall, waiting for a patio table at the restaurant, and just about every place I went. I shut off the audible alert because the thing was going off constantly with all the networks." "The Outer Banks of North Carolina have a full complement of Net hotspot and cell-phone coverage capabilities," writes Peter B. Young. "I like to sit in the shade of an upper deck on our mansion-of-the-week, my sturdy old laptop plugged into an outlet in the living room or often out on the deck itself, and let 'er rip -- as gentle southern breezes caress my worn and wounded body." Rand Foster recommends cruising the San Juan Islands in northwest Washington between                                                     Vancouver Island and the mainland: "There is Wi-Fi at every marina." Brad St. Pierre found the perfect combo in Canada's Northwest Territories: "At the Bayside B and B in Yellowknife, I could watch the lakeside airplane and boat activity from the lounge or deck all day while surfing the Net. With almost 24 hours of sunshine, it's never too late to do the things you forgot to do while you were online." High-tech contractor David G. Evans found a way to have his vacation and get paid for it, too. "I was on call for production support. I spent a few weeks grooming my contacts to text me if they had an issue. That being done, I found a wonderful camp spot in Seaside, Calif., 20 seconds from pristine dunes and the ocean, 15 minutes from downtown Monterey, private, inexpensive, and well equipped. The recreation room has two hookups for Internet and a Web-mail kiosk. "Since this was an East Coast contract, I would get up at 4:30 or 5 to do a quick message check and reply as a first-thing-in-the-morning connection for them. Then we would drive to the Monterey Bay Aquarium but leave me three blocks away at the Kinko's with my laptop, where access is free, 24 hour, and comfortable. I would spend an hour or two working, then wander down to the wharf to meet them for some exhibits and lunch. If there was work, I would check back at Kinko's; if not, we had family time. Except for some mad coding from the backseat of the Volvo, plugged into the cigarette lighter for a portion of the trip home, this was the best working vacation I ever had." Edward C. Horvath had the best idea for a busman's holiday: "Buy yourself a ticket to the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. Live on caffeine, sugar, new technology, and the famed Jobs Reality Distortion Field for a week." The prize for the most far-out connected experience has to go to Savio Rodrigues, one of the authors of our Open Sources blog. He proudly sent us a photo from Machu Picchu -- not of himself, but of his BlackBerry, with a strong connection. A close second: April Harris Calderwood's working vacation, "going to a third-world country and helping a community project with technology; you rest and give back to the community."
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VANCOUVER, British Columbia  - Officials in a  rural valley in British Columbia hope that keeping out  cellphones will help attract residents and tourists who want to  escape to the quiet of nature.
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A phone made of recycled materials and a transmission tower that uses 50 percent less energy were two of the green technologies on show at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week.The environment was top of the agenda in the opening keynote session, where Rob Conway, CEO of the GSM Association, characterized mobile communications as an energy-saving alternative to flying or driving. But he acknowledged the downsides, saying, &quot;We must, as an industry, do something about reducing energy consumption, and support renewable energy and recycling.&quot;The GSM Association is using its development fund to support a number of technologies with benefits for the environment, he said, including green energy sources for off-grid base stations. These include a generator powered by waste vegetable oil, developed by Ericsson, and in Namibia the creation of a wind-powered base station, he said.&quot;The environmental results have been very encouraging. We are sharing these initiatives,&quot; he said.Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, president and CEO of Nokia, preferred to start with the bad news.&quot;Our current model of development is not sustainable. In many ways we are living beyond our means. As much as technology fascinates us and inspires us to do more things, something has to change,&quot; he said.He wants the industry to make more efficient use of materials and to recycle its waste, to optimize transportation and logistics, and to design for energy efficient operation.From his pocket he then produced &quot;Remade,&quot; a concept phone manufactured mostly from recycled materials and designed to consume less energy in production and operation than existing phones. The case is made from recycled aluminium drinks cans, the rubber keyboard from old car tires, and plastic parts from recycled drink bottles.&quot;It&#39;s only a concept. I cannot make a phone call with it yet,&quot; he said, dashing the audience&#39;s hopes of picking one up from the Nokia stand later.Wang Jianzhou, chairman and CEO of China Mobile, also had recycling and energy conservation on his mind.The company is promoting simpler packaging for the phones it resells, with the goal of saving around 57,000 cubic meters of logs annually, he said.It is also looking for ways to reduce the electricity consumption of the 300,000 base stations in the company&#39;s network, he said.He may well have walked by Ericsson&#39;s answer to that problem on his way into the show. On the central avenue leading through the showground, the company had erected a scale model of a transmission tower that uses up to 50 percent less energy than standard towers.Traditional transmission towers place the power amplifiers and other electronics in a cabin on the ground, with antennas at the top of a steel structure. However, around half the signal power is lost in the cables between amplifier and antenna, and more power still is used by air-conditioning units to stop the equipment in the cabin from overheating.Ericsson&#39;s idea is to put all the electronics near the top of a concrete tube 40 meters high, with air vents near the top and bottom. This puts the amplifiers near the antennas, so less energy is lost in cables. The tower acts like a chimney, the rising current of air cooling the electronics with no need for fans or air conditioning.The tower is designed for hot countries and, with a few modifications, can operate without an external electricity supply. In sunny zones the tower can be clad in solar panels, with batteries allowing the base station to run through the night kept cool in a well 4 meters below ground.So far, Ericsson has built only one such tower, near its headquarters in Kista, Sweden. The company is looking for local manufacturing partners in countries that might use the design, representatives said.
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By Tracy Harmon, The Pueblo Chieftain, Colo.  Jan. 30--SALIDA -- The growing business of ecotourism or "wildlife watching," which annually generates more than $1 billion in the state's revenue, will be the focus of a Colorado Division of Wildlife meeting Wednesday.
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The Natural History Museum of the Adirondacks in upstate New York brings the outdoors in.
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Environmentalists are thinking ahead to the effect of tourists and investors on a landscape of crucial habitats.