Freedom Lawyers of America

1]
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/11/technology/circuits/11stat.html

ON Oct. 1, Cingular will begin selling a unique $40 cellphone cradle called
the FastForward. What it does can be described by a single sentence:
whenever you slip your cellphone into it, the FastForward automatically
routes incoming cell calls to your home or office phone.

The implications of this simple idea, though, constitute a much broader
topic. In fact, you could write a whole column on it.

For you, the consumer, this elegant device confers a number of benefits.
First, you save all kinds of money, because the rerouted calls don't use up
any of your monthly cellular minutes. Incoming calls behave exactly as
though your callers dialed your home or office number directly.

Second, the FastForward means that your friends and family have to memorize
only one phone number for you instead of two, three or four. When you're
out and about, their calls to your cell number ring the cellphone; when
you're at home or at work, calls to that same cell number ring your home or
desk phone (known as your land line). Your callers never know the
difference. This is a big deal for people who must always be reachable,
like real estate agents, heart surgeons and expectant fathers.

You pick up a sound-quality benefit, too. For example, a Cingular
representative admitted that Cingular coverage in his own home was, as he
bravely put it, "not swell." But now he doesn't care. Whenever he's at home
(and therefore out of prime cell range), his FastForward gizmo shunts
incoming calls away from his cellphone and onto the perfect clarity of his
land line.

Finally, when you're upstairs, you no longer have to run all the way
downstairs just to answer your cellphone. All right, having to run to find
a ringing cellphone may not rank right up there as the most sympathy-worthy
complaint of the new millennium. (Heck, it's the only exercise some people
get.) But the point is that the FastForward makes every phone extension in
your home ring simultaneously. If you're upstairs, you answer the call
upstairs.

This gadget is no low-tech A-B box. It doesn't even connect to a phone jack
(only to a power outlet, because it also recharges your cellphone). When
you insert your cellphone, it transmits a short text command to the
cellular network itself that says, in effect, "Begin diverting calls now."
In other words, the call switching doesn't take place in your home. It
happens much farther upstream, which is why incoming calls don't eat into
your monthly minutes.

You can redirect your cellphone's calls to any local number, not just your
home phone. In fact, you can create up to three different entries in your
cellphone's phonebook - labeled CF1, CF2, and CF3 (for call forwarding) -
that correspond to the land line numbers where you spend the most time.
Then, a switch on the cradle lets you specify which number you want to
ring: CF1 for your home, CF2 for your office, and CF3 for your secret
apartment, for example. (You can change any of these numbers at any time.)

To turn off the call forwarding - when you're leaving home, for example -
you're supposed to press a Cancel button on the cradle and wait four
seconds. During this time, the cellphone sends a "Cancel" text message to
the Cingular network. Incoming calls will once again ring your cellphone
(and use up your minutes).

If you just yank the phone out of the cradle without pressing the Cancel
button, though, you hear an alarm that seems to say, "Hope you know what
you're doing, Bub." You've just put yourself into a weird sort of cellular
limbo: you can make outgoing calls on your cellphone, but all incoming
calls still ring at home, no matter where your errands take you.

That situation may not always be as nonsensical as it sounds. For one
thing, it leaves the cellphone ready to dial, yet relieves you of the
burden of having to remember to shut it off before entering a meeting,
movie or religious ceremony. For another, it saves you money when you're
going to be out of touch anyway, because your home answering machine rather
than your cellular voice mail can pick up the missed calls. (In any case,
you can turn off the call forwarding at any time by dialing a code on the
cellphone.)

Without a doubt, the remarkable FastForward is elegantly simple in function
but deliciously flexible in potential. But there is, as you might suspect,
some fine print.

First of all, the FastForward works only with Cingular cellphones. That's
just tough rocks for the residents of Denver, Phoenix, Minneapolis, Montana
and anywhere else with iffy Cingular coverage. The FastForward cradle will
happily recharge phones from other carriers but won't give you any of that
call-forwarding magic. (You need a different cradle model for each phone
brand, by the way. The Motorola cradle will be available on Oct. 1; cradles
for Nokia, Siemens and Sony Ericsson phones will arrive in November.)

Second, the FastForward's call-redirecting feature is either free or costs
$3 per month, depending on a couple of factors. It's free if your local
phone company is one of Cingular's corporate parents - SBC or BellSouth -
and you have elected to receive a single combined monthly bill for local
and cell service. (And who on earth wouldn't want a single bill? "People
who don't like the sticker shock of seeing the grand total," ventures a
Cingular spokesman.) BellSouth also requires that you have at least two
calling features (call waiting, for example) on your land line.

The service is also free if you're willing to let redirected calls eat up
your monthly cellphone minutes, thus giving up one of the system's main
perks. (Which is a better deal: paying $3 a month, or paying for the
cellular minutes that the FastForward would have saved you? Only a few
hours snuggled up with a spreadsheet can yield the right answer for you.)

Finally, the FastForward deprives you of one common cellphone trick. When
you're trying to call home but you've been getting a busy signal for hours,
you can no longer resort to calling the culprit on the cellphone to say,
"Honey, get off the phone! I'm trying to call you!" After all, calling the
cellphone amounts to calling the same busy home number. (You can still send
text messages to the cellphone in its cradle, however, in hopes that the
"You've got mail" icon might catch the yakking homebody's eye.)

When you really think about it, the chief function of the FastForward is to
reduce the cellular minutes you use up. It's rather selfless of Cingular to
invent a gadget that's designed to make you use less of its service, isn't
it?

Not necessarily. Behind the scenes, this humble gadget is quietly helping
to execute a number of corporate missions.

For example, the FastForward will redirect your calls only to numbers in
your local Cingular calling area. (For New York City customers, for
example, that region includes Manhattan, Long Island, Connecticut north to
Danbury and most of New Jersey.) That's a limitation designed to serve the
interest of SBC and BellSouth, which aren't about to let you hand off your
calls to other long-distance companies.

Similarly, growing numbers of people are dropping their home-phone service,
preferring only a cellphone - a trend that SBC and BellSouth would clearly
like to reverse. For its part, Cingular hopes that if enough people buy
FastForward, it will benefit from less congestion on its wireless network.

And in an era when many people choose a carrier on price alone, Cingular is
trying to differentiate itself by offering, yes, singular features.
(Cingular is also the only carrier that rolls over your unused talk minutes
from month to month, instead of discarding them.)

So yes, the FastForward symbolizes a strike against some unsettling signs
in the cellular sector. But no matter what's in it for Cingular and its
owners, you, the consumer, also stand to gain a lot, both in dollars and in
convenience; the FastForward is the proverbial win-win. Cingular deserves
considerable credit not only for dreaming up an ingenious gadget, but also
- for a company that's never developed hardware before - designing it so
simply and so well.