Communications Technology

eBay is playing virtual Santa this holiday season with a free “Deals” app for the iPhone that leads consumers to the better buys on the auction site.

Launched Tuesday, eBay Deals is designed to deliver a stream of the best deals on the site from across hundreds of millions of listings. Like eBay Mobile, the company’s regular iPhone app, Deals lets you search, shop, and pay for your items from your iPhone or iPod Touch.

All featured deals spotlight items with no bids, no reserve price, free or fixed-rate shipping, and less than four hours remaining to bid.

You can browse deals across eight categories, including apparel, computers, electronics, and collectibles. If you spot a deal you like, just tap on it, and its listing pops up where you can watch it or bid on it. Not crazy about the current deals? Just shake your iPhone or iPod Touch, and a new set of deals appears.

If you spot a deal that may be better for someone else, you can e-mail it or share it via your Facebook or Twitter account.

Besides browsing eBay’s virtual aisles, you can search for your own deals by entering a product name, category, and price range. You can save your customized search results to return to them later.

Starting Friday, eBay will also be unveiling a “12 Days of Deals” feature promoting a new promotion each day until December 8. Friday’s deal will offer Samsung’s N120 Netbook.

“As the world’s leading online marketplace we have insights into how people really want to shop…and they clearly want to shop on their phones,” eBay Marketplaces President Lorrie Norrington said in a statement.

Though designed for the mobile crowd, eBay’s daily deals can also be found online at the auction site’s Deals page.

eBay has been busy lately sprucing up its mobile auction site for the holidays. The vendor recently added social networking to its eBay Mobile app, letting you share a listing through e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter.

Since its launch in 2008, eBay’s mobile app has been downloaded more than 5 million times, said the company. With a purchase made every two seconds, the company said, more than $500 million worth of items are likely to be traded through eBay mobile this year.

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AT&T launched a prepaid wireless broadband service on Monday, following the lead of competitor Verizon Wireless.

Pricing for the new AT&T DataConnect Pass plans are the same as what Verizon Wireless is charging. Customers can pay $15 for a daily pass with a data usage cap of 75 megabytes. A weekly plan costs $30 and allows for 250MB of data usage. And the monthly plan is $50 and offers 500MB of usage.

While AT&T and Verizon Wireless have offered prepaid cell phone service for years, up until now the companies have required customers sign a contract for their wireless broadband services. Wireless broadband services allow users to connect their laptops to the Internet via the carriers 3G wireless network. These services have mostly been targeted at business users.

As these big phone companies move mobile broadband services into the mainstream, they are expanding their payment options to attract more consumers. But for many consumers in this tough economic environment, taking on a new contract and monthly service fee is simply too much. As such, the prepaid model is now moving to these services as well.

Prepaid niche players, such as Leap Wireless and Virgin Mobile, have recognized the demand for prepaid wireless broadband services, and they are already selling services to address the market. Leap Wireless offers an unlimited usage plan for $40 a month. And Virgin Mobile, which is now owned by Sprint, offers a $60 plan that has a usage cap of 1 gigabyte for a month.

Will these new prepaid offerings be enough to entice consumers to sign up for 3G wireless broadband service? That’s a question yet to be answered. But AT&T, especially, should be careful what it wishes for. The company’s 3G wireless network is already overburdened with iPhone users’ heavy wireless data usage.

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MOBILE phones appear to be “very safe”, says an expert who points out that people were initially suspicious about mains power and microwaves.

Professor Rodney Croft, executive director of The Australian Centre for Radiofrequency Bioeffects Research (ACRBR), says concerns over the location of mobile phone base stations should similarly dissipate over time.

“There really isn’t a great deal of difference between your basic FM radio antenna and your base station’s antennas,” Prof Croft says.

“Radio transmissions have been around for a long, long time and people don’t seem to mind being exposed to that.”

Prof Croft, who is Professor of Health Psychology at the University of Wollongong, says humans have “a tendency to be suspicious of all new things”.

“When microwave ovens first came out there was a great deal of suspicion about them, when mains power came out there was a great deal of suspicion about it,” he says.

“People do move on . . . providing, of course, no science comes out showing it is more dangerous. And certainly the centre’s view is that’s not likely to happen.”

The World Health Organisation (WHO) is soon to release its Interphone study, a decade-long investigation into the health implications of mobile phone use.

The report could be released before the year’s end, and there is speculation it will draw a definitive link between long-term mobile phone use and an increased risk of brain tumours.

But Prof Croft rejects this.

He says the WHO is expected to discount some of the research which highlighted cancer links as methodologically flawed and “clearly not correct”.

“But it will still leave open the possibility that long-term effects have not been looked at adequately, and may turn out to be a problem,” Prof Croft says.

“It all seems to be pointing to the same thing… that there is not a problem (with mobile phone use).

“Our perspective is that we don’t see any science indicating a health effect. It really looks very safe.”

Prominent Sydney brain surgeon Dr Charlie Teo last month warned people should “err on the side of safety” and take simple steps to reduce their exposure.

Dr Teo says mobile phones should be used on loudspeaker while other electronic devices, such as a clock radio, should be placed at the base instead of the head of the bed.

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