Smart Rewards you rebates, discounts and free SMS

While Globe may have managed to snag some precious air time on television with their Watyawannawin campaign, Smart was apparently the first to offer such a service for their subscribers.

So what’s unique in Smart Rewards? Well, for starter, once you register, you automatically get free 500 points instantly. Smart also provides you with a convenient way of checking your earned points online with a dedicated website just for this service. There’s also no indication of how long it will run which more or less means that it’s here to stay unlike Globe’s offer which will end next year. No grand raffles here, though, but you can, however, use your earned points to get free text messages, bill rebates or handset discounts.

For more information, you can check out the Smart Rewards website. Register now so you can earn back every peso you’ve spend on your Smart subscription.

Earn points on your Globe subscription

If you’re on Globe, regardless if you’re on postpaid or prepaid, you can make every peso you consume work for you.

Globe has an ongoing promo called Watyawannawin where every P5 you use, whether it be on a prepaid load or your postpaid monthly bill, you earn 1 point, and after accumulating a certain amount of points, you can then either redeem it as a rebate or use it as raffle entries to win great prizes such as iPods, Macbooks, and even P1 Million cash. This promo will run until February 28, 2009. So better register now, so that you can do more with the money you spend on your Globe subscription than just calling and texting. For more details, head on over to Globe’s site.

With the heated rivalry between Globe and Smart, I won’t be surprised if the latter comes out with a similar promo of their own for their loyal subscribers.

Cellphone with 10Megapixel Digital Camera at the Back!!

As I said before Cellphone with 10Megapixel DIGITAL CAMERA (LG PHONES)

10 megapixel camera phones, or more, HD video on your mobi and even speech recognition GPS technology... these were amongst the bold promises being made by LG at a London gathering this week.

The phone manufacturer invited a select few journalists to have a chat about converging technology – focusing on its new KC-910 mobile phone – which, as well as having an 8 megapixel camera, also offers a whole host of image and video editing tools, Dolby sound and DivX compatibility.

But the roundtable event also gave Pocket-lint a chance to quiz execs from LG, Dolby and DivX as to what we can expect in the phones of the future, and it seems next year could see a whole host of developments.

On the camera phone front – the emergence of three 8 megapixel models has caused all kinds of excitement amongst phone fans, and doom and gloom amongst digital compact camera manufacturers.

And quite rightly so, said Jeremy Newing, LG’s UK head of marketing who claimed that there is no reason why camera phones could not take over from point and shoot cameras.

Indeed – the megapixel race that we saw amongst camera makers is now being battled out between mobile manufacturers, and, said John Barton, LG UK’s sales and marketing director, he’s already seen camera phone offering megapixel counts in the double digits.

The KC-910 also has up to 16x digital zoom, provided by Schneider Kreuznach, but no optical zoom however, there were hints that this might change.

The new relationship with DivX, which sees the Renoir bundled with software for converting files into DivX files for viewing on the phone, could also be a sign of things to come.
When we asked about the possibility of HD video recording in mobile phones – after all this seems to be the next big thing in digital cameras – again – it was a case of watch this space.

Andy Glasson from DivX explained that the company is already working on the H264 encoding and decoding technology that could make this possible.

Moving onto music, the KC-910 is the first global launch to feature special dedicated technology from Dolby to make the sound better from the phone, whether from its speaker or when you are listening through headphones.

Jonathan Jowitt from Dolby told us that this is the first device of many: “This is the start of many products we hope, and we also hope to be working with LG for a long time to come”.

Sticking with music – way back in February, with not many fireworks, LG announced its own mobile music downloads service called MusicStation Max.

It’s all been a bit quiet since, even as both Nokia and Sony Ericsson have launched Comes With Music and PlayNow, but LG may be up to something.

John Barton said that the time was not yet right for the company: “You can’t go to each individual label and do a deal, and then only offer your customers the music of the labels that sign up. You need an aggregator. For the KF700, we created MusicStation Max with Omnifone, which we can see being popular in the Scandinavian markets.” He added, however: “For the rest of the world – watch this space.”

And so what else can we expect from LG? Developers may finally see LG opening up its software for third party applications, and the clever bods in the R&D department are also, apparently, working on technology to stop us getting smeary fingers prints over our nice, shiny, LG touchscreens.

Let’s hope it’s not just a cloth in the box.