Hey, can I borrow your phone charger?  No, I have a Motorola.  Wait, maybe that one will work.  Let me try plugging it in to my phone … err, maybe it’s upside down … oh crap, was that little metal prong important?

I don’t know about you, but I have enough random phone chargers by now to open up my own storefront.  Apparently I’m not alone.  Today CTIA Chairman/Sprint CEO Dan Hesse announced that by January 2012, all U.S. cell phones will all have a common microUSB port.  Finally, the holy grail has arrived: I can own one phone charger that’s compatible with all cell phones.

Throughout the blogosphere, news has been circulating of AT&T offering a free month of its 2GB data plan for iPads old and new. Apparently, AT&T has been e-mailing its customers to notify them of the offer. Reluctantly, I am an AT&T customer because when I received my iPad there was only an AT&T model available. While I didn’t receive AT&T’s e-mail, I did see the story pop on various blogs and I thought I’d give it a shot.

We love posting success stories on our site of consumers we've helped get the resolution they deserve. This success story we can't take credit for (we can try, but then we'd be just as bad as those utility companies) and it's a great example of how persistence can pay off in a big way. 

You know that time you signed up for daily joke text messages and got charged a fortune?  Here’s your chance to get some of that cash back.

Earlier this week Verizon filed a lawsuit against a ring of text message scammers that subverted the proper identification channels.  The Texas Attorney General also joined the lawsuit.  The scammers set up websites that offered everything from recipes to daily jokes to video game tips sent to you in text message form.  However, they didn’t properly disclose how much the service would cost ($3-$10 a month) and they subverted Verizon’s tracking system.  

These two just can’t stay away from each other: Deutsche Telekom is again talking of hooking up Sprint and T-Mobile.  Jeez guys, get a room.

It seems that we can’t keep up with all the new phone scams that are hitting the phone lines. The latest one we bring you involves the same trickery as the other scams we touched on. But instead of reaching out to you to initiate the scam, the scammers in the fat finger dialing scam wait for you to make a simple mistake--dialing the wrong number.

While the phone you use may not be changing the network you are connecting to may no longer be the Plain Old Telephone System.

Remember when Al Gore flicked the Internet on and we were all promised free phone service within 6 months? What happened to that? Politicians, I tell ya...when are we going to learn? Fortunately, there are people looking to make good on the promise to rob traditional landline customers form the Baby Bells by exploiting the Interent in order to offer free local and long distance phone service to deprived consumers across the country. Deprived...seriously. While the Baby Bells might argue against the term "deprived," UCAN begs to differ. The amount of competion in the local/long-distance marketplace is laughable. The Bells were broken up because of monopoly-type conditions, but mergers and acquisitions have steadily consolidated market power back into the hands of a select few. A new wave of Internet-exploiting phone companies could help change all that. Some you've heard of, like Skype, Google Voice, Yahoo Voice, Vonage, Ooma and others.

At UCAN, our job is to make sure your utilities never overbill you, even if it’s only a few pennies.  Today we found out that Sprint may be putting 250 of those pennies into question.