Mobile Barcoder - USA missing more cellphone features

It seems that I am constantly amazed by two things: The really cool features found on overseas mobile phones and 2) that US phones are constantly lagging behind.

With the way that US markets devour techie gadgets with disposable incomes, I am always surprised that companies don't include these features right away. Even 6-12 months later would be one thing, normally "IF" the US gets a feature it will be about 2 years after the fact.

Case in point... I was looking for new Firefox extensions and found this Mobile Barcoder 0.1.1, by Duncan Sample, released on Sep 26, 2006. It translates a URL into an onscreen image that your cellphone can read:

This extension generates 2D barcodes (called QR Codes) of the URL of the current page being viewed. You can then use a mobile phone to read the URL from the screen to save you typing the long URL using the phone keypad. Many Japanese phones already have this capability, Nokia S60 phones are beginning to get some/better applications.

Works with:

Firefox

1.0 - 2.0.0.*

ALL

Give it a Try!!!... If you don't live in the US.