Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

By now all seem to consider WAP dead and gone, not realizing that to enable content services for the newer mobile phones supporting polyphonic and sampled ringtones, color pictures etc, WAP has to be used for the downloading of the content. Even though many services still use SMS for the ordering of content, SMS can't carry the amount of data such media files generate, so WAP is then used for the download. This is nothing a consumer really needs to care about (which is the way it should be), but when industry representatives declare WAP dead it's a different story.

An example is my own Abiro service, that uses WAP for both ordering and downloading of content: http://www.abiro.com.

It seems it's heydays for mobile games, where technologies and features that were popular 10 years ago on PC's (2D platform games etc) are deployed successfully for the smaller format and capacity of mobile phones. An exception is not the least the Nokia N-Gage (even though it's not really a successful product compared to all Java and BREW phones on the market) that supports 3D graphics. 3D graphics has also been deployed in smart phones, via software rendering (ARM9 CPU's are powerful enough to handle that). Both nVidia and ATi have 3D chips for mobile phones. Implementing 3D hardware of course comes at a cost, but as the industry needs to continue pushing out new phone models to consumers, new features need to deployed, and after cameras maybe 3D gaming (and ditto hardware acceleration) is the next feature many will request.

A lot is said about N-Gage and smart phones in the news, but very few purchase such pricey and bulky products. The real market for mobile gaming is mainstream phones with Java (J2ME) and BREW. Also compared to a Game Boy those devices are very expensive, so if it's only mobile gaming that is needed, no doubt a Game Boy or similar is still a better choice.

Gameloft: http://www.gameloft.com/
Nokia N-Gage: http://www.n-gage.com/
nVidia: http://www.nvidia.com/page/handheld.html
ATi: http://www.ati.com/products/handheld.html

Both betting/gambling and adult services are likely to be quite successful in the mobile market as well. Also different forms of messaging will be major revenue drivers, not the least picture and instant messaging. The ringtone/wallpaper market will continue to thrive, even though analysts for several years have warned that this market for whatever reason would implode (already).

MobileStreams: http://www.mobilestreams.com/

As smart phones get increasingly popular, the risk of getting viruses in such phones increases, considering they are fully programmable. Most computer viruses infect by the user taking action, so "ILOVEYOU"-type viruses will appear here as well. As there are yet even fewer using smart phones than MacOS and Unix, the interest from virus authors is still low. Let's hope it continues that way, but most likely it will not for long.

Mobile Viruses: http://www.mobileviruses.com/

For much too long at least Europe has talked technologies, while the only thing that matters is what can be done with them.

BREW is a good example of the latter. BREW is like Java a platform for applications, but with the difference that the infrastructure is fully in place (including an elaborate certification process and a clear revenue model) and applications run as native code on the phone. BREW has become very successful in Korea and increasingly so in USA. It will not be established in Europe any time soon, even though QUALCOMM tries with a dedicated European office.

Java is still considered more open and "free" (even though that is changing), but has the drawback that it requires more CPU power for the same application user experience as BREW.

Sun Java Micro Edition: http://java.sun.com/j2me/index.jsp
QUALCOMM BREW: http://brew.qualcomm.com/brew/en/about/about_brew.html