Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

Lists (and links to) the different IM devices for young people available on the market. I initially thought Zipit would be an alphanumeric terminal complementing a mobile phone (via a cable, IR or BT), but it's actually got WLAN for "on its own" use in WLAN hot spots.

No email and no web browsing. Hmm...

Engadget: Zipit Wireless IM finally gets your teenager off the phone
http://www.engadget.com/entry/9276375527438252/

Wacom introduces a phone with touch-sensitive screen for navigation and handwriting. Interestingly the touch screen only reacts to the special pen included with the phone, to minimize mistakes. The disadvantage is of course that it's easy to lose the pen and then the phone can't be used, unless the navigation wheel can perform the same functions as the pen.

Wacom has long experience in making tablets for graphics designers and is now also involved in providing technology for tablet PC's.

Engadget: Wacom wants to make cellphones more like Tablet PCs
http://www.engadget.com/entry/4610617840651473/

This clever camera from Nokia senses motion, and sends a picture (not a video though) via MMS or email (up to 1 Mpixel) when triggering. With a solar cell it would have been completely autonomous. Next model perhaps?

Mobil: Fjärrstyrd megapixelkamera från Nokia
http://premium.mobil.se/nyheter/visa.asp?id=8604&sid=1

Siemens introduces a smell (or rather gas sensor) solution for mobile phones, to detect bad air (external or internal). Electronic gas sensors is nothing new in itself (used in hazardous environments like chemical labs etc), but might come to good new use here.

Mobil: Mobilen ska kunna känna lukter
http://premium.mobil.se/nyheter/visa.asp?id=8607&sid=1

This note indicates Palm is optimizing its OS to better suit the smartphone market. As Palm must also have realized, smartphones sell more than radio-less PDA's, so it makes a lot of sense.

Interestingly the smartphones Palm sells the most (and that get market accolade) are from handspring, that Palm acquired (and that was started by 2 that broke out from Palm).

Mobil: Palm lanserar nytt system för mobiler
http://premium.mobil.se/nyheter/visa.asp?id=8608&sid=1

Indicates most are developing downloadable phone applications for MIDP Java. Not a word about BREW, but mentions .NET.

Wireless Advisor: Wireless Developers Reveal Platform of Choice
http://advisorupdate.info/Articles.nsf/nl/14708

It's got a browser with PDF support :).

Engadget: Nokia’s 6670 one megapixel cameraphone
http://www.engadget.com/entry/4341347479280003/

Interesting quote: "The cold hard reality is that sales of PDAs are flat while smartphones are all zoom zoom."

Engadget: Toshiba says no more Pocket PCs for the US:
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1647654887697411/

Users have found a way to send any SMS message via a link intended for advising other users about news at 3. Haven't checked how it's done (don't have a 3 account), but it sounds like replacing canned text in the link with your own.

A quote from the information responsible indicates 3 has no intention to fix this?! Probably it would take 10 minutes to fix, but getting and keeping more customers is maybe more important to 3 than profitability at the moment.

Mobil: Gratis sms hos Tre
http://premium.mobil.se/nyheter/visa.asp?id=8577&sid=1

Neonode is in short a phone/PDA based on PocketPC and has a minimal form factor.

It's got an integrated camera, 64 MB (!) SD memory, USB (nice!), MPEG video and audio.

GPRS, WWW and MMS are future options (huh?).

This article indicates that:

• the U.S. market is slower than Europe in adopting new mobile phone related business models
• SMS and TV is a good match, increasing revenue for both providers

MediaPost: Wireless Messaging Market Catches On Faster In Europe Than U.S.
http://www.mediapost.com/dtls_dsp_news.cfm?newsId=267957

This article promotes that phone manufacturers should focus on the audio capabilities of the phones and add new features around that, but it's really not very provocative nor inventive:

"The first step is an integrated radio"
Nothing new.

"Imagine loading an MP3 file as your ring tone"
Well, most phones released this year will have that capability, whether carriers like it or not. I hope though they don't forget a slot for more memory, like they did in the LG 8110.

infoSync World: Editorial: Musical Phones
http://www.infosyncworld.com/news/n/5306.html

When radio technology can't satisfy the location precision needed by users (except via GPS, that very few phones have) maybe this is a feasible alternative, but the question is: Isn't it a lot of effort to photograph all the buildings in all relevant cities? What about the country-side? What if the cows move?

NewScientist: Photo recognition software gives location
http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/phones/

This page shows among other things what countries have the biggest penetration of mobile phones. Interestingly Taiwan and Luxembourg have more than 100% !
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/med_mob_pho#

Nationmaster seems generally useful for all kinds of regional or global stats:
http://www.nationmaster.com

Found this response by chance, that lists different sources for sales statistics on mobile phones.
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=389370

It includes this interesting note about usage of Java applications in different regions. Seems like there's a big market for the taking, or are we in Europe too square to care?

"Despite the proliferation of Java handsets worldwide and the increasing number of vendor models containing the platform, the number of actual Java users is significantly lower. There are some very stark regional differences in this analysis, since in Japan and Korea it is believed that around 80% of all Java handsets sold in 2003 led to active Java users. In Europe on the other hand, the opposite is understood to be the case with a very low conversion rate of handsets sold to active users of only around 10%."

Even though retaining the layout of previous communicators the new 9300 and 9500 are more slick and stylish than the older versions (at least the 9300). Nokia's communicators have always focused on standard Internet protocols and markup languages and extensive cooperation between applications, but later versions also support MMS (no mention of WAP/WML though). Thankfully they now support GPRS/EDGE rather than the more or less useless HSCSD. Yet, it would make sense to support UMTS/WCDMA now. Support for VPN (for email, intranet browsing, file sharing etc) is a very nice feature for mobile office workers.

9300: http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,1522,,00.html?orig=/phones/9300
9500: http://www.nokia.co.uk/nokia/0,,57363,00.html

Microsoft has spent many years now trying to get into the mobile phone market, and failed every time, despite numerous attempts at platform solutions and product naming. The market is obviously out there, so no one is to blame but Microsoft itself. Surely, most carriers don't want to deal with Microsoft at all, but a major factor is also that Microsoft has totally misunderstood what makes a phone. The key use of a phone is still voice calls. Even people buying phones with color screens, cameras, PIM functions, browsers etc etc still mainly make voice calls. A phone-sized PDA with zillions of megabytes is not what people buy, except on company expense. No one should feel sorry for Microsoft, and the mobile industry is very happy that Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly there also.

RIM's optimized technology for email and PIM can now be used from the Nokia Communicator 9500. As you might know, RIM's technology is client/server-based where the main part of the solution resides at the corporate location, tied in with the email system there. The server solution repackages email and PIM data both ways so that a minimum of "kilobytes" is transferred to/from the phone. This means that potentially any type of phone could host the client part of the solution (even ARM7-based GPRS ditto). A major drawback is of course that there has to be a proprietary corporate server in the first place. As everyone knows that has tried to convince IT departments about the value of mobile email: It doesn't come easy, as they see it as a cost and security threat, with no apparent value. As e.g. MS Exchange also supports SMTP/POP3/IMAP4, and most phones today do too: If you only need email and not PIM, then that's a much simpler solution to enable and get through the corporate red tape. RIM has anyway been somewhat successful relative to PDA sales, but certainly not compared to phone sales.

The trend is clearly towards phones with more and more data/information capabilities, but interestingly the latest Blackberry device (7100t) is more like a conventional phone than the previous text-centric devices. It doesn't have any full alphanumeric keyboard (still more keys than usual to make entering text faster), which comes as a surprise considering Blackberry's focus on emailing. It seems like RIM wants to reach a more mainstream market. Quite high resolution on the display: 240x260 (almost the same as on PocketPC's).

RIM's info about the 7100t: http://www.blackberry.com/blackberry7100/index.shtml?CPID-ILC=nah7100t
Swedish news article about the phone: http://premium.mobil.se/nyheter/visa.asp?id=8542&sid=1