Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

Maybe now, when Sharp releases a phone with motion sensors (very bad joke). The target is gaming, and the note mentions golf and action games.

Pantech also has a phone with motion sensing, for simulated fishing, car racing, measuring running speed etc.

Yahoo! News - Mobile phones to turn into golf clubs and toy guns in Japan

"...technology consultancy The Diffusion Group found that 42% would be interested in listening to music via their cellphones, while 30% would want to watch movies or other visual media."

Reading the original article requires logging in.

Survey shows some consumer interest in cellphone media - Engadget - www.engadget.com

This is probably one of the more creative and also optimised uses of mobile technologies. Optimised in the sense that it has to be very cost-effective and small, still be able to send an SMS.

The device is hooked onto a pill bottle and senses when the bottle is opened, to warn the patient of taking pills too often or too seldomly.

Medgadget.com -- Internet Journal of Emerging Medical Technologies - SIMpill

This Swiss Army knife - sorry - mobile phone is the world's smallest GPRS phone and it's got a few odd features not seen elsewhere:
- it's a mosquito repellant
- it's an acupressure reader
- it's a bio-rhythm reader
- it's a flashlight

I wonder if one can make phone calls on it too. I hope so.

nowicom - Mobile Shot TDG-9920

Engadget has a short note about this coming phone. It's got two cameras, so you can both take pictures the normal way and use the phone for video conferencing (if now anyone cares about that).

It's odd that manufacturers so voluntarily add expensive components to phones (see e.g. the V800 for how to solve the "two directions"-problem properly). If someone put two (or even one...) cameras or LCD's on a notebook people would think the manufacturer was insane, but in the mobile industry it's normal for some reason. The question is who is paying for this. Most likely the consumer in longer and more expensive subscriptions, even though most people only need a phone for voice and text.

Nokia 6680 3G handset is real - Engadget - www.engadget.com

"... record labels and artists are pinning hope on the increasing popularity of online digital music stores and the bright future that the mobile phone industry promises to deliver. A major plus for the music business is that cellphone customers are used to paying for services."

"There are only three things that people always carry with them: their wallet, their keys and their mobile phone."
Potentially though the phone could also act wallet and keys!!

"Cellphone users' biggest favourites for the moment continue to be ringtones. But realtones that offer stereo, CD-like quality sound look set to catch on fast."

Yahoo! News - Music going mobile in a big way

"Color screens, cameras and clamshells. Those features helped drive the cell phone industry to another record year in 2004, according to new sales data."

An interesting argument why Samsung is losing market share: "But Samsung does have weak spots, Mawston says. Its focus on high-end and midrange phones may be costing it customers. Samsung really has no low-end portfolio," Mawston said. "That cost it market share in the fourth quarter" when the holidays drive sales of low-end phones."

"Brand-name phone makers should be in the best position, Lin says. Mergers among wireless carriers will likely favor the largest handset suppliers, which can make huge amounts of phones."
Likely, but Chinese manufacturers will become very aggressive during 2005.

"Phones capable of playing digital music could be hot sellers this year, Mawston says. New models from Motorola are capable of playing songs from Apple Computer's iTunes library."
Music capability will certainly be a sales driver.

"Another trend to look for will be slider-style phones -- where one piece slides away from the keyboard to reveal the display. These phones allow for bigger displays -- a key feature when running next-generation wireless services, Mawston says."
I believe/hope so too. This design has many advantages: only one display needed (one of the most expensive parts of a phone), camera can be protected, quicker to take a call, etc.
Potentially this also enables phones with alphanumeric keypad, yet with a reasonable size.

Yahoo! News - Slower Growth Seen In '05 For Mobile Phone Industry

Nice features:
- Corporate email: "But what sets the Treo 650 apart from the pack is its new-found support of direct corporate e-mail access to Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. Enterprise end-users will especially appreciate the device's built-in Microsoft Exchange Server ActiveSync support, which enables direct corporate e-mail and calendar synchronization with servers that run Microsoft Exchange 2003."
- Advanced browser: "The smartphone's Blazer 4.0 Web browser is now fully compliant with the following Internet standards: HTML 4.01, xHTML 1.0, cHTML, WML 1.3, SSL 3.0, HTTP 1.1, JavaScript 1.5, CSS 1.0 and 2.0 (partial), GIF, animated GIF, JPEG, PNG, BMP and Cookies."
- Document viewing and editing: "But the one thing that I really liked was the fact that the Treo 650 gives users the ability to view, edit and create MS Word- and Excel-compatible documents on the go or even pull up PowerPoint presentations by way of the Documents to Go software that comes with the unit."

Summary: Powerful feature set for a good price.

Own comment: An extra plus is the alphanumeric keypad that makes it easy to do messaging and work while on the road.

Yahoo! News - Product Review: Treo 650 Smartphone from PalmOne

194M (164M, up 24%) shipped during Q4 2004 (relative Q4 2003).

664M (up 29% relative 2003) shipped for the whole year.

Q4 marketshare:
Nokia 34%
Motorola 16%
Samsung 11%
LG 7%
Siemens 7%
Others 25%

Yahoo! News - Cellphone shipments rise 24 per cent; Nokia still market leader

This shows promise for mobile downloading of music. Understandable that Motorola puts iTunes support in their phones, even though it's partly a proprietary solution.

“When we launched the iTunes Music Store we were hoping to sell a million songs in the first six months—now we’re selling over a million songs every day, and we’ve sold over a quarter billion songs in total,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO.

iTunes Song Downloads Top Quarter Billion - Personal Audio/Video News - Designtechnica News

Impressive figures, even when divided by the population: 440 SMS's per person. As many people don't send any SMS's at all, the top users of course must send much more than 440 SMS's a year.

Digital Media Europe: News - UK SMS use up 26% over 2004 - report

Surprisingly it doesn't mention OMA's standard for DRM at all. It might actually become the most important standard if looking at sheer device (and user) volume. In any case it's time for the market to consolidate on one very good standard. This plethora doesn't help the digital media business to grow.

Yahoo! News - Electronics Firms Focus on DRM Standard

OMTP (Open Mobile Platform Group) sets out to select existing technologies to create a common platform for mobile devices (primarily phones).

OMTP has yet to show it's relevancy, but it sure has some powerful members: "Other newly-announced members include Sony Ericsson (news - web sites), Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Siemens and Ericsson Mobile Platforms. They join existing members such as palmOne, Samsung, Sony, Kyocera and Symbol Technologies."

Yahoo! News - PalmSource, Symbian Join Open Mobile Platform Group

A rather "poppy" device look-wise, seemingly aimed for younger people, but I doubt the cost over time will attract youngsters. Supports email as well as chat. If more email/chat accounts are configured it costs extra! Doesn't support voice, so it's a pure messaging device.

Review conclusion: "For sheer audacity alone, the Ogo deserves kudos for bucking a market that has been trending away from offering messaging-centric devices. On a scale of 1 to 5, I give the new hiptop wonder from Cingular a 3.25 rating."

Yahoo! News - Product Review: Ogo Mobile Messaging Device

Ogo at Cingular

This is the way office PCs of the future should look like. Unfortunately no PC (read: PC running Windows) provider has gone this far yet, but might due to likely competition from Apple. Of course the Mac mini is not good for high-end 3D gaming and such, but for all-things-office the CPU power etc is there.

For a PC provider to succeed with the same feat they need to make a custom mother board, but if you've looked in a notebook (I have) the mother board is very small there, so the best choice for mini-PC technology is what you have in your Dell (or whatever) notebook. Then you also get low power-consumption, very low heat dissipation, a silent (or no) fan etc etc.

There are no (and there's no need for) expansion slots. All relevant connectors are integrated.

It's actually so small that you most likely can't put the screen on top of it (if it even would be able to carry the weight).

Apple - Mac mini

Reviews and previews:
CNET - Apple Mac Mini
arstechnica - The Mac mini preview
About - Mac mini review

ExtremeTech complains that the price is too high, but in a corporate setting the initial price is not the issue, but long-term maintenance and user hazzle. Not many companies understand that though.
ExtremeTech - The Mac Mini: Less Than You Think

Surely this can and will be fixed.

Lately Sony has indicated they will release music players with MP3 (and AAC?) support, so I hope they will use MP3 or AAC instead of their own proprietary format on their music site as well. The issue of properly protecting the rights to the music is still to solve.

"A study from market research firm Shelley Taylor & Associates blasts music stores for confusing navigation and locking users into proprietary formats and music players."

"(Apple and iTunes) need to watch their back and continue to develop, especially since they've never been good at the e-commerce and shopping," Taylor said. She cited several key Fnac features that are lacking in iTunes, including discounts for buying multiple tracks and the ability to download music videos and purchase concert tickets."

"Taylor said Sony's (6758.T: Quote, Profile, Research) Sonic Stage was the worst music software among those studied because it forces users into using a proprietary music format, has poor playlist functions, and commits user interface sins that make it difficult to use."

Internet News Article | Reuters.com

Despite ever increased competition from especially Korea, Motorola still succeeded to increase its profits. The note also claims Motorola is again no 2 on the market, but it's clear Samsung and LG don't want it that way.

Yahoo! News - New cellphones help Motorola's profit jump 34 per cent in fourth quarter

Looks like it, unless already 2004 was it. Apple's success is kind of surprising as Apple was late in the market, but simplicity and heavy marketing (as indicated earlier) might be reasons enough for their 60-70% market share. Next year there will be a fight between dedicated MP3 players and phones equipped with such support. If max hard disk space is needed I'm sure a dedicated device continues to be the choice, but if you only want one device to carry around a phone with MP3/AAC/WMA support is better.

Yahoo! News - Global MP3 Player Sales Seen Up Sharply in 2005

An interesting collaboration. EA is already the strongest sports game provider. Surely we will also see more branded sports games on phones in the future.

Yahoo! News - Video Game Dream Team

Music on CD's is also digital of course. Would online music be a better term? Never mind...

Looks promising for 2005 if the ever increasing piracying can be thwarted.

"However, the report from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI, also warned that rampant piracy continued to erode legitimate profits."

"The IFPI, which represents more than 1,450 record companies across the globe, said music fans in the United States and Europe legally downloaded more than 200 million tracks in 2004, up from about 20 million in 2003. That contributed to estimated digital music revenues of around US$330 million (€253 million) in 2004, up sixfold from the previous year."

Yahoo! News - Global Digital Music Market Booms in 2004

Being early on the market with 3G phones has paid off.

Yahoo! News - 3G Boosts Sony Ericsson Sales

"The global mobile phone market is set to grow to 2 billion subscribers by the end of 2005, fueled by strong demand from developing economies in Asia and Latin America, Deloitte & Touche said on Tuesday."

"Mobile penetration would surpass 100 percent in some markets as users take a second connection for data or for personal use. The mobile industry had 1.5 billion users in June last year."

If true than this shows good promise for the participants in this industry. Need for mobile media (ever more advanced) will of course also increase.

Yahoo! News - Cell Phone Market Seen Soaring in '05

Can detect movement in all directions and included software makes use of this feature: "When you jog along the street with the phone attached to the waist or wrist, it will show the speed, calories consumed and the distance you have covered"

Yahoo! News - South Korea's Pantech sells motion-recognition mobile phone

Not a PDA by any means, but rather a mainstream phone with a full keypad for simplifying entering SMS and e-mail.

Digital Media Europe: News - Nokia launches messaging-friendly handset

Yeah, and the Internet is a fad too, and the PC...

Dell: The Apple iPod Is Just a Fad - Personal Audio/Video News - Designtechnica News

As I noted in the 6630 review, cameras in phones are still far behind the quality of dedicated digital cameras. It's not just about resolution, but also bad lenses, bad image processing etc.

The recommendation here is to buy a dedicated digital camera if it's picture quality you need. If you will just take photos for wallpapers and MMS then it's in practice enough with 300 kpixel in my opinion. As a brag factor high resolution works though.

Mobil - Vi har känt på 2-megapixelmobilen

IDC has surveyed users of their preferences (in terms of phones that is).

Quotes:
"Young men are interested in having a stylish cellular phone with the latest features and service, while young women regard safety and security"
"Overall, however, a survey of cellular phone users found that productivity and convenience were the No. 1 benefits"

Yahoo! News - Young Men Want Style In Their Cellular phone

In-Stat reports an expected 680% increase of VoIP chip sales in the next five years. The question is though what those chips should be used for, as VoIP is completely software-based (relying on the phone's radio and TCP/IP stack etc).

What's interesting is that they believe VoIP and Wi-Fi will go hand in hand. It's no doubt a nice way to cut call costs when in a Wi-Fi hot spot.

Quotes:
"Indeed, In-Stat expects virtually all cell phones to come with integrated Wi-Fi features by 2008"
"In-Stat believes that Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is the future of voice communications"

Yahoo! News - VoIP Chip Market Set To Skyrocket

Seems like this could be used for games, but it's hard to watch the display while moving the phone about.

An alternative solution, not requiring a special sensor, would be to use the camera to detect movement in at least 2D.

InfoWorld: Samsung's latest cell phone senses 3-D movements: January 13, 2005: By : NETWORKING

This camera from Kodak can send photos via e-mail. Is supports Wi-Fi (IEE 802.11) but can't be used to send photos via a mobile phone.

Yahoo! News - New Kodak Camera Has Wireless Email

This article reviews a number of devices for mobile access to online services.

Yahoo! News - Going Mobile

Of those mentioned here mainly DRM, storage and video formats apply to today's phones. UWB will though be relevant in the long term.

Microsoft is the main opponent to the OMA DRM standard. As Microsoft so far has had no impact on the mobile market, it probably doesn't matter too much as long as media is not exchanged with PC's. My spin is that Microsoft will have to implement OMA DRM support in Windows.

All future 2.5G and 3G phones will have a slot for Flash memory, even when they have embedded hard disks. This makes it key to standardize on one or a few formats so that users don't have to invest in memory cards they can't move when buying a new phone.

The video formats the consumers request are MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, QuickTime and Real. Still operators primarily promote the 3GPP umbrella format that you need to convert videos to before use on phones. Anyone that has converted videos know the time it takes, so really all phones should support the desktop standard formats.

Yahoo! News - Incompatible tech confuses consumers

The Koreans never stop to amaze. Handling real speech-to-text in a phone (without an online service doing the hard work) is complex and requires a lot of CPU power and memory. Therefor the cost of the phone is very likely high, but as time passes this might not be an issue. It shows again how aggressive Samsung is and what kind of risk non-Asian manufacturers face.

Yahoo! News - Samsung Electronics unveils "world's first" speech-to-text mobile

Considering Motorola focuses so much on Java, why doesn't Apple develop a Java iTunes client instead, so this could be deployed on many phones? Might be how they solved it, as the note provides very little detail.

Yahoo! News - Motorola Previews iTunes Phone

Many bad things can be said about Microsoft's strategy in the mobile market, and one of the major is the totally confusing and constantly changing naming of mobile software products, even though another major goof-up is to totally miss the key market, instead focusing on PDA's and smartphones that very few buy. They might solve the first issue with this announcement.

InfoWorld: Microsoft to phase out Pocket PC, Smartphone brands: January 06, 2005: By : HARDWARE

Samsung makes a number of noteable releases at CES 2005, including a 5 Mpixel camera phone and a UMTS phone with megapixel camera.

Samsung's New Releases at CES - News - Designtechnica News

Motorola and Burton cooperate to embed mobile phones into ski jackets. Of course for simple "call for help" applications only voice and SMS would be needed so the phones could be quite cheap. Not a good example of a new volume enabler, but still an interesting application.

Yahoo! News - Motorola to Build Cell Phones Into Ski Jackets

Mobile modems for PC's are typically provided as PC Card modules, but InStat believes such modems willl also be integrated in notebooks. It's no doubt already happening with WLAN / IEEE 802.11 and Bluetooth. UMTS (or EDGE), that has a practical speed enough for corporate email, browsing etc, makes such modems much more interesting than with previous radio technologies, even though cdma2000 1X (100-150 kb/s) should be sufficient as well.

Digital Media Europe: News - Mobile modem market grows 167% in 2004

Oddly this chip doesn't have 3D functionality (which is needed for games) and both nVidia and ATi have video functionality (decompression, scaling, artefact removal) in their mobile 3D chips, so who will win? I'm betting more on nVidia and ATi than AMD in this case.

Positive with AMD's offering is that they target it for use with video files directly transferred from PCs without conversion. The 3GPP format "invented" for mobile phones forces video files to be converted on a PC before use on a phone. Anyone that has worked with video conversion knows how extremely slow that process is even on very strong PC's, so AMD is on the right track in that area. Phones supporting only the 3GPP format are really not of much use. Hopefully the industry realizes this...

AMD Debuts Media CPU, Partners With TiVo - Connected Home News - Designtechnica News