Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

$25 in production cost, including software licensing etc. It doesn't say what kind of functionality could be expected from such a phone.

Cellphones Could Hit $25 Price In 12 Months - Mobile Phones/PDAs News - Designtechnica

It goes without saying that it supports Skype.

WiFi phone in the works from Skype - Wireless - wireless.engadget.com

It sounds crazy (sorry about the pun), but Jamster's Crazy Frog is actually outselling Coldplay's latest single by 4-to-1.

While "Crazy Frog" and other ring tones do not appear to be much of a hit among adults, so many youngsters are personalizing the sound of their cell phones that such digital music could change world music markets.

Phone Ring Tone Set to Top U.K. Charts - Yahoo! News

Some signs:
- Toshiba: left China
- Mitsubishi: left Europe
- Nokia, Motorola and others: moving into Japan
- Global UMTS/W-CDMA standard: more competition
- NEC and Matsushita: posted losses

I believe they will come back, possibly with a vengeance, and my advice to them (not that anyone will listen) is to differentiate into low-end and mid-range. Japan is feature-crazy, but that doesn't mean all parts of the world are.

Japan mobile makers face challenges at home, abroad - Yahoo! News

It's integrated over the screen, and is actually powered by the finger movement (warning: high nerd factor!). It's claimed to support fingerprint recognition. Not sure how that works though. The main use is said to be application navigation, but what about handwriting recognition for Asian countries?

The Korea Times : Cell Phone Meets Fancy Input Device

Extensive review by Mobile-Review.

It's got a very high display resolution (352 by 288), which can be seen in the pictures, and it almost looks like a camcorder when used as such. The camera has Carl Zeiss optics.

Mobile-review.com Review GSM/UMTS smartphone Nokia N90

Three models (car, plane, train), controlled via infrared.

...mainly targeting female high school students.

textually.org: Tomy To Debut Miniature Cars Controlled By Cell Phone

From a new survey by the Network Management Group:

Commercial-free radio over mobile phones (40%) and the ability to download music to phones (35%) are the two most interesting advanced mobile services to young adults

survey respondents preferred the idea of paying 99 cents per song for music downloads rather than $19.95 monthly for up to 30 song downloads

Young mobile users most interested in music -survey - Yahoo! News

This is like an over-sized PDA with WLAN and running Linux and ditto applications.

Nokia 770 Net Appliance - Connected Home News - Designtechnica

Totaling 180.6M units for Q1 2005. Main growth areas: Asia/Pacific, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa and Latin America.

Mobile Phones Sales up 17% in First Quarter - Mobile Phones/PDAs News - Designtechnica

One of the expected future features in phones is support for digital TV reception, but this announcement is simply about streaming video over the 3G network.

Digital Media Europe: News - Orange UK launches mobile TV

The survey covered 800 U.K. users and found that 77 percent of the respondents said they have never used data services such as video messaging, gaming or ringtone downloads.
Video messaging is understandable, gaming and ringtones less so.

Oren Glanz, Olista's CEO: "(Operators) have reacted to the poor take-up off mobile data services by simply rolling out more, on the basis that if you throw enough out there something will stick."

Users Ignoring Or Dissatisfied With Cellular Data: Survey - Yahoo! News

The phones are provided by Sagem, sport large screens and three buttons for the main screen, contacts and messages.

Chief Marketing Officer Peter Bamford: "We also have customers who just want to make and receive calls and text messages on their mobile phones."

A pre-paid Vodafone Simply handset costs 80 pounds, although it is free with a monthly price plan.

Vodafone emphasizes that its new service is not about low tariffs but simple, easy-to-use handsets.

Vodafone goes no-frills with new UK phones - Yahoo! News

Industry research firm, Yankee Group, estimates revenue from mobile phone gaming in the United States totaled $173 million in 2004 and will hit about $1 billion in 2008.
Nice round figure.

"Mobile games are a great low-cost counterpart to bigger budget console games because developers can re-use the same content and the operator takes care of most of the marketing," (Yoshiteru Yamaguchi, DoCoMo's executive director of content and customer relations)

Game developers calling on mobile phones - Yahoo! News

Not for their use really, but for tracking their whereabouts. As the dolphins in question (dusky dolphins) stay close to the shore the coverage from existing mobile antennas is enough.

Also mentions the use of phones (with GPS I guess) for tracking elephants in Africa. Position is requested and sent back via SMS.

Cellphone technology to track dolphins - Yahoo! News

Gameloft has released two multiplayer Java-based games that use the mobile network for the game communication.

3D Multiplayer Games Coming To Your Mobile - Electronic Gaming News - Designtechnica

Called DOOM RPG (RPG as it's turn-based, which is a bit surprising). Developed by id Software, like the original DOOM and last year's DOOM 3. The note hints about a DOOM movie.

DOOM RPG Coming To Your Mobile Phone - Electronic Gaming News - Designtechnica

ISV Oddcast (sic!) will provide a conversational agent based on a local Flash (Lite?) application and a server solution. The solution is said to be for Series 60 phones only. There are actually several phones supporting Flash Lite, and Mobile Fun sports a number of games based on Flash Lite.

Flash applications for cell phones - Yahoo! News

Oops! Push e-mail, a key component that corporate users were waiting for from Microsoft, is still missing.
Will come later though.

Ken Dulaney, a senior mobile analyst at Gartner, said push e-mail capability will not happen until Microsoft ships the next service pack for Exchange 2003. “There will be a number of changes [coming in Exchange] to make up for the weakness of the [Windows Mobile] product,” Dulaney said.

Windows Mobile 5.0 needs a push - Yahoo! News

In the hunt for the killer app ... I don't think this is the one.

picturephoning.com: Sportscar-looking cell phone integrates alco test

The standard will be called Secure User Plane Location (SUPL), and will be out June 2005. A-GPS support is needed in the phone.

A ‘user plane’ solution is an A-GPS system where communication between server and mobile device runs over a normal data connection, for example GPRS.

Digital Media Europe: News - OMA developing secure user plane location standard

...but an almost equal amount of men and women play mobile games.

Guys Download Mobile Games More - Mobile Phones/PDAs News - Designtechnica

"If you were to ask me which mobile device will take top place for listening to music, I'd bet on the mobile phone for sure," Gates told the newspaper.
We'll see. If so, the mobile phone must be as easy to use for music as an iPod.

"The BlackBerry is great but we're bringing a new approach," he said. "With BlackBerry you need to link to a separate server, and that costs extra. With us, the e-mail function will already be part of the server software."
Sure, if the company is using MS Exchange 2003 (or later). Most use MS Exchange for sure, but MS is truggling to get companies to upgrade to the latest version that has full support for mobile devices (via ActiveSync, HTML, WML etc). One reason is the need for adopting Active Directory.

Technology News Article | Reuters.com

NASA has developed a system that uses signals from the nerves controlling the speech to detect what is being said without any actual sound is made. One application mentioned is silent telephony. I think James Bond would like this one.

TheFeature :: Talking Loud And Saying Nothing

IDC: "reaching 2.5m units compared to 1.6m units in the corresponding quarter of 2004"

Hence we talk high-end PDAs etc here, not mobile phones.

Digital Media Europe: News - European mobile devices market grew 55% in Q1 � report

"According to the survey, the third of UK small and medium-sized enterprises did not understand the term 'broadband', while their knowledge of 3G, wi-fI and VoIP was 'negligible' - the majority had never heard of these terms."

"Some 45 per cent of the businesses said they had no need for the internet and only a fifth had access to broadband. Four out of five companies with dial-up access to the internet could not see any benefit to their business in upgrading to broadband."

"The report also found that whilst UK consumers have reasonable levels of understanding about broadband and digital television, three quarters have never heard of 3G."

It indicates the industry has been lousy at marketing the real benefits of broadband and 3G, and as the note says this is a wake-up call for all involved.

Digital Media Europe: News - Digital revolution bypasses much of UK

Having been installed in cars and boats for several years, GPS technology is now moving over to mobile devices. There have of course been phones with GPS earlier, but mainly for vertical markets. We're still not talking mainstream phones, but PDA-like devices.

"And since PNDs are portable, they can be taken from car to car - a big advantage to consumers who would not want to limit the use of a navigation system to one vehicle."

GPS to Evolve on Phones, PDA's - Mobile Phones/PDAs News - Designtechnica

At least that's what In-Stat found when performing a recent survey.

"Some mobile programming is quite clear: news and weather are winners. Payment schemes need more flexibility, however."

Multimedia Handsets Lose Their Appeal - Mobile Phones/PDAs News - Designtechnica

"Yahoo! Music Unlimited uses the WMA format and Windows Media Digital Rights Management 10 (WM DRM 10). This support enables subscription tracks to be transferred to any portable device that supports WM DRM 10."

"Yahoo! Music Unlimited offers a continuously growing online catalog of music composed of more than one million songs, encoded in the highest audio quality (192 kbs) from all major record labels as well as most independent labels."
192 kbps is in my opinion not high quality.

Yahoo! Launches Music Unlimited Service - Portable Media News - Designtechnica

The clear driver behind Symbian OS deployment is Nokia, via its feature/smart phone system Series 60 (etc). We will see Symbian OS in more and more normal-sized phones in the future. A personal opinion is that such an advanced OS with so many included applications needs phones with a full keypad (at least as an option), especially when used as a business tool. Nokia's over-sized/prized BT-enabled keypad is not the answer.

Symbian Q1 smartphone unit shipments soar - Yahoo! News

"...it quickly flashes words on a screen one at a time."

"...once you move the speed up, to about 400 or 500 words (per minute), it feels like a stream"

"Others, though, don't like losing control over the reading experience and not having the ability to jump around within the text."
For news this would probably not be a problem.

On a different but related subject: I'd like to see support for text-to-speech for hands-off news and message presentation. Ideal while driving, but also if you are engrossed in other things. Extra fun if it read out news/messages as they arrived (without user intervention), and possibly expressing emoticons in appropriate ways (sounding happy, sad etc). For a taste of this, see my Notify application.

Text streaming service lets users read material as fast as they can - Yahoo! News

""...limited catalysts for 3G adoption will create complex market conditions over the next few years," said IDC analyst David Linsalata"
Well, music downloads is a very good incentive for adoption if looking at Europe. EGPRS/EDGE would be a good alternative to UMTS of course, but basic GPRS just doesn't cut it (unless you count MIDI ringtones as music downloads as well).

"But Linsalata points out the rush to 3G will be slower than anticipated. A large migration to 3G is not expected until the end of 2006 and some business models will be deployed without testing."
Especially the part about 'deployed without testing' is interesting. Many of the i-mode services were just that: experiments where most failed but some became very big hits. Why are we so afraid of experimenting with new services, and why won't operators give third-party possibility to experiment (by taking a reasonably low cut of the revenue share)?

Third-Generation Mobile Networks Ramp Up - Yahoo! News

"Microsoft's share of the mobile device software market is estimated at 16 to 18 percent, while Symbian is seen having a 61 to 71 percent market share."
That's definitely not true! Most (read: almost all) phones still run OSE, REX/BREW, Nucleus etc. It's not even true when talking smartphones only, as this is not including all Blackberries and Treos out there that run neither Windows Mobile nor Symbian OS.

"The software will also work with "push-to-talk" features, which allows phone users to chat walkie-talkie style, by pushing a button when they want to talk to another party."
Would be very interesting to know what method they are using. SIP? H.324? Proprietary? I doubt the latter.

Microsoft phone software runs hard drives - Yahoo! News

There were also automated services linking to the original. They are not listed here.

eMediaWire: Abiro Introduces Mobile Casino (the full press release)

Online Casino News.com: Abiro Introduces Mobile Casino

101 Best Online Casinos: New Mobile Casino Released by Abiro

It seems IDC forgot to verify that the vendors really meant PDAs (and not smartphones) when they said PDAs. Another indicator that the terms used need to be revised, so that vendors can't use them any way they like.

Personal Tech Pipeline | RIM Passes PalmOne? Not True.

This is interesting: "increasing consideration of mobility as a concept that is central to IT strategy", as it indicates that enterprises might now have easier to accept investments in and maintenance of special mobile servers (like for Blackberry), something that has been a "red tape hell" for proactive employees before. A good start is to emulate the functionality of MS Outlook or Lotus Notes on mobile devices. Access to the customer database on the road is also very important, etc.

Digital Media Europe: News - Widespread mobile device deployment by European businesses expected in 2005 � report

Daily total: 58M pages.

WAP was used during the election to provide news, voting instructions etc.

It doesn't say what else WAP is primarily used for. I doubt it's just ringtones etc. General news is also a likely popular application.

Digital Media Europe: News - UK WAP impressions show 30% growth

A lot of users got phones with color displays and cameras during 2003 and 2004, and IDC means that will result in less users upgrading during 2005. One could argue that music-enabled phones would continue the growth also for 2005, but IDC thinks otherwise. Also, emerging markets like China and India are far from saturated yet.

IDC: Mobile Phone Growth to Slow in 2005 - Mobile Phones/PDAs News - Designtechnica

Qualcomm will likely not find the killer app on their own, but with its BREW application platform and the recently released uiOne (a software package adding advanced user interface functionality to BREW) there might be a bigger chance others will create those killer apps.

After voice, SMS and ringtones no other real killer app has surfaced, but maybe gambling and gaming will become killer apps (see earlier note). Tamagotchi in the phone maybe?

Qualcomm Gets Personal - Yahoo! News

Linux of course doesn't run on the chip but in external memory, but the key point of this note is that there's no need for a separate application processor, which adds a lot of cost (both for that extra CPU and extra memory). As phones get more advanced features yet need to retain and even lower the price this kind of optimisation is necessary.

Qualcomm Offers Single-Chip Linux - Yahoo! News

A new report from Juniper Research indicates gambling and gaming will be the main businesses for content in the future. Considering ringtones is dominating today this is a bold statement.

On the gambling side it sounds like they have the highest hopes for lotteries, but also betting and casinos will be important.

Broken down (for 2009):
- Gambling: 33%
- Games: 31%
- Music: 16%
- Sports: 8%
- Ringtones: 8%
- Adult: 4%
Yet I don't believe there will be any difference between music and ringtones by 2009, at least from a technical standpoint. Adult content got a surprisingly low rating.

Digital Media Europe: News - Mobile content market worth 45bn by 2009 - report

This is up 9% since previous Q1 but down 13% since Q4. Q4 is always considerably better than Q1.

Market share per vendor:
Nokia: 30.9%
Motorola: 16.5%
Samsung: 14.1%
LG: 6.4%
SonyEricsson: 5.4%

Digital Media Europe: News - Worldwide mobile phone shipments total 174.3m units in Q1 � report

It's been up for a while as you know, but now it's really official. This press release is also being submitted to other news services.

20050506 Press Release Abiro Mobile Casino

I don't know about you, but this is scary. Japan has been a pioneer in camera surveillance, and this looks like another step in the wrong direction.

- Employees carry mandatory RFID tags (or RFID cards)
- System monitors employees' whereabouts using antennas
- System analyses employees' work performance (how much one is contributing to production)
- Based on the previous steps, employee allocation is optimized and quality of products is improved.

RFID in Japan: pervasive employee monitoring

Sweden's already there. The figure is seemingly not taking into account telematics devices, which is still a small market.

W.Europe heads for 100 pct cell phone penetration - Yahoo! News

"According to the market research firm, 2005-2009 is the consumer and small business VoIP ramp-up period"

Digital Media Europe: News - Mass migration to VoIP within decade - report

I don't think the likes of HP, Palm etc had expected this, but shows that the user is more concerned about getting access to corporate e-mail (anyway, anyhow) than having a PDA in the first place.

So far such solutions have been proprietary (including MS ActiveSync), but there are standard solutions now being considered, including Push E-mail via SMS (initially), and synchronisation via SyncML.

RIM's Blackberry Topples PalmOne In Handheld Market - Yahoo! News

BlackBerry Is Now The Best-Selling PDA, Study Says - Yahoo! News

The author concludes that mobile gaming works and that it's addictive, despite a negative beginning of the anecdote.

He points to some developments making mobile gaming even more doable:
(quote)
- Better bandwidth. (Thank you 3G and EV-DO.)
- Better graphics. (Thank you ATI and nVidia). Wait until you get a load of the 3-D graphics.
- Larger keyboards and amazing thumb dexterity. (Thank you evolution.)
- Some of the games and sensations are oddly compelling. (Thank you developers.)
- Kids and teens want the games because they have the cell phone with them anyway—inactivity equals boredom, which equals a bad thing. (Thank you television and console video games.)
(end quote)

Is Mobile Gaming Ridiculous? - Yahoo! News

This is counter to previous trends, but it seems the addition of integrated W-Fi and mobile radio (which makes the PDA a smartphone, right...) has lured consumers to buy more.

The PDA/smartphone distinction is increasingly confusing. A smartphone like Treo 650 is really just a PDA with mobile radio and some phone-specific software.

PDA Sales Increase Sharply - Computing News - Designtechnica

"Panelists in a session Tuesday titled "802.11 and Wi-Fi: What's Next?" unanimously agreed that VoIP and Wi-Fi will have a major impact on companies and industries."
Agreed. It's actually also a long-term DECT killer.

"VoIP, meanwhile, allows the transmission of phone calls over the Internet. And the experts say Voice over Wi-Fi -- or VoWi-Fi -- for phones, laptops, and PDAs isn't too far off."
Not sure they mean a new protocol. I figure not. Wi-Fi is just a bearer for any data. Hence, VoWi-Fi is now.

VoIP, Wi-Fi, And Last But Not Least: VoWi-Fi - Yahoo! News

This actually looks quite portable even though the keyboard is large when unrolled (sic!). $99 is reasonable.

the::unwired - ACCESSORY: Eleksen to release a Bluetooth fabric keyboard [UPDATE]

This stalling obviously doesn't benefit the market, and potentially operators and manufacturers will get restless and go for other means for DRM. MPEG LA's greed's to blame.

"However, the Association's board has expressed serious disappointment with the revised terms — both in terms of the fee levels and complexity of the scheme, the Association said in a statement."

Phone Operators Down on DRM Proposal - Mobile Phones/PDAs News - Designtechnica

4.0 is promised to be better optimised as an OS for mobile phones than earlier versions.

Linux Platform on Tap for Cell Phones - Yahoo! News

"most students said that confiscating their cellphone, and thus their connection to the outside world, would be the absolute harshest punishment you could mete out"

The worst thing you could do to South Korean teenager? Take away their cellphone - Cellphones - cellphones.engadget.com /

In Ireland 24% homes are mobile-only. In parts of Asia mobile even dominates at places (e.g. in China), but then because there's no other infrastructure. In Ireland there's been fixed lines before mobile, so this is an interesting technology-switching trend.

Digital Media Europe: News - ComReg survey shows growth of mobile-only homes, high incidence of accidental roaming near Republic-N.I. border

This article is not altogether wrong, but almost.

"The problem with mobile e-mail is that it's easy to implement for 20 people, but a pig to manage for 2,000"
Why? It's a simple plug-in to Exchange or Notes. Of course normal phones should be used, not Blackberries, nor PDAs. I agree that Internet e-mail is a pig to set up in the terminal. Not so if accessing the mail server via the phone browser.

"You have to back them up, update applications, install patches"
How so? Most phones have embedded e-mail clients for SMTP/POP3/IMAP4, and e.g. Exchange 2003 supports WML and HTML for access via a phone browser.

"you have to deal with the problem of people forgetting to bring them into the office for updates"
Updates of what?

"Managing a fleet of Pocket PCs isn't a way of halving your IT budget"
Of course you don't use Pocket PCs for mobile e-mail, but normal phones.

"Ironically, it's spam that has freed us from the tyranny of mail"
Spam? I don't get any spam at all at work? I get lots of e-mail, but not spam. Always use central spam filters.

"Count the number of "clicks" it takes to delete an incoming message"
So the phone manufacturers should design a better UI for e-mail. It's not more complicated than that.
In any case, for mobile use it's critical to set up filters so that not all e-mails arrive at the phone. E.g. ones where you are only on the CC list.

"And if you want to know how to reach that elusive sales prospect, it's easy. Instant messages."
Doesn't it have the same issues as e-mail, like security, management, etc? Using MSN, Yahoo, AOL etc for business/confidential messages between companies doesn't sound like a very good idea security/tracking-wise. Yet, it's a fact that also most/all corporate e-mails are sent between companies without encryption. I actually believe that in the future inter-corporate messages will all be encrypted and messages between parties that are not approved will just be thrown away.

At my work all travelling sales and service people need mobile e-mail now. Of course via normal phones. No sense in investing in new equipment again.

E-Mail on Phones: Just a Bad Idea - Yahoo! News