Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

Increasing 106% since last year, according to Analysys.

textually.org: SMS in USA grows 106% in a year

J.D. Power found that the physical design of the wireless phone was most important, followed in order by ease of operation, features, durability and battery life.

Consumers are looking for phones that are easier to use because of the growing complexity, as manufacturers add video and still cameras, music players, and software to support various data and multimedia services.

For some reason clamshell phones are much more popular than soapbar-style phone in the US, and J.D. claims that clamshells are lighter. Why would they be lighter?

The feature on the phone used the most was the speakerphone, followed in order by short-message services, gaming and cameras.
Again indicates US preferences are quite different from e.g. Europe.

Design, Ease Of Operation Ring Up Cellular Phone Sales - Yahoo! News

Update: Didn't notice it was not until tomorrow. Will make a try then and see the site volume increase dramatically ... or (more likely) not at all.

I sent messages with "Check out www.abiro.com !" and "Check out wap.abiro.com from your phone!" to this display. I'm wondering how many seconds it was shown. Maybe someone reading this saw it :).

Storyboard will provide an opportunity for members of the public to post messages to a mobile Variable Message Sign using a mobile phone. The sign will be located on Hayes Island, adjacent to the Old Library and will be active between 10am and 11pm on 28th, 29th and 30th October.

may you live in interesting times - Stefhan Caddick / Storyboard

At least very close to. The keypad looks like that of a pocket calculator, which is probably a good thing: Finally a phone with distinct keys! The display is relatively large and in the "21st century format": landscape 3:4 for photos and videos. Hopefully all phone displays will have that form factor in the future. It's got a camera too, which is impressive in such a small phone. It's not very pretty though.

Slashphone.com - SlashRumor: Ultra Slim Samsung P300 - mobile phone reviews, news, rumors, mobile community and more...

Vodafone offers sales of mobile phones via vending machines in Manchester. An obvious trial, but nevertheless. Japan has sold iPods etc via vending machines for some time, so maybe Vodafone got inspired by that.

Vodafone UK deploys mobile-vending machine | Channel Register

31.6M phones for $2B revenue

Motorola: 30%
LG: 16%
Nokia: 16%
Samsung: 16%
Sanyo: 5%
etc.

Consumers bought 30 percent more cellular phones in the third quarter than the same period a year ago, and 7 percent more than the previous quarter, NPD said

U.S. Mobile Phone Sales Top $2 Billion In Q3 - Yahoo! News

377M subscribers (29%)
219B SMSs

Just the logistics of churning out so many phones so fast is quite impressive. Without local factories that would be impossible.

China was already the biggest cell phone market when in August 2003 it reported 250 million cell phone subcribers.

China Continues Mobile Phone Growth - Yahoo! News

IMS is still not fully specified, yet there's already a lot of talk about its potential, as it combines transfers of audio, video, pictures and data using the same base protocol (SIP).

Like with all emerging technologies the industry gets religious about it (remember WAP?), but it's just another enabler technology that will find its place down the road.

Digital Media Europe: News - Worldwide IMS market to surge to �11.7bn in 2010 � study

As previously reported Cingular has introduced Java-based e-mail and chat clients for popular Internet services. OZ Communications has provided the Java applications that are now available via Cingular's online shop.

OZ Takes PC-Like Email Client To Cellular Phones - Yahoo! News

Parks Associates states that more US users want cameras in their phones than music capability.

"Moreover, the impending introduction of advanced mega-pixel camera phones will strengthen demand, which will create great opportunities for service providers to increase their ARPU by offering photo sharing, photo printing, and other applications."

160Characters Association

Another sign that Java is increasingly used for more than just games. E-mail, chat etc are much less "power-hungry" than most games, so you don't need a powerful phone to run these applications.

textually.org: Cingular Introduces E-Mail Access on Cell Phones

It's called W-SIM (even though it's not really as small as a SIM card), and it's without a display and keypad.

It's for the Japanese PHS network and is intended to be used in portable devices that need mobile communication. Seems the whole portable industry is in the W-SIM Forum, including Apple, so maybe there will be DAPs and game consoles with PHS soon.

A closer look at Willcom�s W-SIM - Cellphones - cellphones.engadget.com

In a recent post I wrote that RIM had already closed down sales of Blackberries in the States, but that was apparently "crying wolf". They are still in the risk zone though.

You gotta love companies just focused on suing, or selling expensive patent licenses to, other companies:
He (Rob Sanderson ATR) also noted that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently finished reexamining eight NTP patents and issued initial rulings rejecting 100 percent of the claims.

RIM ruling risks US Blackberry shutdown - Yahoo! News

These statements confirm the impression garnered at the time of the acquisition that Access's strategic interest in acquiring PalmSource was in getting its hands on the Linux development capabilities PalmSource acquired at the end of last year when it bought China Mobilesoft.

Together with the joint venture with Oki Electric for multimedia, Access is suddenly a heavy-weight in complete platforms and applications suites for mobile phones, directly competing with Symbian, Microsoft and others. Not that Microsoft is any competitor to talk about at this time, so if anything it's really about knocking out Symbian from the smart phone and soon feature phone pedistals. Meanwhile most feature/volume phones are based on more or less proprietary solutions.

Palm is ironically instead taking the Microsoft route, also leaving Palm OS behind.

Access: foreseeing the demise of the Palm OS - Computer Business Review

...since the same period last year.

66.6M units in one year. Impressive!

Nokia estimates that the world market is 780M units.

Nokia profits surge 28.6 percent in third quarter - Yahoo! News

Again, the examples of uses described in this article are really streaming of video via UMTS.

Recent forecasts from Jupiter Research, however, suggest that 65 million people around the world will be subscribing to streaming or broadcast TV services by 2010.

Interactivity, including voting and interacting with reality formats such as "Big Brother" and FreemantleMedia's talent show "The X-Factor" will be a vital ingredient.
A nice benefit is the possibility to chat in real time, vote etc while the show is ongoing.

Mobile TV may be tiny but it looks set to grow-up fast - Yahoo! News

No surprise to anyone using Skype, as it's easy to arrange so that all ones buddies are accessible through Skype whatever the location. This is provided that all buddies use flatrate broadband of course.

The note is indirectly about eBays's acquisition of Skype. Skype was insanely over-priced, but I doubt that eBay has any plans to profit from Skype itself (which makes the price even more incomprehensible), rather become even more dominant in the e-bidding market.

One Day VOIP Calls Will be Free, says eBay - Lifestyle News - Designtechnica

As indicated before, RIM (Research in Motion) is threatened by Good, Microsoft, Nokia etc in this area. There are two surprising things:
* Why hasn't that happened before, considering Microsoft owns the corporate mail server business, and Nokia the mobile phone business?
* Why have users and corporations been so slow adopting mobile e-mail?

It would be sad if Microsoft won the match simply due to RIM leaving the building. Microsoft hasn't done anything (relative to what they could have done) to capture this market so far. Because they don't care or because they don't understand the mobile market? I doubt that they don't care.

BlackBerry's Dominance Threatened

Only 5 buttons with pre-defined numbers. Not even a display.

:: cellphonegeek.com :::

Pros:
- dedicated media/music keys
- supports memory sticks
- plays videos on a 2.2" display in 30 fps
- 2 Mp camera

Cons:
- only 500M Flash memory built in

Sony Ericsson announces the W900 UMTS Walkman phone - Cellphones - cellphones.engadget.com

Almost en par with the iPod nano, this provides plenty of room for your favorite music. As it's based on Flash memory, it's much more reliable than if it had a hard drive. If anything, the business for 1" hard drives is soon gone unless they can come up with 10 GB models or more.

Samsung launches cell phone with 3-gigabyte memory

When on that subject: These guys provide a solution for rendering Indian languages. Based in Sweden.

v-rocs

Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson claim support for Indian languages. Both Nokia and Samsung support multiple languages (Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati etc), but Sony Ericsson is yet only supporting Hindi.

CIOL : News : Mobiles get a 'Desi' touch

India is one of the world's fastest (if not the fastest) growing mobile phone markets, and it shows.

The number of cellular phone users in India totalled 65 million at the end of September, up 53.5 per cent from a year ago, said Sanjeev Sharma, who heads the Indian operation of Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia Corp.

Currently, one among every 10 Indians has a phone connection, and there are more mobile connections than land phones.

India's cellular phone market adding 2.5 million new users every month - Yahoo! News

Like:
- Series 60
- the numeric keypad kan be flipped up for access to a full alphanumeric keypad
- VoIP over SIP via WiFi
- corporate email via BlackBerry Connect, GoodLink, Nokia Business Center, Seven Mobile Mail, Seven Always-On Mail, and Visto Mobile

Really impressive stuff, considering we are talking a phone that is quite small (when folded)!

Nokia E70 (MobileBurn)

DVB-H is one of the candidate technologies for Mobile TV, and many believe DVB-H will dominate.

Manufacturers will launch DVB-H mobile TV on a trial basis by 2008 after dealing with ambiguities regarding spectrum allocation.

‘The DVB-H mobile TV market is set to grow at an explosive rate and touch €6.80bn in revenues by 2011,’ says Frost & Sullivan industry analyst Pranab Mookken.

Digital Media Europe: News - DVB-H TV to gain momentum in Europe by 2008 � report

Ericsson and BenQ/Siemens are cooperating to define a JSR for enabling IMS functionality in Java applikations.

The JSR-281 will consist of at least three types of functionality: IMS core functionality, push-to-talk over cellular (PoC) services, and Group List Management services.

Digital Media Europe: News - Ericsson, Benq Mobile to lead IMS Java standards

Small form factor, yet support multiple corporare email solutions and WiFi.

yes, it’s got GoodLink, Nokia Business Center, Seven Always-On, Visto Mobile, and BlackBerry Connect support

Nokia - New Nokia Family of Devices Targeted at the Business World - Press Releases - Press - About Nokia

It's a pure production unit, so this means Indian phones will still be designed in Korea. 1M units per year sounds low, considering the potential.

Samsung Electronics to set up mobile phone plant in India - Yahoo! News

many fans can now spend the downtime between bands texting photos and messages to their friends in the venue via the big screen

The solution is povided by Vibes (I think it's this Vibes).

93X

This is big news, and an in-road for Microsoft to establish Blackberry-like terminals with support for ActiveSync and hence Exchange 2003:
Analyst say that service won't be disrupted for now but the company (RIM) won't be able to sell BlackBerry devices anymore in the U.S.

Considering RIM did this to avoid paying NTP a lot of money, the question is what's NTP's goal. To kill off mobile e-mail altogether? Only U.S. lawyers could come up with such a stupid idea.

Could this also stop Microsoft and Nokia (with its new Business Center solution)?

BlackBerry Service In The U.S. Threatened

Engadget didn't like this one, but the user interface actually looks quite user-friendly with dedicated music player keys and equally-shaped numeric keys (why don't all phones have that! they are supposed to be used more than looked at). It's iPod white and rather ugly. The camera is only 0.3 Mp (VGA), which indicates this is a phone in the lower price bracket. The logo indicates it supports MP3 natively.

Slashphone.com - Bird MP300 / Bird W1 - mobile phone reviews, news, rumors, mobile community and more...

This time they've put the alphanumeric keypad on the phone rather than on the fold-out keypad. That's much better from an ergonomics point-of-view, yet I'm wondering why they have the keyboard on the shorter side. That forces it to be pretty tiny.

Web browsing is done in landscape mode, which makes it even more odd that the keypad is on the "wrong" side. It uses Opera's latest UIQ browser.

It supports UMTS, WiFi and Bluetooth, and has a 2 Mp camera.

The Sony Ericsson P990 UMTS and WiFi smartphone is official - Cellphones - cellphones.engadget.com

Phone charms have grown popular in Asia, but not in Europe and the US. OddzBallz are special in that they are handcrafted and only produced ín 200 units each, and they look like small weird monsters.

The OddzBallz,1st Limited Edition, Handmade and Designed by elsakawai

Round as a ball and showing a "face" expressing moods, with a projected keypad / clock (there's no keypad on the phone) plus some other neat features. To charge it you bounce (!) it. I doubt it would stand that for very long (mechanically speaking).

The page also points to other Nokia design studies.

Coverage of Nokia Concepts 1 : Nokia Acibo - Revolutionary Design @ PhoneMag.com

DoS = Denial of Service = sending so much "spam" data that valid data can't come through

The remedy to this is that the sender, not the recipient, pays for the cost of sending SMSs. An simple alternative, if this would be too complicated, is to set up flow control in the SMS service, limiting the amount of SMSs per time unit per sender.

Attackers Could Text Message Cell Services To Death - Yahoo! News

They've translated passages from the Bible into SMS-speak (whether they did that through automation or manually it doesn't say), to shorten and modernize the text.

The way it works is that you download a Windows application with the passages, and from that you can then send any passage to somebody else via SMS.

If you want an alternative way to access the Bible (in original text) you can visit wap.abiro.com from your phone. You'll find Mobible under "The Lab" / "Read Books". On the Books page you will also find classic literature. Both services are free of charge (except for the air-time of course).

SMSBible

Very simple UI, very large symbols on keypad and display, optimised for the elderly, or for anyone else that only makes voice calls and doesn't feel embarrassed by not having a phone with a 2 mp camera, stereo headsets and Crazy Frog ringtone. It even has a paper phonebook instead of a digital one. Don't expect to surf the Web with this one.

DoCoMo�s D880ss elderphone - Cellphones - cellphones.engadget.com

As North Korea uses GSM (at least they've done one thing right) there haven't been any phones with Korean text. Some other country could though easily have made GSM phones in Korean, so it's not a 100% convincing argument. In any case this effort now means South Korea will make phones for North Korea. This could even help in the coming-together of the countries. Stranger things have happened, and everyone would applaud if North Korea opened up its borders.

Digital Chosunilbo (English Edition) : Daily News in English About Korea

I've mentioned before that real mobile TV is about having a separate receiver for digital TV broadcasts. This article talks about streaming video over 3G networks, which might be similar-looking to an end-user, but is technically vastly different. One of the problems with this approach is:
capacity on a third-generation, or 3G, wireless network could be exceeded as early as 2007 if 40 percent of subscribers view even eight minutes of video per day.

It's interesting how operators take too big leaps in the chase for new revenue that seemingly never seems to surface. Instead of reaping the benefits of 3G for email (including corporate such) and web-browsing (two things that users really want, but can't use due to badly designed terminals without alphanum keypads, too small displays etc), they suddenly go for something completely different, even though 3G is a very inefficient transport for any form of TV (meaning video content that many "listen in" to at the same time). 3G is simply not a broadcast network, so why even try. It's just darn stupid.

This is an interesting note about real broadcast TV, considering voice is still the numero uno revenue generator for operators:
But the drawback of MBMS is that it requires operators to set aside capacity that could otherwise be used to sell lucrative point-to-point voice or data services.
What's confusing with this is that value-added voice services could easily outrank any new data service in increased revenue, so why not focus on that instead. Maybe short-sighted, but after all it's hard cash that counts. Nothing else.

Tight squeeze for mobile TV | CNET News.com

Docomo and Mitsubishi are experimenting with having the keypad replaced with touch keys that via an underlying display tells what keys are available at the moment. This is nothing new per se, as touch keys have been used on the main display of PDAs and smartphones for a long time, but as a separate keypad/display it's fairly unique.

You heard of touch screens now check out touch keys - Phoneyworld.com

Canalys reports that smartphone volumes grew by 170% in the first half year of 2005, yet only 7.5% of all phones in the EMEA markets are smartphones. Most of these were Nokia Series 60 based (80%). Series 60 is now used in mainstream phones as well, so I think it's wrong calling all them smartphones. Really the term smartphone is more and more irrelevant. As most smartphones have neither a touch-screen display nor alphanumeric keypad, they are really not that useful for information services, email, PIM etc. Even though the integrated applications can be quite good, they are very hard to use without that (and if I would choose, I would definitely prefer at least an alphanumeric keypad).

Yahoo! - New Study Finds Steep Growth For Smartphones

Intel bets on WiMax (an evolution of Wi-Fi/WLAN/IEEE 802.11), Qualcomm on an evolution of CDMA. Intel's advantage is that many dislike Qualcomm for their control of the extensive (and expensive) CDMA patent portfolio. Qualcomm's advantage is that there's already plenty of frequency space for CDMA to use, which is not the case for WiMax.

Yet Qualcomm is not out of luck if WiMax wins:
One of Qualcomm's reasons for buying Flarion was getting its hands on key OFDM patents. Since WiMax is partially based on OFDM, Qualcomm could ask makers of WiMax gear to pay royalties. Qualcomm hasn't said whether it plans to do that. "We do believe we have IP (intellectual property) in WiMax," said Jacobs.
Sneaky, aren't they?

Yahoo! News - Intel, Qualcomm Ready To Fight Over Emerging WiMax Standard