Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

Get free voice minutes for watching a video ad sounds fair right?

Well, not the way Virgin is doing it: You get 1 minute free talk time for watching a 30 second ad and then answering a few questions based on the ad. That means you most likely spend considerably more than 1 minute wasting your time and getting brainwashed, to get 1 minute to talk for free.

What a lousy deal for the consumer!

A Sweet Deal for Virgin Mobile?

Agile Mobile is recommended for smartphones, and Getaboo or Mobisophy's UltraIM for featurephones with Java. Note that the latter are both commercial. You will find a few completely free IM applications at GetJar.

How to instant message with your phone - infoSync World

Today's dosage of different mobile market statistics:

Quote: Asia Pacific is the world’s largest mobile phone market. There are 409 million mobile phone users in China as of the end March 2006.

textually.org: Some interesting mobile stats


Quote: Worldwide sales of mobile phones will rise from 935m units in 2006 to more than double that in 2011. Smart-phone sales will surpass 480m units by 2011.

Quote: The greatest challenge is to just add the features different customers want without adding unneeded cost or complexity from unneeded or unwanted features.
That's solved by providing differentiated phone models.

Digital Media Europe: News - Global wireless handset market to reach €196bn in 2011 - report


Quote: In particular, users expressed increasing satisfaction with features related to being able to connect to the Internet.

Study Finds Users Happier With Their Cell Phones - Yahoo! News: "users expressed increasing satisfaction with features related to being able to connect to the Internet."

It should not be surprising, as it's mainly young people that use SMS, but what they really want is IM. Hooking up to communities (that you might already have access to from a PC) instead of doing just point-to-point messaging is an obvious step to take also on the mobile side. Just the fact that you can't look people up easily and based on interests etc via SMS is a good reason to abandon it long term.

IM is the fear of the century for operators. As I've pointed out earlier, it's a completely irrational fear. Operators should provide what users want and hence make them happy and stay with the current operator. That will generate revenue so also the operators become happy. Simple, right? If they don't provide IM then a lot of other providers will. As IM over mobile radio is very inexpensive for the consumer there's nothing holding back third-party providers from giving customers what they want.

Oddly, operators are putting a lot of efforts into data-intensive services like streaming video etc, that completely drain their networks, and are of very arguable value to consumers. IM on the other hand doesn't load the network nearly as much (if at all), and don't require new network technology, even when sending a few photos and files now and then.

As mentioned before, that a proprietary and closed service like mobispine can get very popular in a short time indicates the market is there for the taking.

Telcos could lose out on mobile IM - Communications - News - ZDNet Asia

Mobile IM held back by 'traditional' operators - Mobile & Wireless - Breaking Business and Technology News at silicon.com

The Helio service is much more interesting than the phones (at least from my perspective), and I'm wondering why at all there are specific Helio phones, considering a Java ME application or a WAP service for existing phones would do the trick. I understand it from a brand-building perspective, but not from a TTM/adoption/quality point-of-view. After all, how many new phones can people afford to buy per year?

Quote: Tight MySpace integration on Helio's network should give you a good idea of who they're shooting for.
Now we're talking something new, but why new phones for that?

Helio review roundup - Engadget Mobile

Information about the Helio services:
Helio Services - Check Out What's Possible with Helio

It's kind of funny we still use both mobile phones and land-line phones, the mobile phone being individual but expensive over time, and the landline phone being common for a household but much less expensive over time.

The broadband ISPs as well as independent players like Skype, Net2Phone, Vonage etc fight for replacing the landline with telephony via broadband, but also has an opportunity to provide the same functionality over mobile networks and Wi-Fi or WiMAX hot spots. As the mobile operator is between you and the other party when calling via the mobile network, providers like Skype can't lower that cost to a "landline killer" level. At least not in Europe. Hence, participation from mobile operators is needed to make the convergence realistic, but do they want to?

People that claim that Wi-Fi hot spots threaten mobile networks don't know what they are talking about. The coverage of Wi-Fi from a global perspective (and even from an urban perspective) is still laughable.

I'm now closing down my landline connection to use only mobile and broadband.

Fixed-Mobile Convergence Called Disruptive - Yahoo! News

This is the first in a series of articles that will look at different mobile platforms suitable for corporate use. This article is specifically about RIM Blackberry.

Interestingly most users still seem to see the Blackberry as mainly an email device, even though it functionality-wise is a smartphone or PDA. That's the side effect of connecting certain functionality to a brand. On the positive side, those in the survey also considered the Blackberry to have the best corporate email support, pointing out the fact (?) that the Blackberry technology uses real pushing of emails to the device, while e.g. Windows Mobile pulls emails at given intervals. I don't think that is true, but I haven't dug deep enough into the specs to know for sure. Lack of Wi-Fi is pointed out as a clear drawback when using the device within the office.

The author promises that this article will be followed up with ditto about Windows Mobile, Symbian OS, Palm OS, Linux and Java ME.

Mobile platforms: BlackBerry -- Mobile e-mail's 'gold standard'

Most phones are of course already made in Asia, whatever the label put on them, and China and India will completely dominate in terms of mobile users. Hence, increasingly decisions made at worldwide operators and manufacturers must mainly take into account the needs in these markets.

textually.org: India set to overtake US in mobile market

Previously MobHappy served as the hub for different bloggers' submissions of Carnival of the Mobilists summaries. I can't see any direct connection with MobHappy on the site, yet I know the team is still involved. There will later be handed out awards for the best CotM summary of the year.

Carnival of the Mobilists

Quote: For engineers, an understanding of mobile operating systems such as Symbian, J2ME, Windows Mobile and Palm OS would be useful, as well as a knowledge of WAP, the Wireless Applications Protocol and SMS, the Short Message Service.

Another advise (if you are into Java ME, or want to become convinced you should be into Java ME): Read my Java ME pages.

RWonline - RW Special Report

Well, maybe not, but by choosing GSM (and WCDMA) as the base technology for all its future phones it means the same phones can be used worldwide.

DoCoMo's attempt to establish in Europe has not been a success, requiring new phones with i-mode functionality (Europenized) and with GSM, and services that haven't caught on.

Of course there's nothing that says services successful in Japan will be successful anywhere else, except for roaming Japanese people. Hello Kitty anyone?

DoCoMo to make all models global standard - paper - Yahoo! News

Quotes from Motorola on JavaOne:
"It's a huge market opportunity for developers," (Christy Wyatt) said.
Java provides portability for applications, (Rob) Shaddock added.

The obstacle: But cell phone application development is challenged by the rapid acceleration of technology and platform fragmentation

InfoWorld Tech Watch | InfoWorld | Motorola cites Java cell phone opportunities | May 19, 2006 08:08 AM | By Paul Krill

See also:
Motorola seeks mobile unity at JavaOne | InfoWorld | News | 2006-05-15 | By Paul Krill

The info about SMS and MMS is nothing new: SMS dominates, MMS disappoints.

One thing caught my eye: The MIM market is still fragmented, and IDC believes the true value to users will be observing presence of their IM contacts.
That's a pretty bad excuse. What users want is to be able to do IM, at all. Compatibility with non-existing Wireless Village servers is obviously not a solution. Neither is a complicated setup process.

mobispine that I reported about before is still among the top 3 downloads at GetJar (beat by Opera mini and Movamail), and this is a completely proprietary solution, creating a community in itself.

I'll watch out for more software that support existing IM services, like the previously mentioned imseven.

Digital Media Europe: News - W. European mobile messaging market to reach €12.1bn in 2010 – report

Domestic manufacturers have a hard time competing with the established brands. For sure the phones are increasingly made in China, but they still don't carry Chinese brands. Interestingly the external brands are even increasing market share. Considering how many Chinese brands there are, it's easy to predict that many of them will disappear or become ODMs.

Nokia, Motorola, Samsung Dominate Phones In China - Yahoo! News

It says it's totally free of charge and that it supports MSN, Yahoo! and AIM, and you can send photos. It sounds really great, and I will definitely try it out.

Yet, I'm wondering why it is free of charge (there's not even advertising) when a whole generation wants such an application and could easily pay $3-4 for it. Where's the business in giving this away for free? Build a customer database? There's no registration, so that's not the reason. Build brand for coming products? Maybe, but very risky in this fast-moving business where everyone wants to grab the attention of the consumer.

IM7-evolution / free download

I would argue no.

Quote: As an increasing number of phone calls are being routed via the Web, through Web-calling services, they are becoming easier to record than traditional phone calls, as they are in a digital format.
Yes and no: Digital calls to digital storage is easy, yet most calls now and in the future will be peer-to-peer and encrypted. It's so with Skype, and can be so with SIP, H.323 etc, so why not in all future protocols? It's the best way to spread out the load and secure you can't be eavesdropped. In Skype's case it's also a very good way to hide the technology as such (creating a walled garden where there previously was none).

This also means archiving of calls will be very expensive due to the infinite number of peer-to-peer links and the number-crunching needed to decrypt all the calls. I understand if governments are worried about that, but as an individual I'm of course happy as a lark.

Archiving Phone Calls? Why Not; It's Cheap

This is used to speak messages and status while occupied by sports. Oddly you need to press a button to make it speak.

Nokia 5500 Sport: Smartphone With a Six-Pack: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

Motorola is a strong promoter of Java ME, so the step to provide its testing framework and test cases is logical.

Promoting MIDP 3 is also logical, due to the limitations in MIDP 2. You can find more information about it here: JSR 271: Mobile Information Device Profile 3. See under 2.1 for proposed enhancements. No details though. I hope/expect features from Java SE will be re-used whenever possible, to get a smooth upgrade path to Java SE. MIDP 3 can be used over either CLDC or CDC.

It will take a long time before application developers can abandon MIDP 2 though, due to the huge volume of phones with MIDP 2.

LinuxElectrons - Motorola Wants To Unify Mobile Java Platform

In terms of Java functionality it supports Java ME CDC, JSR 209 etc, which together provide an application environment considerably more powerful than today's Java ME found in most featurephones: parallel processes, more advanced GUI primitives etc. It also support the more common CLDC/MIDP feature set, for application compatibility. It should be noted though that the market for Java ME applications will continue to be very strong, as normal feature phones won't get this kind of feature treatment just yet.

Hardware feature wise the phone is nothing special. It's rather less good than most other phones, if your focus is normal use. For developers it's much more interesting as a reference platform for CDC and JSR 209.

It's been a long time coming for SavaJe and its Java-based mobile application platform, yet I sense it has a good chance to get much more traction in the future. Consider for instance that RIM's Blackberry phones are Java-based, and compared to Windows Mobile and Symbian OS, Java ME (yet less powerful than what SavaJe offers) is already the dominant application platform in phones.

Quote from Engadget: if you're a Java developer or you just like dated tech running a relatively untested software platform, the Jasper S20 might be the phone for you.
OK. I'll probably choose some other phone for now.

SavaJe releases Jasper S20 Java phone - Engadget Mobile

SavaJe Unveils Most Sophisticated Java Powered Mobile Phone Allowing Developers to Create Advanced User Interfaces: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

SavaJe - Press Release

Quote: More teenagers recognize Java than they do Microsoft, because that is what they have in their pocket on their cellphone.

Reserve your phone today:
SavaJe Technologies - Order Developer Phone

Softbank and Apple will cooperate on mobile phones. The choice of a Japanese company to partner with seemed odd until I realised it's about the distribution, not the manufacturing. With great certainty the phones will anyway be made in lower cost countries like Taiwan or China. Rather it's about first releasing the phones in Japan.

Softbank is owner of prior Vodafone Japan, so they have a channel for the phones, yet very small compared to e.g. NTT DoCoMo today.

Softbank, Apple to jointly develop iPod cell phones: report - Yahoo! News

Didn't I say that about Java ME? Maybe it's the year of WAP too. At least that's what Dialogue Communications thinks for mobile content purchases.

Paul Griffiths at Dialogue mentions 'Browse and Buy' that is the name of Dialogue's server solution for mobile ecommerce, complementing SMS purchase of mobile content with access via the phone's browser.

wap.abiro.com and other WAP sites have used this approach for years for ringtones etc, so it's nothing new. What Paul mentions as the big difference now is that higher bandwidth and better ways to render high-quality content will likely make it more attractive to consumers. You could for instance stream a short snippet of a ringtone before you buy it etc.

I can't say wap.abiro.com is very flashy, as it has to support also very simple phones. There are of course ways to adapt to different phones, e.g. to use WAP 2.0 when possible etc. Parts of the mobile site is at least using HTML when appropriate.

webitpr - online press release distribution and monitoring

Finally, after much delay, the E61 is shipped to stores. I still find it very attractive for business users, as it combines all the nice features of Series 60 with a reasonable user interface. It supports most corporate e-mail solutions as well as Internet e-mail, so it should be quite useful as an alternative to Blackberry terminals. It supports both Series 60 and Java applications, so the options for after market applications is pretty broad. As the display is in landscape format it should also be OK for viewing photos and videos. It doesn't have a camera (not even a cheap low-res one that would be enough for video conferencing) which is a peculiar limitation.

Nokia - Nokia E61 - Phone Models - Phones

The 3.5 billion (Euro?) lost by the media indsutry is here said to be due to piracy. In my opinion loss of sales revenue and piracy are not linearly opposing.

In any case The Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF) rallies for an open standard that can be used to protect all kinds of commercial service-to-phone content transfer.

It's not said if they promote OMA DRM or not. OMA DRM has hit a big snag by being so expensive for phone manufacturers.

Mobile DRM to cost E3.5bn [Mobile Entertainment Forum]

Press release about a Frost&Sullivan report on Mobile DRM:
Growth of Mobile DRM Likely to Drive Demand for Next-Generation Mobile Content Services

From the press release: For example, industry fragmentation due to a lack of clarity over OMA DRM v2.0 implementation royalty rates is compelling mobile operators to implement readily available proprietary DRM solutions.

ICUE provides a service and a Java application that enable reading of books on mobile phones, and they've won a Red Herring award for it.

There's plenty of free software for reading ebooks (check out GetJar), but what's particular about ICUE is that they also provide commercial books, and reading is done either a page at a time, as a scrolling banner, or a word at a time.

There are also providers of dedicated reading devices, but that hasn't caught on nearly as well (read: not at all) as dedicated digital multimedia players.

<•> ICUE ::: Moving The Way You Read ::: Welcome to ICUE :::

Found at Textually

It's the RAZR effect again. No wonder Samung makes phones that are even thinner than the Motorola RAZR.

Quote: Bluetooth, a short-range wireless technology, was the most popular mobile-phone feature in the quarter.
Just because the phones have Bluetooth doesn't mean customers have asked for it. Bluetooth must by today be in most phones regardless of that.

U.S. Mobile Phone Sales Up, As Old Phones Get Tossed - Yahoo! News

T-Mobile has simply banned such use: Its Web 'n' Walk professional service expressly prohibits such usage, and the company reserves the right to terminate contracts.

Quote: Mino Wireless ... launched one of the world's first commercial VoIP-over-mobile services, offering fees as low as US$0.02 per minute for international calls.
As always: What about the operator air-time fee?

Quote: customers need to install the company's mobile VoIP application on a Java-enabled mobile phone

VoIP on Cell Phones: Read the Fine Print - Yahoo! News

This note states it's because of real need for more advanced features, including music and video downloads etc.

It also says people from 55 an up are slower to replace, but still every 30th month, so the difference is not huge.

Would this also mean younger people are quicker at adopting 3G? E.g. 3 is focusing on music etc services that utilize the 3G network, so it's at least a hypothesis.

Teenagers Most Likely To Buy New Cell Phones - Yahoo! News

EA Mobile is significantly larger in terms of game downloads than its nearest competitor Glu Mobile: 28.8% vs 9.9%. Interestingly Tetris is the most popular game. It certainly suits the usage model of phones.

PRESS RELEASE M:Metrics Unveils Top Mobile Game Titles

SoonR provides a service that enables access to your PC's files and MS Outlook from mobile phones. The only thing you need to install is a SoonR application on your PC. You then access the PC via the phone's browser, so there's no downloaded phone application involved. By checking the characteristics of the phone (no indication of how that's done, could be UAProf, UA/WURFL mapping or similar) the service optimises the information provided for the phone in question.

PC files can be viewed in 3 different ways:
* As the original format, e.g. Word, Excel etc, provided you have such a viewer application in your phone
* Converted to PDF, again provided you have a PDF viewer in your phone
* As a text file, directly in the browser, which should work on all phones

The now released SoonR Talk adds the possibility to call via Skype from a mobile phone. When you make a call via the browser (you just enter an international number or look it up via Skype or MS Outlook) the service actually calls you back via the normal voice channel from Skype Out. The press release talks about free telephony, which I don't understand. Skype Out is definitely not free, and in Europe more expensive than normal phone rates. What you can gain by this is that the one you call can be across the world without you having to pay the long distance rate for that person. From what I understand SoonR Talk is of no use for regional calls, but it might be different in the States. If the person can't be reached via voice it's possible to send an IM.

GetJar and other application downloading sites provide other services for remotely accessing your PC, but it looks like SoonR is one of the better services around. By not relying on a downloaded application the service works with more phones.

It should be noted that GUI emulation is not provided by SoonR, which some other services support. This would definitely require a local application.

SoonR - In Touch Now

SoonR - In Touch Now - SoonR Talk Press Release

It's clear one of the reasons Apple's iPod has been so successful is that it's a no-brainer to understand what it does and how to use it. That's always an issue when adding the same functionality to a multi-function device like a mobile phone. Most phones with multimedia support don't have dedicated buttons for that (not even as "Shift" functions on the existing keys). No doubt the symbiosis with iTunes has also been key to the iPod's success.

This article argues that once phones have hard disks the threat is real. I don't agree. Apple sells many more of the Flash models than the hard drive ditto, so with enough Flash memory in the phone (2 GB and up), a no-brainer user interface and support for iTunes etc DRM there are at least technical, and maybe also practical, reasons why mobile phones would compete head-on.

There are already many more phones sold that are capable of playing multimedia than the amount of iPods sold. Few of those phones are used for multimedia today though.

Down the road it will be interesting to utilize the mobile phone's radio for downloading multimedia, and we might be there in certain countries and with certain operators already, but most operators still charge too much for data to make this feasible.

Cell Phones' Hard Drives Could Doom MP3 Players - Yahoo! News

Russell responds to comments he got for his previous note about Java vs browser access to mobile services, and provides a news service as an example of where Java ME is beneficial.

A similar example is news feed aggregation from many sources, which I have implemented via WAP and HTML at wap.abiro.com / Mobile News. This works reasonably well and without any form of maintenance over time, and is actually more data efficient than if the phone would download complete news feeds from the source sites to check for news updates, as I heavily optimise the feed data on the server before generating WML and HTML. One obvious benefit with a Java ME implementation would be alerts: via audio signals or by speaking the news entries when they arrive. Via Java ME you could easily hide the fact that such alerts were received via SMS or polled via HTTP at given intervals. Spoken alerts would be practical e.g. when you are driving or generally being occupied with something else. Another benefit is presentation: a Java ME application is much more responsive than a browser, even if the data rate is high, and dynamic graphics adds to the experience.

News is though not an ideal example as the information as such is rather passive. If offline reading is needed that could also be achieved via a browser with offline page support. Yet, most phones don't support that.

It's when access to local phone functionality is needed (storage as well as features like location, camera, audio etc), and the application as such is very interactive, e.g. showing live graphs, video, etc that the user can interact with, that Java ME really shines. I mentioned interactive stock charts in my previous comment, but e.g. map panning in Google Maps would not have worked as well via browser access etc.

There's another distinction possible here, considering almost all Java ME applications are stand-alone games without any service connection whatsoever. I'm getting a bit off track here, but almost all of those games are commercial, hence generating revenue to especially the distributors, while most mobile services are free of charge with only secondary revenue streams through advertising (which many services don't even make use of) and possible after market services (that most consumers will ignore). I would argue that the values to investers and possible buyers are instead a big user base, a compelling service and a strong brand rather than hard cash. That sounds dangerous and naive to me, but were e.g. Skype and Pyra Labs acquired because of their bottom line? No way.

A potential large future business (at least when talking real hard cash bottom line) is to mobilize both blue and white collar work force, as almost all have mobile phones anyway. I'm not just talking access to intranet web pages and documents, but logistics, economy, reporting, surveillance etc systems from any mobile phone. Instead of using expensive and bulky smartphones that few have it's more relevant to utilize users' existing Java and browser enabled phones. Whether WAP, HTML, SMS, MMS, Java ME etc is used is less relevant. The key thing is to create a good user experience and a higher productivity than without it (by saving time, by adding lacking functionality etc). The awareness of what's possible and what might add value is very low at most companies, which is both a blessing and a curse for entrepreneurs. Consider that most companies haven't even enabled access to corporate email from mobile phones.

Java Magazines at MobHappy

I'd argue that this is a conservative figure, as the need is there, and the RIM/NTP "affair" has made people more aware of the possibilities.

I agree though that RIM and others will get competition from non-proprietary services that use what's in mainstream phones already, like WAP/WML, Java, and not the least the often built-in e-mail client. Microsoft has a very good chance to dominate here, by inherently supporting this in Exchange.

It should be noted that many companies still don't use Exchange 2003, where you get full access to Outlook functionality via WML and ActiveSync (the latter for Windows Mobile only). Even with Exchange 5.5 you can though achieve mobile e-mail, by simply using the e-mail client most phones already have and accessing Exchange via SMTP/IMAP4. You have to open the firewall for those protocols though. A Java ME application for Exchange would make the user experience a bit better, but I doubt Microsoft will release that.

Mobile E-Mail Usage To Triple By 2011 Says Report - Yahoo! News

The product pages don't say much about the new version, but I found this in the press release, with my comments:

• Content download: 1.0 didn't support any kind of file downloading. This still won't work on all phones with Java, as the PDA API is required. All newer phones should have it though.
• New skins: I like the Snow skin. A no-nonsense out-of-the-way color scheme. Interestingly when changing skin you always go online to download a new one.
• Multisearch: Not just Google anymore, and you can add your own search engines.
• Speed dial: I would rather call it speed navigation. This feature doesn't seem well thought out though, as you don't see the "speed dial" numbers until you scroll over a link/feature, and it's only supported on the Mini home page. It would be more useful if supported on any web page.
• Visual navigation: It pans the page content when you move back and forth in the page history list. More of a look-n-feel feature than adding anything really new.

I noted there are now more font sizes. The ones in 1.0 were simply too small for newer high resolution displays.

Narrow/smart rendering is still the only rendering mode supported. There's no possibility to view the web page in 2 dimensions, not that that works very well on a phone, but it would be a nice alternative for more complex multi-column pages.

I will check the mobile commerce feature further, and will probably report back on that later.

Press Release

Download

According to this analysis most consumers buy only one gaming title, if any at all. Consumers mention price and selection as reasons for not buying yet another game. I find this odd as mobile game prices are very low (if you compare with console games) and there are 1000s of games.

If on the other hand the games available are not in line with what consumers expect then of course price still is a significant factor.

What I find not so good is that phones are not yet designed with gaming in mind. Even if a phone is designed as candy bars or clamshells, the joystick and main buttons could be made more optimised for gaming needs without hurting normal phone use.

I'm convinced games that can be played for a short time, like Tetris, Space Invader, Break Out etc are more suited for phones, not just because of the small display etc but also due to the way phones are used.

M:Metrics News

I've heard recent figures spanning from 300M to close to 1B, and here's another stab at guessing the amount:
Quote: In retrospect, you have to admit that with somewhere near 1,000,000 devices running J2ME, this was the most successful of the Java platforms.

This might seem irrelevant to most people, but it is actually quite important for the service industry as it indicates Java ME is in almost all recently produced mobile phones, even if they also have BREW, Symbian OS or whatever. Hence, if you want to select a mobile application platform with the broadest reach that complements your online service then Java ME is a safe bet, and increasingly so. I just wish there was less differences between the implementations, causing less headache for the developers.

JavaOne: A Look Back, and Predictions For This Year @ SYS-CON ITALIA: "J2ME"