Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

I'm in the process of releasing a commercial Java ME application, so I needed to figure out where to start publishing it. This might be useful for others in the same situation.

I tried Handango that's focused on PDA/smartphone applications, and even though it's possible to register Java ME applications there, such can't be published at www.handango.com. The options provided are rather HelloMoto or on my own site. Also, Handango shares only 45% to 50% (the latter for high volume sales) of the revenue, so I had to move on.

clickapps/clickgamer (same company, different sites) sounded better, so I will publish there instead. They share 65% of the revenue for smartphone applications and 55% for Java ME applications. Likely because Java ME applications are generally lower priced. Even though clickapps is focused on PDA/smartphone software, there's also a lot of Java ME applications, so it looks like a good fit. They have a method using RPN Strings for creating unique license keys, so I wrote a Java ME class to handle the specific algorithm. Might come in handy later.

I use GetJar for promoting free and shareware versions of applications, with a pointer to where applications can be purchased.

Information about the applications are of course also available at www.abiro.com.

I'm using a viral marketing approach in my latest application. Will be interesting to see if that has any effect.

This is the first time Bluetooth, marketing and hot spots have been used together in a real working solution. Much has been said about it for years, but that's another story.

It's using a high-effect Bluetooth radio, supposedly reaching a 100 meter radius (unobstructed).

The Bluebot unit is stand-alone, and information to distribute is uploaded via USB or over LAN via HTTP.

It can stand -20 C which indicates it can be used outdoors.

Bluebot - Mobile Marketing via Bluetooth

This note indicates Skype has troubles getting client software out to mass-market phones (read: with Java and Symbian OS), and argues players like JAJAH can outrun Skype in this space.

Now it would be easy for eBay/Skype to just buy a company with mobile application platform expertise, but they've lost time.

Skype's Mobility Problem

The MBW-100 works like a normal watch, and looks like one too, yet adds Bluetooth remote control functionality. It's developed in collaboration with watch maker Fossil.

Quote: By adding control of their calls and music to their watch, as well as notification of text messages and a clever out-of-range notification when users are separated from their phone

You can't actually talk through the watch, nor send text messages, which would be the next step, but requires a more elaborate user interface.

Sony Ericsson MBW-100 Bluetooth Watch Shows Who's Calling - Mobiledia

AOL/Tegic and Zi Corp are the leading providers of predictive text solutions for mobile devices (products named T9 and eZiText respectively). Tegic has the lion share of the market.

Qix sounds like a solution that could make Zi Corp stand out more. What it does is search through the phone for contacts, bookmarks, applications, messages etc and then when you want to access any of these you just enter as much of the names as you want from the idle screen and you launch that function.

The idle screen is a perfect place for this, as it's not used for much today. Using it as the hub for phonebook lookups, web browsing etc is therefor logical. Ideally it won't even interfere with entering phone numbers.

According to a source at Zi Corp, Qix is currently only available for Series 60 phones as a separately installed Symbian application (no need for phone manufacturer involvement), but will be made available as a phone independent solution at the year end, that's to be integrated with the phone software.

Qix(tm)

Commentary:
MEX - the strategy forum for mobile user experience - Zi makes progress with Qix

As this announcement points out, dotMobi is not just about selling domains, but also to provide guidelines for how services on .mobi domains should be designed to work well on mobile devices. Many of those guidelines are not mandatory though, so the mileage may vary in terms of site compatibility.

Interesting, at least to a European, is that we are not talking WAP here, but mobile-optimised HTML with stylesheets. That cuts out many deployed phones.

For sure dotMobi is not doing this for charity, and the main business is of course to sell .mobi domains, but hopefully they will keep up the guideline work and adapt as technologies and phones evolve.

Quote: dotMobi has established best practices, style sheets, standards and tools to make sure the dotMobi experience is consistent and easy to use, for both consumers and site designers

dotMobi Launches General Availability of .mobi Domains

Investers haven't given up on the mobile email market, as Visto now gets $51M. This money is for expanding the business to new regions.

An interesting point is that Barry Schuler from AOL joins the BoD.

It says Visto has tripled its subscriber base. If I'm not mistaken that's mainly in terms of users accessing public email services, rather than corporate.

webitpr - online press release distribution and monitoring

This time at ZDNet's Mobile Gadgeteer, with the best from blogs about mobile technology and culture. Check it out.

» Carnival of the Mobilists #46 | The Mobile Gadgeteer | ZDNet.com

Update 20060927: Added some more commentary. JAJAH can't complain about lack of media coverage.


JAJAH has previously only been available for PC users, but is now also supported by Symbian and Java phones, which covers a lot of phones. Not all 1B Java phones though, as audio recording is only supported by later phones.

JAJAH - web-activated telephony

JAJAH Offers Free Calls from Any Mobile Phone

JAJAH Introduces Free Global Calls from Mobile Phones

Telecompaper: "Your One-Stop Source for Telecoms Information!"

Voxilla - Coming Soon to a Cell Phone Near You

JAJAH to Liberate All Mobile Phones for Free Global Calls: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

Jajah's Mobile Ambitions

RED HERRING | Please Hold for Jajah Mobile

TelecomWeb :: Would-Be Skype Killer JaJah Goes Mobile

» Nine reasons why JAJAH Mobile Suite is no threat to cell OR VoIP | IP Telephony, VoIP, Broadband | ZDNet.com

Update 20060926: The Register hints that this might be about standardizing the Nokia N-Gage platform. Why would OMA touch that? Java ME already rules, so if anything that should be promoted by OMA.
Mobile gaming initiative gains OMA backing | The Register


Just when I had questioned the future value of OMA it goes along and does something really useful for the industry.

The agenda for this group: "establish a common definition for minimum device capabilities and measurable performance characteristics that game publishers and developers can rely upon."

Whether this means there will be only one preferred gaming platform (read: Java ME), or also BREW and other platforms will be supported, is unknown at this time.

I will follow this up as soon as I know more.

Industry Leaders Join Forces to Mobilize Gaming for the Masses

Both the E62 and E70 are attractive business phones, and are likely to have some success as alternatives to RIM BlackBerry in the US. They even have the BlackBerry Connect software included, so if you like the form factor over those of BlackBerries you still have the same email functionality.

E70 is the oddest one with flip-out alphanumeric keypad. Apart from that they are very much alike.

I hope Sony Ericsson will introduce the M600 in the US with BlackBerry Connect included (not standard in the European model). I'm addicted to that phone now.

I wonder why phones need to be changed, and in the case of E61/E62 crippled, to sell in the US.

Nokia officially launches US-friendly E70 - Engadget Mobile

CTIA - Symbian Waiting To Pounce On The US at MobHappy

It's from China, and it even has a 1.3 Mpixel camera and handwriting, yet no numeric keypad. Supposedly it will be sold in Europe.

The Raw Feed: Cell Phone So Small You Could Swallow It

(via Textually)

File this under geeky interesting miscellaneous...

Pleo is a robotic pet in the shape of a friendly dinosaur (a Camarasaurus/Morosaurus to be exact) that reacts to light, touch, distance etc, and supposedly learns about its environment over time, so maybe it's more advanced than tardigrades now.

I got an update from Ugobe today that says it will be a bit delayed (December), but on the other hand will now have a camera, more powerful CPUs and motors, and less noisy gears. The site talks about a price point of $200, which is impressive if true.

A risky venture for sure, but I hope they will succeed with getting the dino out the door and to an awaiting audience.

Ugobe

Update: I've added the main digg feeds to News Feeds, so you can now read the main news from a mobile phone without the B1TE client. You have to go to digg's site (via the news entry) if you want to vote or read the sub sections.


Digg is a user-submitted / user-voted news service. It's supposedly got over 400.000 registered users and has been up since end of 2004. It's even got a Wikipedia entry, which indicates it's become somewhat of a phenomenon.

B1TE has now released a free Java application that gives access to the Digg service from mobile phones. I tried to download it, but my phone didn't like the page content for some reason.

Surely a Digg gateway could have been done using WAP too, but according to the site they do data compression, and caching in the device. Likely also a Java application provides a better user experience through quicker browsing through news etc.

B1TE

digg

Digg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(via Textually)

OMA as in Open Mobile Alliance is an organization consisting of mobile industry players (operators, phone manufacturers, phone software providers etc) that defines standard protocols and applications for mobile phones. What I mean with my question is that the market increasingly ignores what's being churned out from OMA. A few examples:

Push-to-talk: A complete don't-care that took years to specify, even though it's inherently very simple (SIP and a button) yet also very useless to most people.

Instant Messaging: OMA brought in Wireless Village as an OMA standard, yet is now working on replacing it with IMS-based IM. On the other hand, the market goes for direct access to AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, Myspace etc. IM schemes that tie users to operator-dependent communities are completely uninteresting. Operators thought Wireless Village based IM would compete with SMS revenue, and so few operators deployed it. Instead they now deploy direct access to popular IM services via Java applications in the phone. Where's the logic in that? Customer pressure and/or common sense finally taking over?

Web browsing: OMA brought in WAP 1.x from WAP Forum and later defined WAP 2.0. Both are used for payment services and operator portals, but what users want is to browse the normal Internet. The most successful downloadable web browser (Opera Mini) does just that, yet transfers a transcoded markup language to the phone that's not compliant with the WAP standard. It would be logical that Opera used the integrated WAP browser instead of requiring a Java application, but they didn't use that approach for whatever reason (probably for end-to-end control). What's good is: It just works. At least all smartphones handle normal Web sites reasonable well. There's of course still the issue of display sizes etc, so there's need for optimization to phones' real estate, but that can as easily be done via HTML and Javascript.

Media sharing: As MobHappy pointed out in a recent note, sharing photos and videos between phones is not very interesting. Rather you want to put that media on a service that others can access via their phones or PCs. MMS (or email) can be used for sending the photos to the service, something mojungle does via an email gateway, which makes it quite independent of phone used. Yet, e.g. Shozu doesn't, providing the added benefit of interacting with the service, but in my opinion also more hazzle for the user and less phone compatibility. IMS is also intended for media sharing, but again initially for point-to-point transfer (as far as current application specs go), not central sharing. What I'm getting at is that OMA didn't have centralized media sharing in mind when defining MMS (and IMS), rather that it would be a multimedia version of SMS.

Email: Just recently OMA created a mobile email group. Despite that most phones today already have support for the Internet standard protocols. E.g. Vodafone chose to resell RIM's server and handsets as a way to reach corporate customers, yet OMA has nothing in terms of direct access to MS Outlook etc. Many talk Push Email, but they forget that accessing the full set of functionality in MS Outlook (email, calendar, tasks, notes, contacts etc) has nothing to do with Push Email, even though that's also needed for user comfort (or annoyance; your choice).

Blogging: Actually, OMA has completely forgotten to provide support for blogging, which is a good example of the inertia (and arguably closed-mindedness) of OMA standardization. Blogging (and also media sharing) has boomed so fast that it probably wasn't even popular at the time when OMA would have had to make the decision to support it or not.

Social network services: Like Myspace, Lunarstorm etc, that combine IM, blogging, user info, advertizing, e-commerce etc. I haven't seen any specification from OMA even reflecting on such services, and even less seen thoughts on supporting such services.

All in all, when OMA comes out with anything new it's typically way too late and often completely misdirected, and is rather a reflection of yesterdays's walled garden thinking, that consumers and service providers try to break any way they can. It's also a sign of what might have been interesting the year the decision was made, but 2-3 years later might be completely uninteresting. Instead, mobile services that are completely operator and OMA independent have been hugely successful during 2006, and very much in control of the consumer's mind set. Even operators must begin to realize something is wrong here (on their part). I know they are, and some clearly take action, but that doesn't seem to change OMA's agenda. OMA played an important role at the startup of mobile data, but is simply no longer in control where the consumer interest and money is.

If you need a smartphone/webpad with a really good keypad this might be it. The keys look the same size as on Psion 5, the last general PDA made by Psion.

The question is, does this device exist? The photo at Engadget Mobile looked real enough though, and it's said to run Windows CE 5.0.

Quote: based on current progress, that we will have the units manufactured and ready for market by mid October 2006.
It's soon October...

More S-XGen details emerge - Engadget Mobile

Seamless Internet : Products - Mobile Computing Devices

It's 7 years since DoCoMo introduced its system of charging content/service providers 9% of the revenue and still operators in Europe in some cases charge more than half of the revenue and still relies on primitive Premium SMS instead of direct payments to the phone bill via the service sites, according to this note. Will we Europeans (and Americans) ever learn?

Hurting the discussion is that even this note - that's pro a better ratio and setup - talks about mobile data. We should talk about mobile services and only that. The real and unexploited value is in the services, not the bit pipe. Consumers care less about the bit pipe. It should only be fast and inexpensive.

What I'd like to see is flat rate mobile data subscriptions together with a sensible business model and revenue split that drives growth of mobile services and that still gives enough to the operators so they can enhance their networks. Service providers and consumers control the success of services. Operators can only enable - or strangle - them.

Quote: Less positive for operators was the finding that only 15pc of content purchased will be part of an ongoing subscription model.
Also seen in other surveys, consumers shun subscriptions and prefer one-shot purchases, which shows consumers are smart.

Side-note: I and some colleagues were in Japan 1999 and met with DoCoMo, just when they rolled out i-mode. Little did we know then what success i-mode would become. Interestingly we already then thought this could be applied to Europe. i-mode is available in Europe now, but frankly I hear little about it.

SiliconRepublic.com: Operators stymie mobile commerce, Valista claims

This might be an interesting additional read:
i-mode History

mylo stands for My Life Online and is functionally a PDA / web-pad like device that includes IM/email (Yahoo!, Google Talk, Skype) and browsing, and connects via Wi-Fi. You can also use it as a phone by calling via the Skype network, still via Wi-Fi. Supposedly you can browse any web site using the integrated browser. You can also use it for playing music, and it's got a sizeable 1 GB of Flash memory for that.

This device is clearly addressed to the younger crowd in urban locations. You can also use it at home or at the office if you have such a connection without WEP or similar (which to me sounds a bit limiting).

It's not extremely small. The M600i is actually smaller, yet mylo comes with a full keypad (as in one real key per letter; see my M600i review for an explanation), and the display is in landscape format, which should make messaging very easy. You can also use it with the keypad stowed away, as the navigation keys are on the same part as the display.

The mylo is sold as-is without any monthly subscription. You just need an open Wi-Fi hotspot. "Just" is very relative to where you are located, but in my opinion this is a much better attempt at a mass market Wi-Fi Communicator device than e.g. Nokia's 770.

The price is a bit high ($349) in my opinion, if you consider that you also need a mobile phone. With that in mind, a possibility to hook the mylo up to a phone would be nice, to get better coverage than with Wi-Fi. That wouldn't add much cost to the mylo. Nothing such is mentioned on the site though.

Sony - mylo™

As now close to 1B phones have Java (typically Java ME) and more and more existing and new services need to be mobile-enabled somehow, it's understandable that the need for developers in this field is increasing fast, as well as for Java EE (on the server side).

Beware that this is a press release from a specific company (RGA Consulting).

Due to that it's important to know:
* Mobile-enabling of a service can also be done via SMS, MMS, e-mail, WAP or HTML. It's when you need access to multimedia etc in the phone that Java ME shines, but even then there are other ways: See e.g. mjoungle where you email photos to the service. If there are better/simpler ways, use them.
* Java ME doesn't require J2EE / Java EE on the server side. That's more of a competence/efficiency issue for specific companies. Most Internet services are based on PHP/MySQL, and that works well together with Java ME.

Demand for Java Engineers Increases with Continued Growth in Smart Hand-Held Devices According to RGA

Here are two new solutions for taking a snapshot of a document and convert it to text that can be edited and stored.

ABBYY provides an SDK that runs on the phone for creating your own text-aware applications. I looked for the solution at ABBYY's site but didn't find it, so I guess it was first announced at CTIA. This is very likely only available for a select number of handsets with advanced OSs at this time.
OCR for your mobile phone

ScanR is different in that the conversion is taking place at a central service. A photo is sent in via email and the service converts the image into a searchable PDF document, retaining a cleaned-up version of the original image and sends it back.
Scan, copy and fax with your camera phone or digital camera


Note: I flinch when people still talk about Optical Character Recognition (OCR). There are no optics involved except in the initial snapshot of the document image. The actual "OCR" solution is of course completely software-based, and doesn't care how the image was created. It's like saying word processing is Finger Character Recognition. Oh well...

The Mobile Life Youth Report by The Carphone Warehouse reveals some interesting facets of young peoples' (10 to 17?) use of mobile phones:
* 51% of 10 year olds have a mobile phone
* 91% of 12 year olds have a mobile phone
* More texting than talking
* On average 10 messages per day
* Way to communcate without parents' knowledge
* Increasingly used as a dating device

I believe there's still a big opportunity for providing mobile IM and better ways to handle SMS and MMS. Just recently 3 offered MSN chat as the key selling point for signing up to a new subscription. As I've said before, mobile IM is way more important than mobile video/TV, and if operators want to make money from it, they can. And they don't have to upgrade their networks either to handle it.

More than 90 percent of British children have a cell phone - Yahoo! News

There seems to be a similar pattern in USA:
QuicklyBored » Blog Archive » Let’s Talk Survey

Update: I got confirmation on the high price. In Swedish press I read that due to the lack of an operator setup, individual songs will cost approx 40 SEK / $6. Ouch!


Only a few phones will support this service initially (W850 and W950; why only them?), but it's likely to support many more phones later, and potentially also from other brands.

What doesn't "compute" is who will pay the downloading cost. If no operator endorses this, they will charge full price for the download, which might be more expensive than the price of the downloaded song.

Also Nokia has similar plans.

Sony Ericsson launches new music download service - Yahoo! News

Myspace partners with UIEvolution to get this done, and seemingly for "any" phone (whatever that means).

The information at the site indicates the solution will be based on UIENgine, with a platform-independent application running in the phone. Whether that gives access to phone hardware, for taking snapshots, recording videos and podcasts etc it doesn't say.

UIEvolution :: Company - News & Events

Commentary:
mopocket

MobileCrunch hosts this week's CotM. Enjoy.

MobileCrunch » MobileCrunch Presents Carnival of the Mobilists #45

The Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) effort, that has most major operators as its members, is looking beyond today's technologies and focuses on the needed characteristics of future technologies to achieve good performance, cost and security.

They want to select one technology suite to promote, to keep deployment effective and to lower costs, yet what technologies to promote doesn't seem to have been decided as of now.

Carriers Unite for Future Mobile Networks - Yahoo! News

I've briefly covered J2ME Polish before. I'm analyzing it again to see if I can use it for my own applications, as I've ran into some serious compatibility issues with the high level widgets in MIDP. It doesn't help to report such issues to the phone manufacturers, as they don't fix issues in phones that have been out on the market for a while, and consumers never upgrade the phone software anyway. I'm not pessimistic, just realistic. Interestingly I've noticed that most issues are related to features that were added to MIDP 2.0. Are the TCK tests not optimized for MIDP 2.0? Are manufacturers getting sloppy in their testing? Don't they care as "developers anyway only make Canvas-based games"? I don't have the answer.

J2ME Polish consists of several different functionalities and modules, that to some degree are intertwined. This is a powerful package indeed.
* A complete UI implementation that overrides and emulates the MIDP 1.0 and 2.0 lcdui classes, and adds some classes of its own, including TabbedForm.
* An implementation of MIDP 2.0 specific UI features for MIDP 1.0 phones, including the Game API and lcdui methods not supported by MIDP 1.0.
* A CSS-based method for customising the above UI functionality, potentially creating UIs that look very different from MIDP's own implementation. Things like animation, coloring, specific fonts etc can easily be added.
* Localisation features for multiple language support.
* A database that describes the differences between mobile phones, that can be used from within applications.
* Conditional compilation to build code based on phone model and other conditions.
* Means to build several versions of applications for different phones in one build.
* A font editor for creating or modifying fonts
* etc.
(I probably forgot a few features)

The MIDP lcdui implementation has been done completely using Canvas, with a few exceptions. E.g. text input (that is hard to implement using Canvas due to the complexities and phone differences) can optionally make use of the phone's own functionality via a TextBox. That's the only way to get access to e.g. predictive and handwriting, unless you implement those features yourself. Don't try this at home...

J2ME Polish can be integrated with Eclipse, NetBeans and JBUilder, and of course uses Ant scripts. In my case I'm testing it with NetBeans.

To use it commercially, and for volume applications, you need to acquire a license for 199 Euro per application (which is not too bad) or get a one-shot/corporate license for 2990 Euro (maybe later...).

As many already know, the mobile phone database can be accessed interactively via the J2ME Polish web site, and it's easy to look up what phones support a certain JSR etc.

J2ME Polish

This is based on their own testing of over 200 applications rather than user feedback. It mainly consists of games and entertainment applications. You can read their motivations on the site.

I was a bit surprised Opera Mini is not included, nor IM+ Messenger etc. I wouldn't consider MozzyTones an application, unless we talk application as in "uses of technology".

Quote: This year’s winners include apps that solve the biggest problem facing the mobile content industry: the stagnating uptake of content services.

Top Mobile Applications 2006 | Mobile content and mobile marketing news

Might be of interest to readers of Mobile News. It doesn't say very much about real-life applications. Rather it's an expose of the involved protocols and gadgets.

6403_MotDoc.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Update 20060914: This explains the deal better, especially why Verisign is willing to give away the control over Jamba: A Second Look: VeriSign


News Corp buys 51% of Jamba (Jamster) from Verisign. Verisign makes $95M in the deal (assuming Verisign previously owned 100% of Jamba).

Guardian Unlimited Business | | Rupert Murdoch pays out £100m to control the Crazy Frog

Nomura Holdings is clearly completely guessing as of now. That RIM needs a more powerful platform for applications is more obvious.

If it was true it would have interesting implications, as the more obvious choices would be Linux for the OS and CDC/PP for the application environment, as RIM is already using a "MIDP+" environment for after-market applications, and the RIM developer community should consequently be more Java focused than C/C++ focused.

Quote: Symbian accounted for about 71 percent of worldwide smartphone shipments in the second quarter of 2006 and serves the consumer market well," Kort notes. "Microsoft, Palm, and RIM each accounted for only about 3 percent of smartphone shipments in the second quarter, with Linux accounting for the remaining 19 percent."

Then why do so many claim Windows Mobile and BlackBerry phones are used much? Because Microsoft and RIM have more marketing dollars?

Most Symbian OS phones are using the Series 60 platform and runs on high-end, yet mass market, phones from Nokia.

Unstrung - RIM to Go Symbian? - Wireless Networking News Analysis

David Beers' Software Everywhere hosts this week's CotM. Lots of great info about mobile technology.

Software Everywhere » Carnival of the Mobilists #44

This time highlighting the issue of viewing different content simultaneously on the same display, and pointing to split screens and mashups as the solution.

Little Springs Design - designing the mobile user experience » Blog Archive » multiple windows versus multiple layers

A. San Juan has a great site about CDC, and he lists the phones currently available. Frankly too few to mention, so I will continue focusing on CLDC / MIDP, while keeping an eye on CDC. The phones listed also run Symbian OS (UIQ och Series 60), except the SavaJe Jasper.

Note that Jasper also supports Swing, so Java SE applications should be easy to port, as long as the Swing dialogs etc fit on the much lower resolution screen. Some assembly required...

Even though it doesn't look that way at first the M600i and P990 have identical Java CLDC and CDC feature sets, as they are based on the same software (and most of the hardware as well). The only difference is that P990 has a camera and so supports taking photos and recording video too.

That the Nokia E series phones (with much more volume potential than the 9500 Communicator) don't support CDC indicates that Nokia takes it slow with this at the moment.

Java ME (J2ME) CDC Personal Profile Development

This is a cheaper version of the E61 without Wi-Fi. The only reason I can think of that it doesn't have Wi-Fi is due to carrier request.

It's sold for $150 with a 2-year contract. As a comparison the E61 is sold in Europe without a sub for ~$600.

The Yahoo! note compares it with BlackBerry phones. In Europe it would rather be compared with e.g. Sony Ericsson P990 and M600i.

Why are phones sold in USA dumbed down versions of those sold in Europe and Asia? I can't figure it out.

Cingular to launch keyboard Nokia phone - Yahoo! News

Revised 20060913

There are good reviews of the M600i, some of them listed in my previous Choosing the best phone for mobile application development post.

I was adviced to give a more nuanced view of the phone, so I've removed some of the more side-tracking notes about Bluetooth etc, that don't have anything to do with this specific phone. I also removed the bug section, as I've posted the issues I found to Sony Ericsson.

As mentioned earlier I bought my Sony Ericsson M600i to try out CDC and Symbian OS, and to get a decent all-in-one business phone/PDA. It also has a bit more advanced MIDP support than my current phone (out-of-date in terms of Java after half a year). I got it with a subscription that includes free calls, SMSs, MMSs and video telephony within 3's network. My other phone has the same sub type, so now I can send myself a lot of messages (for a reason: application testing).

This is such a complex device that I will only cover things I found striking, in a positive or negative way.

The M600i and the W950i are more or less the same phone, but I find only M600i worth buying, as the W950i is kind of crippled: it hasn't got the alphanumeric keypad of the M600i, is somehow focused on multimedia (it's got a radio and 4 GB Flash built in), yet doesn't have a camera. The M600i doesn't have a camera either, but is more aimed at professional use anyway. The M600i has a memory slot that can house up to 4 GB of Flash memory, but when checking for such large memory sticks I could only find up to 1 GB. I could care less about the radio, but I slightly miss a camera.

Hardware: General

At first look I got a feeling this is a good solid phone/PDA without it sticking out at all (a wolf in sheep's clothing, if you like).

In my previous revision of the review I commented that the phone is slow. It is very slow when you start an application for the first time after a reboot, but not after that. I'm not 100% sure why it takes so long to start applications. It's of course a tough balance to have high performance yet long battery life, but this loading time probably doesn't have to do with only the CPU.

Hardware: USB

It says it's USB 2.0 compatible but strangely at 12 Mbps. That's a weird combination, and if you put 1 GB or more in the phone you'll get pretty slow music and video uploads. Even with the included memory this is way too slow. Hence this is not a good replacement for a dedicated music player, and filling up the memory in the W950i must be outright painful.

Hardware: Bluetooth

Bluetooth is very slow for any form of file transfers, yet is sufficient for headsets and other accessories. Hence, I've used USB for all file transfers and syncs.

I hope I will get Bluetooth PAN running, as that will make it possible to surf, check emails etc wirelessly without any air-time charges at home or at the office. The speed of Bluetooth is enough for that, and if it works OK it will partly make up for the lack of Wi-Fi.

For VoIP, e-mail, browsing etc I believe Bluetooth doesn't stand a chance against Wi-Fi/WLAN, so the trend that smartphones get Wi-Fi will continue. Bluetooth's saving grace is a much lower power consumption, so Bluetooth will continue to be included in pretty much all phones as a check box feature.

User Interface: General

Even though the M600i has a PDA-size and -resolution display and an alphanumeric keypad it's still nicely small. Not as small as mass market voice-optimized phones, but still works well as a pocket phone. Hence it shows smartphones can be made small and still be manageable and powerful. It's actually almost the same size as the Z800 and considerably thinner, and less heavy too.

User Interface: Output / Display

UIQ is similar to the Series 60 UI, and both run on Symbian OS (in this case the new v9.1). UIQ is though quite different in certain aspects: it supports touch screens and handwriting. Interestingly the touch screen can also be accessed from MIDP applications, for e.g. map and drawing applications.

User Interface: Input / Keypad

The M600i has a very interesting keypad design, where each button has several functions, up to 4 (or 6, depending on how you count). It's fully alphanumeric, yet lacks national characters on the buttons (easy to access via multi-tapping).

What's so peculiar about the keypad is that you can left/center/right-press the buttons to get different characters and symbols (similar to some BlackBerry models). There are also Shift and Alt buttons to get capitals as well as shifted symbols.

I'm starting to like it after a few day's use, even though I don't type very fast on it yet. The best method I've found is to use the finger nails to press on the sides of the buttons. It's definitely more convenient and secure than multitap or predictive on a normal phone keypad, yet it can actually be used together with predictive as well.

User Interface: Touch Screen

The touch screen works very well and is quite precise. Softkeys are activated using the touch screen, which seems odd at first but is quite intuitive (actually pressing the softkey rather than a nearby button). I haven't used the stylus much so far. Also here I used my finger nails, which might cause scratching in the longer term.

Due to the small size of the phone it's quite convenient to hold it in one hand and the pen in the other. Not that you need to use the touch screen much. Most operations can be performed using the jog dial and touching the softkeys with a nail.

User Interface: Buttons

Apart from the full keypad there's a set of other buttons of note:
* On the left side is a combined scroll and select wheel (called jog dial) that is excellent for quick navigation in menus, lists and pages, even though I found the select function to be a bit too stiff. Beside the jog dial is a Back button, which together cover most navigation needs. I would have preferred an analog joystick with select, on the front or on the side, but this works too.
* On the right side is a "@" button that by default switches to the browser . You can though reprogram this to e.g. launch the media player, the sound recorder etc, but the choices are too few in my opinion. I'd like to launch "Write a new message" for instance.

Software: General

As mentioned before it's very slow to start applications after rebooting, yet once applications have been started it's very quick to switch between them.

It was easy to find bugs in the applications, especially in the Office tools (acquired from QuickOffice) and in the MIDP implementation, yet the main applications work well, even though they sometimes crash. The software can be updated via downloads from Sony Ericsson, so hopefully there will be patches to fix these and other issues soon.

Software: System

Being a smartphone, M600i relies heavily on applications running on dynamic platforms rather than being fully embedded with the phone system software. Most applications in the phone are of course embedded in a sense (as you can't replace/remove them, except by upgrading the whole phone software) but they run on top of Symbian OS and using UIQ as the UI. There are also included some Java ME applications, and it's also possible to run CDC / Personal Profile applications on it. Hence it's a very powerful multi-platform phone indeed, optimal for corporate use. Of course most after-market applications will be either for Symbian OS / UIQ and MIDP. I was surprised how many UIQ applications there are at e.g. Handango.

Software: Activity Menu

On mass market phones this would be called the idle screen, which says a lot about what it's used for on such phones: pretty much nothing. On smartphones and PDA's it's a different story, and I hope this will move over to mass market phones as well.

M600i shows a Today list of actions, emails etc as well as a row of the most common applications and access to the Main Menu. I wish this could be reconfigured to show other applications, RSS feeds etc, but I haven't found such a setting. The Today list can be folded so you can still see the background picture.

In future phones I hope this screen can be set up for any kinds of events, feeds and applications, like a user-defined information digest.

Software: Applications

I won't go through all the applications shipped with the M600. For a business user it's got a pretty complete suite, with PIM, document viewers, email client, web browser, etc etc.

I read somewhere it supports corporate email solutions and push email. I translated that as saying "such software is included", but it isn't. The email client only supports the normal SMTP/POP3/IMAP4 protocols, yet as such does what it's supposed to do.

Software: Browser

It runs Opera 8, which is quite capable in handling normal web pages as well as mobile web pages (WML and XHTML). It also supports Javascript and frames, so most sites look good. There's no support for full Flash though. It can show pages in either 2D (as on a PC), or in vertical/narrow format, where scrolling is only vertical. You can have several web pages open. You can also zoom the page up and down, as well as turn it to landscape mode. I found landscape mode to be very hard to use with the keypad to the side and the jog dial in front of you.

On my phone it always opens 3's portal when started. This is a bit annoying as it takes time. It doesn't cost anything though, as all portal navigation is free. I should be allowed to choose any home page I want, yet this is understandable from an operator perspective.

Arguably the best solution for a mobile phone is to first show the bookmark list when the browser is started.

Software: Digital Rights Management

I jumped when I saw this in the manual for Backup (translated from Swedish): Copyright-protected files are also backed up, but the rights objects are not. ... You need to order new ones (and pay for them again) to be able to use the files. So much for customer-friendly DRM (which probably is an oxymoron by definition).

Within Java ME there are so far defined two configurations: CLDC (Connected Limited Device Configuration) and CDC (just remove Limited). These are two very different beasts, where CLDC with the MID Profile is quite compliant with Java SE on a language level, but not on a class library level, while CDC with the Personal Profile (PP) is much more close to Java SE (yet excluding Swing and some other more advanced features), and also requires more CPU power, memory and display real estate.

I mention CDC and PP together, as I believe all mobile phones with CDC need to support at least PP to be useful for mobile application development.

Based on my very brief investigation CDC is currently only available on mobile phones that also have an underlying PDA/smartphone OS, except the platform and reference phone provided by SavaJe. I believe this will continue, at least through 2007. Therefor I'm wondering if CDC will be used much, as performance and functionality are way higher when programming directly for the smartphone OS.

For CLDC/MIDP it's a completely different story, as in mass market mobile phones this is typically the only after-market application platform available, so there's simply no other choice for developers. You obviously have to use what's available.

Also, all phones with CDC also need to support CLDC/MIDP, to provide backwards compatibility with the tons of games and applications available for CLDC/MIDP for years to come.

The way CDC can be "saved" is by being deployed on phones with proprietary OS's or e.g. on Linux phones that don't allow after-market applications any other way, yet MIDP 3 is also on the way, so CDC might be squeezed between phones that don't need it (as they run Symbian OS etc) and phones that rather would use MIDP 3.

I acquired a Sony Ericsson M600i recently for evaluating CDC/PP (and because it was a generally nice phone), and so far I haven't been able to make NetBeans understand that I've installed an SDK for CDC. Many others have had this problem, but I hope I can have it running in a few days.

I don't think I will develop that much for CDC in the short term, nor for Symbian OS / UIQ that the M600i also supports. I will mainly evaluate what's out there so that I can plan ahead.

I see a potentially big corporate and consulting market for CDC applications, as there are a lot of developers for Java SE and Java EE, and they should have easy to move to CDC/PP. Much easier than to learn to use e.g. Symbian OS. Not that there seems to be a lack of Symbian OS developers, but I doubt many IT departments have that competence.

This will be followed up in due time, as I learn more about CDC.

Little Springs Design has an interesting note (the first in a series) about the Mobile Web that e.g. argues that mobile browsers need to be able to handle multiple overlaid windows displaying different web pages.

This already works well on smartphones, and as Symbian OS is increasingly used in mass market style phones (primarily from Nokia) and even Windows Mobile, the user has the choice to get a phone with this functionality without having to go bankrupt. Sure, web pages eat memory like crazy, but in part that's a matter of software design.

I'd argue that the major issue is still the small display, and phones need to have a small display to be portable, so this is a tricky thing to solve as web designers are not up to speed on phone-specific requirements yet.

With a system like Opera Mini with a transcoding gateway you can get pretty compact and fast data transfers and hence less cost for the users, and I hope that operators will also rethink the rates for data overall, maybe coming down to 1/10 of what it is today.

Little Springs Design - designing the mobile user experience » Blog Archive » What’s wrong with the mobile web? (part 1)

Update: 3 Sweden's site mentions IM but not e-mail. The mystery thickens.


This sounds a bit better than it really is, but having it at all is of course a good thing.

This partnership will give users access to MSN Hotmail from their mobile phones, yet not MSN Messenger.

There are several free or almost-free services that provide both e-mail and IM to MSN, Yahoo!, AOL etc in the same gateway service, and where you only need to download one Java application to get access to all these services. OZ also has an IM solution, so I'm wondering why 3 didn't get that as well. Hopefully shortly.

As I have a 3 sub I will test this as soon as I can get my hands on it.

3 Scandinavia Keeps Their Subscribers Connected by Deploying OZ's Mobile Email Solution; 3 Subscribers Now Able to Stay in Touch With MSN(R) Hotmail While on the Go

OZ's products:
:: OZ Communications :: mobilizing IM and Email messaging ::

Seemingly being a fan of a given game genre is the most important factor when buying a specific mobile game. According to the diagram in the note also price, free trial, brand recognition and game recognition play major roles in the choice of games.

Interesting is also that game buyers prefer a one-time charge, and that the age range is pretty broad, so mobile gaming is definitely not just for the younger population, and there's no big gender difference either.

These people are already believers in mobile gaming, but some of the preferences might be highlighted in marketing to make also other people buy into mobile gaming. Free trials is definitely one of them.

GameDaily BIZ: The Mobile Gamer: What's He (or She) Thinking?

GSM Association and Ovum agree there's likely to be 3B mobile phone subscriptions by the end of this year, with almost 0.5B added just this year. Not surprisingly most of the action is in Asia.

Based on other figures this would mean that more than 1/3 of the phones will support Java ME, and pretty much all new ones do, which means there's a hefty potential for after-market applications.

Number of cellular connections to hit 3 billion soon | InfoWorld | News | 2006-09-07 | By Sumner Lemon, IDG News Service

I probably didn't get the lyrics right, but you get the point.

Mobile Opportunity has a very long and interesting note about the perceived differences between European and American mobile phone use and users. Overall he's done a great job, and it's not that much biased.

Quote: The archetypal operator is Ernestine, a character created by actress Lily Tomlin. She snorted annoyingly, was rude, and reveled in her ability to manipulate customers
Isn't that how a typical mobile operator behaves? Just kidding, maybe :).

Quote: many people in Europe feel about their mobiles the way that Californians feel about their cars.
True, yet I think many Europeans think about their cars like Californians think of their cars, at least those of the male persuasion.

Quote: Many people in Europe love candybar phones. Most Americans think they look cheap and dislike them. Instead, many Americans love flip phones.