Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

Mobile gaming in Japan: A different world indicates the most popular gaming device is the mobile phone. I believe the Western world will move there eventually, but in Japan "the future is already here" (to put it lamely). Also, many more people play video games in Japan (supposedly 90% of those interviewed).

Side note: I don't like the term "video game" as used here, implying a video signal is somehow involved, which it's not in a phone. "Digital games" would be much better.

Windows For Basic Phones Is Ready -- But Who's Buying? presents a new application platform for mobile phones. Here's the complete press release from Intrinsyc: Intrinsyc Delivers Soleus™ Version 1.0

Soleus, developed by Intrinsyc, is based on Windows CE, and ships with numerous phone applications. Microsoft seems to have had some play in getting this done, but for the record, it's not a Microsoft offering. One can though guess that Microsoft is watching Intrinsyc closely.

From the earlier Cheap Phones To Get Windows: The operating system and core applications can fit onto phones with 16 MB of RAM and 16 MB of flash storage
That's OK.

Of course, Soleus-based phones also need to support Java ME / MIDP to be application compliant. I didn't find any information about that, but that should be up to the phone-maker to decide.

I haven't yet come around to write something about what I believe will happen and establish during 2007, so here is what some other people say, in the meantime:

The Australian: Chilling visions for year of binges

Mobile Enterprise Weblog: Enterprise Mobility: Setting the Stage for 2007

Mobility Weblog: Thoughts on Mobility 2007

InfoWorld: The seven top mobile and wireless trends for '07

LA Times: Picture gets clearer for cellphone camera users

About Mobile AJAX, or, mojax is not Mobile AJAX clarifies that mojax is not really supporting AJAX, even though it's quite similar in concept. The reason it that it doesn't support an HTML browser with DOM editing. Nevertheless, it seems to be a good tool for creating mobile widgets, and getting things done is what counts.

I also got it wrong in AJAX framework for mobile phones.

Enrique argues that the next step would be to support other mobile browsing standards in mojax. I honestly think it's much more important to support the technologies used on the "normal" Web, so that existing tools can be re-used. The longer we push special technologies for the mobile Web, the more time it will take before it's broadly deployed.

Chinese government demands all handsets be rechargeable via USB describes something we argue about in Europe, USA and elsewhere, but never seem to enforce. China's reason is mainly to minimize waste, which is a very good reason in itself, but there are also other advantages like less gadgets to bring with you on trips, less costly upgrades, as manufacturers don't need to ship yet another power supply.

This will bring about a worldwide change, as also imported phones need to have powered USB.

On the phoneME page you can download the December 21 release.

If you are not into developing new base features for Java ME CLDC and MIDP, or are not an über-geek, you have no use for this code.

If you want to get started on developing MIDP applications for phones, check out Java ME - Resources instead.

With this I mean that there are now providers of widget and service frontend platforms that are implemented on top of Java ME / MIDP, to simplify the development of such applications as well as games. It's logical, as pretty much all newer phones support MIDlets, so it's the obvious choice for all kinds of abstractions.

Not that it's hard to program MIDlets, but as we all know, cross-device compatibility can be a pain. Yet, I would have thought e.g. mojax was compatible across handets, as that's one of the obvious benefits and outright requirements on such a "higher abstraction" platform, but it's not. See the list of supported devices at the site below. Maybe this is because it's so new.

Examples:
* WidSets
* mojax

Also Flash Lite players, SVG players, multimedia players, game engines (like mophun) etc will be implemented this way.

Of course Adobe/Macromedia wouldn't like third-party to make Flash Lite players, and they acquired and shut down a company that did just that. That doesn't say Flash is so protected (patent or otherwise) that it would hinder some other company to try the same thing. Adobe's goal with Flash Lite is clearly to get their own Flash Lite player in all phones, which actually is a threat to SVG that OMA and others prefer as the SVG is not owned by any specific company.

In Mobile entertainment market will hit $38.1bn by 2011 Informa says this market will double in 5 years.

I think that's a bit conservative, as the whole IT industry will refocus to mobile over time. Not completely of course, but the onslaught of profitable mobile services has only begun.

Not surprisingly, music is considered one of the future big revenue generators, but also games and TV/video.

My opinion is that in the future TV and on-demand video will completely fuse (mobile or otherwise), so that users can either view immediate and scheduled video (aka TV) or archived/on-demand videos from the same services. E.g. sports and film channels will provide both. The technology supports this already, and users are accustomed to playing music videos etc via YouTube, and that's just the start. All TV shows will be available this way, etc.

This time over SEVEN Networks.

Quote: although this case was never about monetary damages for Visto ... It was, and is, about protecting the rights of inventors and ensuring that innovative mobile email products remain accessible to all consumers around the world.
Right. It's about money and damaging a competitor. Mentioning inventors and consumers is a very bad excuse.

I wonder why so many providers still bother about mobile corporate e-mail, considering it's such a mine field patent-wise, and the market is yet so small. Maybe it's because of the latter that the involved players are so ruthless against competition. The smaller the territory, the more aggression.

It's great Nokia is also moving into the NFC field via a new venture called Venyon, as it's so far mostly been an Asian phenomenon.

Of course, without NFC readers connected to POS terminals etc the applicability is arguable, but someone has to start, and adding NFC support to a mobile phone will cost very little. The opposite has also been tried in Korea and Japan, where the phone is the reader.

A few years ago Bluetooth was considered a possible means to perform payment and authentication. I haven't seen that outside of labs, possibly in part because NFC and Bluetooth have very different coverage (typically 10 centimeters vs 10 meters). Hence NFC is more "private" than Bluetooth. The advantage of Bluetooth is that you could just pass through e.g. a hall-way and be identified via Bluetooth, without having to step up to a special reader.

Update 20061228: mojax is actually not AJAX-compliant, only AJAX-like. For more about that, see mojax is not AJAX.

Developed as a MIDlet, the mojax framework from mFoundry enables developers to use AJAX with phone-specific extensions as a frontend to services, without a need for a browser with AJAX support. If full JavaScript 1.5 and CSS are supported this is a reasonably complex piece of software.

It should be easier to develop service frontends this way than if using MIDP and J2ME Polish, but less powerful feature-wise.

mojax has access to phone features, like e.g. the camera, via the support provided via Java ME / MIDP.

(via Little Springs Design)

Shape is well-known for its IM+ Messenger product that enables chatting via popular services from your phone.

That Shape now provides a mobile game might indicate they will broaden into that area in general.

The setup with cash prizes when winning the game is an interesting spin, but even more interesting is that prizes can also be mobile content, and that Shape now invites other providers to participate in offering prizes, according to SHAPE Services to Introduce an Innovative Approach to Mobile Gaming.

Read the site text and you'll get a laugh. The worst spelling I've seen in a long time (and that includes my own).

Here are two good articles on the topic of mobile banking/payment.

OCBC hits a mobile milestone describes a successful mobile banking project, that was mainly done through in-house development, and where there were obvious problems with adapting to a phone's UI and testing on each and every phone etc, but that went well in the end. They used .NET for the server solution, and Java ME for the phone application.

As cellphone uses grow, so do security options goes through a number of arguments for why mobile banking is now feasible, and also a number of available security solutions.

Glu goes public, has been losing money since 2003 indicates it's not all gold in the mobile gaming business.

Gameloft launches Online Store (but not in the US) is about a new service from gameloft that enables downloading of mobile games via a PC instead of via a phone. I'm not sure I understand how users will cope with this, as in most cases it's a pain, if even possible, to then upload the games/applications to the phone.

Samsung introduces 'optical joystick' tech is not only about gaming of course, but a joystick of this kind (or my proposed thumb disc) makes the gaming or browsing experience better.

Little Springs Design has a short piece called user experience goes beyond user interface, that's about web developers still not understanding the limitations and special needs of mobile phones when designing sites for mobile access.

If they had actually tested the mentioned site on real phones during development and together with the customer, it would have been blatantly obvious that they would have to go back to the drawing board and re-do everything.

Practice makes perfect, as they say, so just reading a book (as Barbara suggests) is just a starting point, albeit probably a good one in this case.

A practical case in point (based on experience): E.g. Opera for PC supports WML (and also XHTML-MP?), but don't use it for testing mobile sites:
* It's much faster than a phone browser
* It has access to tons of memory for caching complex content
* The communication link of a real phone is way slower
* A phone's display resolution is lower and/or the pixels are smaller
* Opera is very buggy at least when it comes to WML
* The UI of a PC is way more advanced: e.g. on a phone you don't want to enter a lot of text, so use check boxes etc instead (if possible), etc

Maybe I should wish for Barbara's book as a Xmas present <:)...

It seems everyone writes about this news, including Yahoo!, so I guess I have to as well.

Of course Cingular hasn't developed this solution. Rather MySpace has, or more likely an application development house.

This is a clear sign of the operator-controlled market of USA. In Europe most would just shrug and wait for the same feature to come via their own operator, as of course the operator has done nothing on the technical side to get this going. MySpace (or who now has developed MySpace Mobile) can of course provide the solution to/via any operator, even independently, without need for big investments on the part of the operator, and that's also likely to happen soon.

The mobile phone part of the solution is based on a Java ME application, again showing that at least Java ME is needed to get a decent user experience and access to phone features. MySpace Mobile would be dead in the water if it wouldn't enable taking snapshots and recording videos for instance.

Quote: The fact that the social-networking site, which was purchased by media conglomerate News Corp. in 2005, has begun to attract an older audience might explain why MySpace has hooked up with Cingular, expanding beyond its initial mobile partnership with the youth-centric wireless operator Helio.
This is a typical pseudo analysis. What MySpace wants to do is to broaden its customer base. It's as simple as that. Helio doesn't provide much of customers, and never will, so signing up Cingular (US' largest operator) is so obvious that only industry experts can miss this.

Quote: That could mean the wireless world will see more hookups with major Internet players. Already, Yahoo, Google, and several other tech heavyweights have made major deals with wireless providers.
Rather "It will mean...", as Yahoo!, Google etc have the value-filled brands, not the operators.

Here's a collection of recent news about accessing social network services from mobile phones.

Mobile phones are obvious access terminals for social network services, being always with you and always on, and being able to record audio, take photos and record videos.

MySpace Launches Its Largest Mobile Initiative In Partnership With Cingular Wireless

Free 'YouTube' Type Service for Mobile Phones

The MySpace Generation Expands its Range to Mobile

DeviceAnywhere provides remote real-life testing of Java ME applications, supposedly on real phones.

Quote: In short, they provide an online interface for testing different live phones across multiple networks

Motorola recently acquired Device Complete that owns DeviceAnywhere, which makes sense as a support tool for Motorola's application developer partners. The question is if that will affect the support for other than Motorola phones.

Engadget has tested X-Series and lives to write about it in 3's X-Series platform reviewed on Nokia N73. You seem to get a lot of bang for the buck, yet is it flat rate for any service access? I figure not, but 3's site is not very informative about that.

More about X-Series.

Opera Mini Web browser pre-installed with Nokia 6300 provides another sign that established Java applications are bundled with phones as if they were native applications. The trend continues...

I really like Opera Mini. Even on my M600 it's a better browser than the embedded one, as it's faster and more friendly to my wallet.

IDC estimates that the MEA market will reach a yearly revenue of $3.5 billion by 2010 (from $1.2 billion 2005) in a newly released report on the subject.

IDC means all involved in making applications and services for enterprises (you know who you are) need to add mobile functionality to their services, to satisfy future user needs.

Update: Note that MEA doesn't necessarily mean access from mobile phones. E.g. SAP's Mobile Time and Travel runs on a PC. The mobile functionality consists of being able to work offline as well as online, but information about the SAP Mobile Infrastructure indicates also a mobile phone could be used as UI to the SAP services, not that I've found any such application offered by SAP.

A loooong time ago (read: almost a year ago) Engadget mentioned that Apple might start an MVNO.

Apple To Introduce MVNO Wireless Service In ‘07, UBS Says indicates this is not so much a rumor anymore.

If Apple is to be at all successful with a family of mobile phones they will have to offer network services as well, so setting up an MVNO is not that far-fetched after all.

It's easy to guess that there will be a tight connection between this MVNO and iTunes, that now offers both music and videos, and also audio books etc would be handy for mobile phones. It's also fairly easy to guess that this MVNO will deploy flatrate for data. Otherwise the logic falls flat (no pun intended).

The note mentions a disparity between the amount of shops Apple has and that of Cingular etc. Maybe Apple will instead (or at least complement with...) sell phones via e-commerce sites, MySpace etc.

Another not so far-fetched guess is that phones will be provided with the iTunes service activated and with a music/video bundle ("download 100 songs for free" or something).

I'm not so worried about subsidizing of phones killing the iPod business, as after all subsidizing is not really subsidizing over time.

In any case, this is a tough market to conquer. Much tougher than the DAP market, as it existed yet was immature and with low consumer awareness at the time the iPod and iTunes were released. Hence, someone had to walk with the marketing torch, and Apple did.

Apple has to ride the data/information service wave (if there now is a big such wave) to win, providing all the neat things younger people need: high quality media downloads, blogging, IM, media sharing, mapping etc and with links in between, hence be more like Helio than a "cheap voice/SMS" MVNO. Commercial media downloads and ad-hoc media sharing will be an important thing to secure. iTunes uses DRM, and is likely to continue to also on the iPhone, despite the current discussions about DRM-free media downloads from other services.

They could of course start with not supporting downloading of multimedia at all, and just syncing with a PC, but that doesn't sound tempting enough for people to ditch their current DAPs and phones.

A Call to Action - The MEX Conference Manifesto is very much a stategy piece, with advice for how to develop mobile devices and services in the right direction. A lot of good "vectors", that should be taken seriously by phone manufacturers, equipment manufacturers, operators and content/service providers alike.

Mobility Beat is a service for user-submitted news links, where you can vote for the best news. Not much activity yet, but relevant to watch for anyone into mobile technology.

The official agenda: MobilityBeat is a community powered website about mobile devices and technology. Members can add, comment and vote for articles. The most popular stories are promoted to the homepage.

(via Textually)

David Gosen at I-play estimates that this year there will be more games played on mobile phones than on gaming consoles.

Of course, revenue will be way less than for console games, so the mobile game industry still has a long way to go to equal the value of the console ditto, and phones should also be better designed for gaming.

TomSoft has posted a few tips on J2me mobile development practices, going through what features in Java and the development tool should be used when developing for mobile phones. To sum it up: Don't make it more complicated than needed, due to memory and performance constraints. Be practical, not academic.

Some tips of my own:

I'm more in favor of dynamic handling of lacking features than building different versions of the application for every detail difference, but if you can manage 10s of versions, then go ahead.

I also build reusable classes for phone features, so that I can quickly build new applications based on such functionality blocks.

If I can get away with building an application for MIDP1 I use that to gain increased compatibility.

Rudy De Waele has written an introductory piece on Understanding Mobile 2.0.

It should be noted that Mobile 2.0 is not without controversy about definition, and this introduction is not that detailed either, e.g. not mentioning much about what technologies will actually be used.

To me Mobile 2.0 is about utilizing the communication features and other functionality of mobile phones overall, and not just browsing, yet many seem to think it's all about browsing (not Rudy though).

The most interesting and eye-opening thing I got from reading this article is the fact that phones now increasingly come with communucation features that completely bypass telecom operators (notably Bluetooth and Wi-Fi), so users get options for communicating with services and buddies that they never had before, and with implications of completely new services, e.g. VoIP via Wi-Fi hot spots, Internet access in the home via Bluetooth PAN, media sharing and chat via Bluetooth etc.

Even so, a better way of handling service access via the mobile network will be required for broad use, which I've written about several times before.

Mobits has published what they think are the best applications for mobile phones. Games are not included, and all are MIDlets.

See also GetJar for the most downloaded mobile applications.

Michael Mace at Mobile Opportunity lists what he feels is needed on top of flat rate to get a success in Will flat-rate pricing make mobile data take off?

A few comments on steps to success:

1. Provide a consistent architecture that works offline.
Michael starts off with access via Web browsers, but then also gets into downloaded applications. Many (most?) services will rely on a local application that will take care of the device feature access and possible local storage of information (like caching of maps etc). As local applications are designed together with the actual service, this can be optimized to achieve the best performance and reliability possible. The only choice here is of course Java ME / MIDP as that's what most phones support. Series 60 is an option, but is not enough for broad coverage.

2. Kill security certificates.
Independent applications don't need this anyway, so I don't see this as a major issue. Take e.g. Opera Mini: It's not certified, but still works fine on most networks. You get asked to allow access to the Internet, and for accessing the camera when photo-blogging, but that's it.

3. Unlock the user's data.
PIM, file etc info is accessible from Symbian and Java applications on modern phones, so it's not a major issue, except from a usability perspective, as e.g. file access in Java generates tons of warnings if the application is not certified. Hence, this is a much more important reason to certify. That Java at all generates warnings for "less than ordinary" accesses to phone features in uncertified applications is to lessen the risk of viruses, so it's not all bad.

4. Make it easy to discover new content and services.
Yes, this is a real problem, as people simply don't know what's out there. Don't expect people to randomly search the Web via a mobile phone. Instead present interesting things to the user in a portal, and not just what the operator offers. This is an opportunity for third-party as well. Also, for those services that have a Web presence for promoting the mobile service, use that presence to push down links to the phone for downloading the possible local application or a link to the mobile-adapted Web service. Instructions is not enough.

5. Get ready to go to a flat rate for everything.
For the pure data transfer, absolutely. For services, maybe. Selling ringtones on a subscription basis gave a very bad taste in the market, as especially young people were fooled into signing up for a service they believed was a one-off deal. Hence, service providers need to be very clear about the business model for the service.

Also I spot one overall flaw, that I've stated before: Let's face it, the operators are not the service providers, so what operators need to do is to make it easy to access those third-party services.

Take 3's X-Series for instance: All services offered are from third-party. What 3 has done is to bundle them into an attractive consumer offering.

Regarding X-Series not allowing access from PCs (not that I understand how they can check that): In the long run inhibiting business users from doing so will be detrimental to service uptake by those people, as open access from PCs is exactly what business people need (e.g. to access the corporate intranet). I propose that 3 provides another flat rate offering with business people in mind. Of course considerably more expensive than the consumer offering, as the companies will anyway gain from lower and more consistent monthly phone bills.

MIDP supports a basic level of 2D graphics already in MIDP1.

What TinyLine 2D brings to the table is more advanced such support with gradients, outline fonts, text directions, antialiasing and other nifty features.

TinyLine also offers SVG and decompression.

(via JDJ)

A side track (way out there):

I read in Wikipedia that IBM has delivered the CPUs to Nintendo Wii, Sony Playstation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360. In other words, all the leading new game consoles.

Interestingly each CPU has different specs. It shows IBM is flexible in terms of designing chips for specific customer needs.

Also interesting is that the Cell CPU used in PlayStation 3 is actually based on existing building blocks, depite being an unorthodox design (1 main CPU and 8 co-processors on the same chip).

I'm surprised Intel and AMD are not found here. Can't they make powerful enough chips? Are they too expensive? Too inflexible? Too PC-focused? Are their chips too power-consuming?

Apple is now using CPUs from Intel instead of from IBM, but providing CPUs to game consoles is probably a very lucrative business for IBM.

Will each manufacturer of game consoles now blame IBM for providing inferior CPUs compared to the rivals? There's no one else to blame than IBM, and one of the manufacturers has the lemon.

Mobile Phones under 5K (Rupees) presents a number of low-cost phones that are sold in India. Note that prices are without any subsidizing/subscription. Note also that some of the phones are well below 5000 Rupees. Samsung has one for 2000 Rupees!

Currency converter: 5000 Rupees = $112 = €84

No doubt fully functional phones, and some are also stylish, with a feature set that would fit most people, also outside of India.

Most lack a camera. Exceptions are Nokia 6020, Motorola C261 and Sony Ericsson K310i, but only VGA (0.3 megapizels).

Why don't most people in Europe and USA buy such inexpensive phones without a subscription instead of signing up for long subscriptions that are almost impossible to get rid of? Are we too nerdy? Is a high resolution camera and music features that important? As a secondary subscription-less phone these fit nicely.

I tried to check which ones support MIDlets, and some clearly do (either MIDP1 or MIDP2), but I suspect the J2ME Polish site is not complete on "foreign" phones, as other phones in the same series indicate MIDP support, yet some of the evaluated phones are not mentioned at all.

I would guess all have at least SMS, MMS and WAP, but I didn't check that thoroughly.

All photo clipart in Microsoft Office 2003 of people using mobile phones show them talking on them. None is showing use of mobile phones as information terminals.

I noticed it because I needed such a picture. Drat!

See here for what I found on Blackberry. Correct, but not right.

In Ballmer: Life after Vista Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, gives his view of Microsoft's role in the smartphone application platform market.

He almost makes it sound like Windows Mobile is dominating in smartphones, which is of course not the case. He's right though that Symbian OS / Series 60 and Windows Mobile are the most general (and also consistent; my comment) application platforms for smartphones. He avoids mentioning that Series 60 is way more popular than Windows Mobile, and that Java ME is available in pretty much all new phones.

Oz Unveils Mobile Social-Networking App mentions that mobile IM/e-mail player Oz Communications will release support for social network services like MySpace. A very logical next step, with all the camera phones out there that can be used for photo and video blogging/sharing etc.

As mentioned in Trend spotting: Java in mobile phones, it's very likely this client will be considered for integration into phones (that's happened with Oz's IM and e-mail clients). A huge market for Oz. Much more so than individual downloads by users.

BBC reports about Children 'swap music via phones' using Bluetooth for the swapping.

Considering it's currently done via Bluetooth I doubt that this can be considered illegal, as it's clearly with a very limited scope, and among friends. This is rather similar to the earlier music swapping via Compact Cassette.

In the future, with flatrate data, music swapping between mobile phones will be done the same way as for PCs (using Torrent or similar), and then it's time to talk about illegal use, as one upload can lead to 1000s of anonymous downloads.

Nokia and Motorola are the leaders in selling mobile phones to emerging markets (mainly China and India as of now), partly because they've succeeded in making inexpensive enough phones, but also because of a conscious strategy. There's also a huge market for telecom infrastructure to these countries.

Ed Zander claims that all manufacturers need to refocus to the emerging markets to survive in the long run.

Technology Review has a piece on Microprojector technology could let handheld gadgets like mobile phones and iPods display big pictures.

You may ask, why integrate a projector in mobile phones? In this day and age, where almost anything else has been integrated, the question is rather why not?

It actually has practical uses, e.g. for making mobile TV, photos and videos more practical than if viewing them on the small phone display. There's also a corporate use here, showing presentations using only your mobile phones, but that's a grain of sand compared to the potential of video and photo display.

The described projector is still under development and planned to be released commercially during 2008.

Update: I strenghtened the confidence in the text, as this is not guesswork.

For a better understanding of the text, there are two configurations of Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME): CLDC and CDC, with a range of profiles. The most popular and relevant combinations for mobile phones are CLDC / MIDP and CDC / Personal Profile. MIDP is completely dominating among the two, and also dominating overall. Sun officially claims 1.5 billion mobile phones support Java ME, and almost all of those support MIDP. In comparison there are ~100 million Symbian OS phones (mostly Series 60), that all also support MIDP. For more on Java ME for mobile phones see my Java ME pages.

Trends and observations:

* MIDlets are increasingly integrated into phones and hence shipped with the phones. Mainly games of course, but also messaging, social networking and productivity applications. These applications are typically picked among the top applications already available on the market, hence cutting lead time considerably, providing solutions for the current market and getting very high quality. This trend also applies to Symbian OS.

* The quality of fully embedded applications, especially when looking at new types of applications, are going down (very expensive to develop and maintain), and the quality of the most popular MIDlets are going up, even further fuelling the above trend.

* Increasingly MIDP is also used for developing new applications for embedded use only. The advantages are: much easier to find developers fluent in Java than a proprietary phone platform, easier to deploy on many different handsets (even with differing platforms), easier to test in the field (could be downloaded to the handsets) etc.

* MIDP3 will replace MIDP2. CDC/PP will not. Reasons: MIDP3 is backwards compatible with MIDP2, which is crucial for the application developers and the phone market, and MIDP3 is optimized for mainstream phones, which CDC/PP is not. CDC/PP is optimized for smartphones, but almost all smartphones are based on Symbian OS, so why develop for CDC/PP (except in cases corporate applications)? There are currently only 3 commercial phones on the market with CDC/PP. Also, SavaJe is gone.

* Application developers, especially those of games but also applications, will continue to develop for MIDP1 as long as many phones still only have MIDP1. MIDP1 is also sufficient for many productivity and corporate applications. It's likely corporate applications will mainly be developed for MIDP2, as companies tend to use later phones.

* More and more applications are developed using any of the porting/de-fragmentation tools as a base. Sun doesn't effectively resolve the fragmentation issues, but third-party are.

This week the Carnival of the Mobilists is at Mopocket, so please check it out. I'm in there somewhere.

Textually provides a listing of information about phones for kids. Technically they are basic phones with voice and possibly SMS, so the production cost is very low, not saying they are sold for a low price (as volumes are likely to be low right now).

The mojungle founders are selling mojungle on eBay.

The starting price is $60k, and according to picturephoning hoping to reach $250k for the complete company (except the founders I guess...).

It's an interesting approach, as there are several sites for selling and buying web sites, but prices for non-profitable web sites are extremely low, so selling via eBay might be a very smart move. mojungle is of course not just a web site, but a system also including an e-mail gateway, format converters etc.

I've had a good contact with Ari Mir at mojungle, and have only good things to say about him and the company, but it still makes me wonder if this is the future for many other Web 2.0 services that have no clear revenue streams, not even advertizing?

For Puzzled Seniors Only describes two products that can come in handy for elderly, whether they are listening to Beatles or not:

Samsung Jitterbug

Available in two models A110 and A120, without and with numeric keys. The one without uses a few keys to call predefined numbers. Both support predefined numbers though. Everything's large, as can be seen in this video.

HP Printing Mailbox

Is inherently a printer, but that calls up a mail server via an async modem and pulls out possible e-mails and prints them. Sounds very much like a fax machine, and there are low-cost e-mail-to-fax services, and also fax-to-e-mail services, so this is an alternative to using a standard fax machine. A clear drawback is that it's not possible to send messages from this device. At Axis Communications I was responsible for the development of a device that did just that: Connected to a low-cost scanner it converted anything scanned to e-mails. See here: Axis Network Document Server.

Update 20061207: The shell as a display
Update 20061205: Added programmability, AI and movability.

The Economist tries to extrapolate what mobile phones will be like in 15 years time in The phone of the future. It's a good read, and it's pushing the envelope a bit more than these kinds of outlooks tend to do.

15 years is almost like infinity in this business. Just look at what a mobile phone was like 15 years ago (the only thing that hasn't changed is the form factor), so here are some of my own tongue in cheek, but also serious (as in dead serious) thoughts on the matter:

In 15 years there will be no notion of a mobile phone as a distinct device. People will say "15 years ago people used clunky devices called mobile phones", and they will laugh cruelly.

Information access will be the main bandwidth use of phones, and it will be massive. Without guessing too much, in 15 years all revenue will come directly or indirectly from information access and it will of course be flatrate. Voice will be absolutely free, even long distance. We will not talk about specifically mobile access to information. It will all be high capacity broadband in one way or another.

I'm a bit concerned about how advertizing might evolve in 15 years, as it's already a terrible pain in the butt (just look at this site), and even today so many services are solely funded through advertizing, and more are every day. It's everywhere, and almost always irrelevant to a specific user. With a positive mindset I hope advertizing will be way more individualized by then, but there will also be huge concerns about identity. What if advertizing companies get access to all your personal information, so they know that you for instance have a gene causing you to be especially gullible or generally stupid? Scary...

Phones will be used as wireless keys, money and identity. All are security-oriented, so advancements in security must be made for this to work without risk of identity theft etc. Mechanical keys, money and business cards are so 20th century, and the current plastic money cards are so unsafe that it's amazing we are still using this crap (the only remaining security is the perception of security). Smart cards are much better, and what you already have in a phone (at least on GSM) is a smart card. Even so, expect something way better than even smart cards.

All mobile devices will be programmable in the sense that you can download new firmware and after-market applications. Potentially most service-enabling will be done that way, as the cost will be very low, and the devices will have tons of memory for storing the applications. Data will though mostly be online.

AI hopefully has evolved enough in 15 years to provide semi-human reactions to user requests, including emotional responses (for good or bad). Of course then speaker-independent speech recognition and speech synthesis will be important. In simple terms for speaking messages, feeds etc but in advanced terms to act as an interactive device/avatar, that you can speak to and that will act as a cyber-friend, as an intelligent organizer, etc.

There's technology in the works for providing small legs and arms to devices, with electronically controlled muscles, so maybe the phone will be your communication device as well as your tiny cyber-pet. It could then run to the power supply if it's close to running out of battery, and clean up your desk while you are in front of your computer etc. Maybe not...

Memory will not be an issue for music, video etc. The question is what's beyond even DVD quality movies. Storing matter and DNA sequences (e.g. for cloning your pet ... or your favorite kid)?

I hear industry representatives complain about subsidizing and that it causes people to not make conscious choices about phones, but subsidizing is actually driving the phone replacement market and also the market as a whole. Otherwise very few would upgrade, and most would still use phones that can only do voice and SMS. It's very likely this will also drive the market in the future, even though it sounds conservative. Possibly there will be other ways of funding evolution.

As the cost of a voice/SMS device at that time will be close to zero and almost invisible to the eye (well not quite, but certainly smaller), expect such functionality to be integrated in devices you wouldn't even consider today, like all kitchen equipment, cars, traffic lights etc (to report failure and for reprogramming etc), all consumer electronics, pets (hopefully external though) etc etc.

On a more negative note, in 15 years time the radio technologies as we know it might be forbidden due to health risks, so at the same time when all oil will be gone and water has risen 10 meters, we might also have to reconsider the very notion of using wireless technologies. Hopefully this will not be the case, but we shouldn't just believe future will be more of what we have today. I rather think the future will also be a lot different (as in side-ways shift) than today. The world is not endless.

People will still be people, and very much unchanged, but if the stress levels are high today among young people due to being always accessible, it might be a magnitude worse in 15 years. This is likely to cause societal changes. What if you are always (and I mean always) hooked up to a voice chat session with all your friends? As there will be no cost for voice per se, this is fully possible. That's almost like telepathy, and interestingly this could make groups of people behave as if they were at the same location constantly, even though they are always apart, working together, learning together etc.

The Economist article mentions miniature projectors (prototypes exist using scanning lasers). What about eye displays? Not the bulky ones available today, that require glasses, but rather something you could let float over one eye (like a lens) that would show all received messages and TV etc. I'm not a friend of operating in stuff, and I don't think a communication device as a whole should be, but for many reasons you might do it with earphones and microhphones. Again, I'm not a fan, but stranger things have happened.

If the future realization of a mobile phone is at all visible as a specific device then it's likely it will be possible to skin the device via software. Today you buy a new shell to get it customized, but the technology for creating plastic-based displays is most likely very low cost in 15 years (it's probably low cost in just a few years). By wrapping the whole phone in such a display it's just a matter of downloading a picture optimized for the phone's dimensions and display it on the shell. Normally this takes energy which would makes it work only as a notifier, e.g. when a call arrives, but it's also possible to make static multi-color displays, and then the picture would stay without any extra energy consumption. As a notifier the interesting effect is that it could show different pictures and colors depending on who's calling, etc.

Mobility Weblog has a piece on Java ME, GPL and Intellectual Property Considerations with a response from Roger Brinkley at Sun explaining that contributions to the PhoneMe project are still owned by the contributors. Enrique also re-confirms to my comment that applications running on top of a KVM and base classes are not affected in any way by GPL.

About PhoneMe:
Q: What is the phoneME project?
A: The phoneME project is where Sun is releasing its phone implementations for Java ME. It has a single repository that consists of various active development modules including CLDC, CDC, MIDP, and various JSR implementations.

Media: Making money on wireless will take years provides another example of the strange logic in our industry: "To make mobile data a success we always need to utilize the most bleeding edge technologies, as we've given up on doing nothing with the older technologies".

We all know that's irrational thinking, still we can't let go. The problem with the latest technologies is that it's all investments and no availability, while established technologies for information exchange get forgotten in the chase for something else that analysts and equipment providers deem as the Holy Grail that will generate revenue, as supposedly the previous technologies can't or are not hip enough.

Rather I would say the only technologies that can generate real revenue are the ones that have reached some level of critical mass, in terms of phones supporting it, in terms of network capacity, in terms of service providers taking the risk and time to offer good services, in terms of user acceptance etc.

Third-party service providers know this, and have to know this, as their only interest is to get the most users for their services, so they need to go for technologies that exist. I've seen exceptions though: It took quite a while before Flickr supported other than Symbian OS phones. Possibly due to development issues, but nevertheless. At the same time social networking, chat, feed, etc services don't need anything new at all. Almost all phones support such services.

An extreme case in point: The SMS way to lend or borrow

Operators can of course stop third-party from providing interesting services, as indicated in US operators fight for their right to not innovate.

Pretty low I'd say:
* £5/$10 for the base service, on top of an existing sub.
* £5/$10 extra for on-demand video from Sling or Orb.
Nice price indeed, but will it turn 3 into a profitable company? I doubt it.

Quote: Hutchison plans to roll out X-Series, which will initially be available on just two handsets -- the Nokia N73 and Sony Ericsson W950i
This is the rather silly side of it: Why on earth release a service that hardly works on any phone? Clearly this is due to the services involved, but that's no excuse, as any user with a 3G phone would benefit from a flatrate sub, with or without operator-endorsed services.

Reuters - 3 unveils pricing for X-Series services

Labels: 3g, flatrate, services

TeliaSonera (Sweden's biggest operator, leading also on fixed telephony) hasn't been lazy lately:

DM Europe - Telia launches mobile phone alarm service
This enables simple triggering of an alarm to the Swedish SOS Alarm Service. It seems special phones are needed, as GPS is required to get enough precision in the location of the person. I hope they will extend the service also to normal phones, with precision controlled by the base station density (E-OTD etc). Better than nothing.

DM Europe - Telia completes 3G network
Almost all Swedes (8,860,000 of in total 9,016,596, according to CIA Fact Book) now have 3G access. Now we need to figure out what to use it for. It says TeliaSonera will continue to heavily invest in enhancement of the network speed and coverage, but why not spend some money on making it easier for service providers (and also TeliaSonera) to get revenue from information services too?