Category: Mobile

Things that aren’t static

Nokia Boss Admits N-Gage Below Expectations

Jorma Ollila Nokia chairman and chief executive, admitted to the Financial Times yesterday that the N-Gage, their gaming platform, has not been the success they had hoped for, in his words “The sales are in the lower quartile of the bracket we had as our goal.”

The original aim was to sell 9 million units within its first two years, but many feel that the €300 (£200, US$380) is too expensive when compared with other gaming-only platforms such as the Nintendo GameBoy. It has also been criticised for its lack of game support and difficulty in operating it, in particular requiring the removal of the battery to change the game. The cracking of their game copy protection method last year has also not helped them with game publishers.

Ollila said he plans to wait until November 2005 to decide if it has been a success or failure.

Europe’s first mega-pixel camera phone launched by Vodafone

Vodafone has beaten the rest of the market to be the first to bring a mega-pixel camera to Europe. In a further development of their relationship with Sharp, it will be Sharp GX30.

Not content with being just a mega-pixel camera, this quad-band (GSM) phone of many features incorporates an MP3 player, offers Bluetooth support, has a removable SD memory cards and provides video message functionality. The screen on the handset has been significantly uprated to be capable of displaying 262,144 colours, four times its previous model, the GX20. It will be available in retail stores from March 2004.

Breaking the mega-pixel barrier is significant. At this resolution the photographs start to become useful beyond simply sending them other phones. The quality is sufficient to print them out and services such as Pixology (We QuickLinked earlier), are planning to take advantage of the always increasing resolutions.

The other direct benefit for Vodafone in higher resolution cameras’ becoming the norm is in increasing their call income – the higher the resolution, the more data there is to transmit, the higher Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). Raising ARPU is the mantra for mobile operators.

Vodafone’s global presence means it has tremendous clout and purchasing power enabling it to secure exclusive deals with phone manufacturers. It is known in the industry that Vodafone is keen to develop its own, branded phones in an attempt to break the power of Nokia on the phone market. They want to move their users from identifying with the make of handset, “I’ve got a Nokia” to “I’ve got a Vodafone”. Extending the relationship with Sharp is a further step towards that.

Vodafone

Sharp phones

Phone-on-a-chip Coming Soon

Bill Krenik, who heads up research and development in Texas Instruments (TI) wireless terminals business unit has been revealing the companies intention to create an integrated chip that will hold all of the functionality of a current smartphone, on a single chip. TI plan to have it available by the end of 2004.

TI, the world’s largest maker of cell phone chips say the integrated chip would reduction power consumption by a half and free up large amounts of the valuable system board real estate for additional chips providing features Wi-Fi high-speed wireless networking and satellite location tracking to be added to phones.

TI is not alone in thinking along these lines. Samsung were speaking about this very idea last week. They prefer the term System-in-Package chip and plan to show it at the coming GSM World Congress Conference in Cannes. Their chip will include a 203MHz ARM-based processor with 256MB of NAND flash memory, 256MB of SDRAM and support for USB.

Vodafone launches 3G in Europe

Vodafone have announced today that it will be starting its 3G service in Europe. Interestingly their first offering will be a data only service using the catchyly named Vodafone Mobile Connect 3G/GPRS data card, rather than a voice service. Slotting one of these into a laptop will provide data speed up to 384kbps.

It is clear that Vodafone is not just throwing money at bring their 3G service to the public – they are taking a cautious, measured approach to it. The service is launching in seven European countries over the next four weeks; UK, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. The coverage will not be comprehensive to start, but will focus initially on major cities and grow through transport routes, then expand over the next few years. When the 3G service becomes too weak, the card will automatically fall back to GPRS without interrupting service.

We feel there may be a number of reasons that Vodafone have launched their initial offering as a data service and not voice as was expected. In short, predictability – of income, subscribers and usage. The data service, aimed at businesses, will more than likely bring in more income than the voice service, for the use of the same infrastructure. It is unlikely that there will be thousands of individuals clamouring to get on to it and signing corporate accounts will give them a far better ability to plan for expansion and usage patterns. In addition, may be something as simple as they do not feel the handsets that are currently available would appeal to their clients.

Vodafone

New Nokia Phone Converges Too Many Features To List

Nokia have released phones with radios incorporated in them for some time — but the 7700 is somewhat different as it incorporates a service that Nokia has termed “Visual Radio”. Listeners to participating stations can interact through their phones – polls, artist information, ringtones are all displayed in 7700’s browser whilst they listen a radio show. Helsinki’s Kiss FM will be the first station to offer the interactive services.

Adding interactivity to a radio programme through a browser (rather than streaming the programme to the phone) allows Nokia to avoid rights issues and save bandwidth. To us this seems like a good stopgap, but streaming directly to the phone offers so much more functionality that it won’t be too long before someone sorts out the rights nightmare and produces a proper internet audio/video phone.

Nokia will no doubt be analysing what users do with the new interactive features from radio stations – cookies and server logs will show them which features are popular. If successful, charging for ringtones and extras from stations will be a nice revenue channel for Nokia and its radio partners.

The look of the phone could best be described as “funky” — Nokia seem to be getting further and further away from traditional mobile phone design with every new iteration of their products.

Nokia on the 7700

Kiss FM

Nokia to Buy Psion Out of Symbian

Nokia has announced its intention to try and nearly double its shareholding in Symbian by buying Psion shares in the venture, taking them to a 63.3% holding. Symbian, created arguably the most successful rich media Operating System (OS) which is primarily used on mobile phones and portable devices. Almost 2.7m units were shipped with their OS in the first six months of 2003 and it is currently owned by seven partners; Ericsson, Panasonic, Nokia, Psion, Samsung, Siemens and Sony Ericsson.

Nokia propose to pay Psion in two ways; £93.5 million (~$173.8m, ~€137.1m) as a fixed payment, plus £0.84 (~$1.56, ~€1.23) for every Symbian OS equipped phone Nokia sells during 2004 and 2005. Psion are currently estimating the deal will be worth around £135.7m (~$252.1m, ~€198.4m).

This is not the first time there has been a significant shift in the Symbian ownership. Back in August 2003, co-incidentally Symbian’s fifth anniversary, Motorola announced it would exit Symbian, selling its 19% holding. The two partners picking it the holding were Psion who increased its holding from 25.3% to 31.1% and Nokia bought the rest of the Motorola shares, increasing its holding from 19% to 32.2%. Psion paid Motorola £17m (~$31.5m, ~€24.8m) cash, valuing Symbian at that time at £300m (~$557.4m, ~€438.4m). The current Nokia/Psion deal values Symbian at £430m (~$798.9m, ~€628.4m).

At that time David Potter, Chairman of Psion gave hints at their possible exit from Symbian, “Psion will continue to play its role in driving Symbian towards the successful exploitation of its market. At the same time, realising the value of out investment in Symbian for the optimal benefit of Psion shareholders is a key strategic goal”

This leaves two questions hanging in the air. What will happen to Symbian’s other minority shareholders now Nokia is far and away the largest shareholder? Where are Psion going now?

The other owners, lead by Ericsson, the next largest owner (17.5%), may feel shouldered out of Symbian or indeed be uneasy providing income to their largest competitor. Currently the only other option they would have is to go the Microsoft route with their less than perfect offering.

A few years ago Psion got out of the consumer hardware business and they also sold Psion Software to Visto in February for an undisclosed amount. They are now placing their bets on wireless applications in the enterprise. Initially growing Teklogix, which manufactures rugged, wireless devices to help companies streamline their logistics. They also plan to move into providing support to mobile workers in the field, such as medical staff who are visiting patients in their home.

Teklogix is an area they feel they have a strong footing in this business already, making it is a defendable area with potential for great expansion. The CEO, Alistair Crawford says they plan to focus on RFID and Voice. The benefits of RFID in the warehousing business are well known. Psion also feel there is benefits in using voice input there, as the operators quite often need to have both hands free, or their not able to use their hands, for example in a refrigerator unit.

Psion is a company that has changed considerably over its 25 years from its start writing software, in particular Chess for Sinclair computers, through single handedly pioneered the handheld computer market back in the 1980’s., to defending themselves against the onslaught from Microsoft. We’ll watch this space with interest.

Nokia to purchase Psion shareholding in Symbian – Press release

Interviews with Chair and CEO of Psion

Visto Corporation Purchases Psion Software – Press release

T-Mobile Launch TV to Mobile via GPRS

T-Mobile, the worlds second largest mobile phone service provider, has launched a service in Germany enabling their subscribers to watch television over GPRS to their mobile phones. A first for Germany, the service with the very catchy name, “n-tv mobile live TV”, will initial be offering a live stream of news direct to the handsets that have the Real player installed. Currently their Windows-based PDA offerings, T-Mobile MDA or T-Mobile MDA II and Symbian Series 60-based platforms, Nokia 3650, a Nokia 6600 and Nokia 7650 support this.Interestingly there will be no additional charges made on top of the cost of GPRS data transmission, although it should be noted that video is the most dense and bandwidth hungry form of data.This new service follows hard on the heals of a deal between T-Mobile and Kodak that enables their subscribers to send MMS-photographs or other digital photos to be printed at Kodak then deliver via post. To use “Fotoservice”, some software has to be installed on the Symbian-based handset that uploads the images to a private storage area. Given the current low resolutions of phone-based camera, there is an option to place a number of photos on the same 10×15 print.

Mobile Phone Ringtones Reach Realism

News reaches us that Oki Electric Industry have launched a new range of chips for mobile phones that plays 64 polyphonies simultaneously with eight octaves. If you are slightly lost with this, let us translate; a mobile phone equipped with one of these will be able to have a ringtone capable of playing music with up to 64 musical notes sounding at once, from a range of notes far greater than the human voice (as high as five octave is rare).

This is the third generation of Oki’s Swing’nRinger sound generators and doubles the number of notes that can play simultaneously. As with previous generations ships they will be programmable using MIDI files. Samples will be shipping from December this year and volume shipping will start in March 2004

It is interesting that the technology appears to be catching up with the views of the industry. In our discussions with people taking music in to the digital world, they have been muttering about the next stage in ringtones being complete music track singles being used as ringtones. This technology will bring the rendition of the music to a more familiar sound.

Oki Swing’nRinger Press release

Thomson Announce Portable Multimedia Player

Giant media group, Thomson, has announced the launch of a portable multimedia player that has 20Gb of hard drive storage and a built in colour screen which plays videos, show photographs and plays music. Sold in two guises, Europe (THOMSON LYRA Audio/Video Jukebox PDP 2860 – €749, ~£520) and USA (RCA RD2780 – $499.99), it will play back both MPEG-1 & MPEG-4 video and mp3, Windows Media Audio. It can also be upgraded to mp3PRO.

Depending on the compression used, Thomson claim the unit can hold up to eighty hours of video, which can either be played on its own screen  (3.5-inch Thin Film Transistor (TFT) LCD ) or displayed on a television set using analog composite leads. Alternatively the unit can either be used as portable computer storage, store up to 5,000 music tracks or 100,000 JPEG images. Images can be organized into slideshows to accompany the playback of music.

The content can either loaded via a computer (PC or Mac), using a USB 2.0 connection, or the unit can either record video; using it built in MPEG-4 encoder, and audio directly. When the unit encodes video content, forty hours of content can be stored.

Battery life is reported to last up to twelve hours when playing music but only four when playing back video.

The unit is pretty compact (5.31″ x 3.15″ x 1.06″, 13.5cm x 8.00cm x 2.70cm) and light (10.5 ounces, under 300g) and we suspect will seduce many enough to add it to their xmas list.

RCA RD2780

First European “Over the Air” Music Download Service Launched

mm02, UK cellular provider, have launched the first European “over the air” music download service.

To use the service, prospective customers must buy a separate music player, the “O2 Digital Music Player” (O2 DMP), which connects to the online service through their mobile phone, either via an Infra-red port or a short cable. Once connected via GPRS, they are able to browse the selection of music, preview tracks and then purchase them. Previews are not charged for and take around 20 seconds to start to play, but when a track is bought, it is downloaded to the device, which takes around 3.5 minutes, the customer will be charged £1.50 (~$2.55, ~€2.15). While it does not look like good value when compared with what is the current industry standard of 99c, mm02’s Kent Thexton claimed the price “fantastic value for money, for less than the cost of most ring-tones customers can purchase and own an entire chart track”.

Siemens designed the DMP on behalf of mm02 and will also run the DRM-protected content aggregation and platform hosting.

The music is encoded using a CODEC called aacPlus, a combination of MPEG AAC and Coding Technologies’ SBR (Spectral Band Replication) technology developed by the German company, Coding Technologies. They claim the compression can reduce the size of audio files by up to half. Given the limited bandwidth available on cellular networks, it is important that the files are as small as possible.

A wide range of handsets are compatible with the service, meaning that at launch, more than 1.2 million O2 customers can access this service.

The music content is being supplied by BMG, Universal, AIM and Warner Music and it is hoped that up to 100,000 tracks will become available.

Once downloaded, the music is stored on a 64MB SD Memory Card that slots into the device. Tracks can be played back on the O2 DMP or transferred to a PC using the Memory Card but will remain locked with their DRM. The DMP can also play back MP3’s

mm02 are hoping for a good take up as in a previous trial of 300 UK and German customers, an average of five tracks per user per week were downloaded.

mm02

Coding Technologies – aacPlus