Category: Cellular

Cellular related stories

The Text-Message Enabled Chandelier

The beautiful Swarovski SMS-enabled chandelierSwarovksi, an Austrian crystal group famed for their chandeliers (where else do you get yours anyway?) have demonstrated a chandelier that displays text messages sent to it from mobile phones.

The chandelier, called “Lolita” (oh no – that’s going to do strange things to the search engines) uses strings of LEDs hung in crystal cylinders. The rows of LEDs are then switched on and off in sequence to create a scrolling dot-matrix effect – rather like an extraordinarily posh and expensive version of those displays you get in cab office windows.

Swarovski

3 Announce Videotalk to PC

We have to admit – it’s quite compelling: with 3’s new Videotalk to PC service, subscribers on the 3 network can call any PC with email and a webcam and have a videophone conversation. The service will roll out in Australia shortly.

It’s a great idea – and will help spread the use of 3G video phones because now you have more than just a few other 3G video phones to talk to.

NEC’s 606 and 808 handsets are already compatible – and a software upgrade will allow Motorola A920 users join in. PC users need a webcam and need to register to use the service before they can take calls.

The service is in use in Italy, and about to launch in Hong Kong. Calls are charged at national Videotalk rates.

3G.co.uk on the story

T-Mobile Introduce Mobile Jukebox, Unleashes New Music Format on Unsuspecting World

T-Mobile have partnered with Sony Music and Unversal Music to provide a somewhat unique entry to the mobile music market. Called “Mobile Jukebox”, the service allows subscribers to download music clips to their mobile phones.

So far, there are 200 tracks available to choose from – but the real killer is that those tracks are between only 90 and 120 seconds long.

We think this one might have launched a bit early – with only tiny number of tracks currently available, and even those are brutally short, this has an air of “So what?” about it. T-Mobile intend to offer more tracks later in the year, and full length ones too – but will that be enough?

Thomas Gewecke, Senior Vice President of Sony Music Digital Services explained: “Mobile Mix enables music fans to download a 90 to 120 second excerpt of a song in just a couple of minutes, allowing them to get a feel for the music almost instantaneously, and takes the mobile music entertainment experience to an entirely new level.”

Mobile phone users tend to be young and demanding, and require quite high standards form their entertainment, so surely they want considerably more than just to listen to a music clip? It maybe that T-Mobile have misjudged their market here, or were just keen to get some sort of music product out as soon as possible.

T-Mobile on Mobile Mix

Motorola’s Linux Music Phone

Motorola haven’t released a Linux-based phone outside the Far East before – but their new E680 looks like it will be distributed in the West.

The phone is intended to be a wireless entertainment portal, with plenty of features to support that claim: GPRS downloads of up to 115kbps; MP3, RealPlayer and MPEG4 playback; stereo speakers; FM radio. And, yes, it has a camera – VGA with an 8x digital zoom and MPEG4 video capture.

The phone incorporates a WAP browser and will run J2ME (Java 2 Mobile Edition) applications. Further expansion is available through an SD slot, up to 1gb.

LinuxDevices on the new phone

Slashdot

Hand-held Digital Video Broadcasting – a summary of progress at DVB World 2004

The fourth Digital Video Broadcasting World conference was held in Dublin last week – and one of the key topics discussed was the developing standard for broadcasting digital video to hand-held and other mobile devices.

The new standard was only conceived two years ago, and after a couple of name changes (it has previously been known as DVB-M and DVB-X), has been named DVB-H. The standard was accepted by the DVB Technical Module in January and is expected to be submitted to the European Television Standards Institute this year.

As the standard is still so new, there are still some problems to be ironed out, mainly power consumption and some network issues.

DVB-H’s core function is the delivery of digital media to small and portable devices such as mobile phones, but without using mobile phone networks. It has been designed to deliver MPEG-2 streams, but can broadcast any type of data.

The proposed standard addresses five issues with mobile devices: they tend to move about, they have smaller screens, they have smaller antennas, they require indoor coverage and they run on battery power.

DVB-T (the terrestrial standard for digital broadcasting) was not really considered for mobile video as it was designed for use with rooftop antennas and does not have the building penetration required, nor is it very power efficient. In theory it could be used to broadcast to mobile devices but a separate dedicated standard would allow many optimisations, rather than just bolting on functionality to a standard that was never actually designed for mobile use.

DAB was designed for devices with similar location and power demands, but simply does not have the spectrum width to carry the data required.

Another interesting aspect of DVB-H is that it can coexist with DVB-T without disturbing devices using the other stream, such as set-top boxes.

DVB-H uses time-slicing between streams to reduce power consumption, but this saving is more or less lost when the total bit rate for a service is low. It’s designed to carry only IP (Internet Protocol) services, so is obviously constrained by the capabilities of the carrier protocol – but since IP is well understood and supported, and has a rich set of features such as strong encryption, this should not present many problems.

As we said at the beginning, the standard doesn’t use existing mobile networks to deliver content, but we should add that it also needs more masts than conventional broadcasting (though less than cellular coverage, and the masts need not be as large as conventional broadcast masts). It is expected that existing cellular masts will be upgraded to transmit DVB-H signals. However, the cellular network will provide the return path, allowing users to pay for content and receive licenses for their purchases.

Presented at DVB2004 was the Nokia’s 7700 is the first device to support DVB-H through the addition of their Streamer SU-6 accessory. The SU-6 is attached to the 7700 like a battery pack and is just the beginning for devices that will provide new forms of multimedia and entertainment for consumers.

DVB Home

The Nokia 7700

The European Television Standards Institute

.mobile domain on the way?

There has not been a new Top Level Domains (TLD) since .name came out a couple of years ago. Even that ended up as a bit of a damp squib. But now a collection of nine corporations, have applied to ICANN (Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers) to form a new domain. Their proposal, .mobile is to be used for mobile applications/devices and will be filed by 15 March 2004.

Nokia is leading some pretty heavyweight companies from the worlds of computing, software, tech manufacturers, mobile phone makers and cellular service providers. The list; Microsoft Corp., Nokia, Vodafone, 3, GSM Association, HP, Orange, Samsung Electronics Co, Ltd. and Sun Microsystems is not only from a diverse range of areas, but are feature companies that normally do not really like each other, like, Nokia, Microsoft and Sun.

If the current application is successful, the current estimate is to have the first names available during the second half of 2005. An independent, separate organisation would run the registry.

This is not the first time Nokia has tried to get some new TLD’s introduced, back in October 2000 they requested, the following form ICANN:-

.mas
.max
.mid
.mis
.mobile
.mobi
.now
.own

At the time they came out with a press release, which sadly they have removed from their site, but thanks to archive.org (nee Way Back Machine), we can find the original release. (Interesting to see their projections for mobile handset, overtaking computers for IP access by 2003). The 2000 applications, clearly was not a success.

UMTS forum has been a big supporter for a Mobile TLD, or M-TLD, as they prefer to call it, and two years ago (March, 2002) they published the findings of ‘Benefits and Drawbacks of Introducing a Dedicated Top Level Domain Within the UMTS Environment’ prepared by Theron business consulting. The Executive Summary –  is available to the public, the detail (TOC) is not without registration. The estimated cost of applying for and running the was estimated at less than 3m Euro.

The purpose of the .mobile domain, beyond opening up the domain market to another potential name grab, is not immediately clear. So after reading between various lines and carrying out further research we’ve concluded the following.

It appears that the idea is to limit the people who can get a .mobile name, and by doing this, they hope to ensure that, at the very least, the content is formatted for mobile devices and the service has a level of QoS (Quality of Service). If this will turn out to be a mobile walled garden, a mini-internet, only for mobile devices is not clear. Will .mobile domain only be available for use BY mobile devices, or are people to put their mobile-friendly content on .mobile domains?

Some quotes by the founding partner companies appear to support the walled garden theory.

“We expect that by leveraging the technologies of the Internet, appropriately scaled for mobile scenarios, this initiative will provide the ease of use and efficiency that will significantly fuel mobile Internet usage.”
Brian Arbogast, corporate vice president of the MSN Communications Platform at Microsoft

“Creating a unique, standard platform for a mobile Internet environment is a natural next step to enabling new and compelling services for businesses and consumers,”
Felice Swapp, director of strategic initiatives and business development, HP

Forcing publishers to create a whole separate sites to operate under a .mobile domain appears a very expensive route. We would imagine that it would be a much better to define a standard that can be used with any currently existing domain. ie just serve it from the same domain as before but define Digital-Lifestyles.info/mobile or mobile.Digital-Lifestyles.info as the convention.

If the mobile phone owners would get a choice between .mobile-internet or Internet is also not clear.

One things that the mobile industry understand is if each handsets has its own domain name, there are significant issues in maintaining DNS records and monitoring their connection to the Internet – as the phone connect and disconnect so regularly. This lead us to think that they are talking about maintaining a separate DNS system for mobile devices. If they do end up running a separate DNS, Nokia (or their JV company/partners) would become the gatekeeper to and from the mobile world – a very powerful position.

More details of this are bound to popup over the next few weeks, if anything relevant turns up, we will let you know.

The mobile Top Level Domain initiative

Nokia October 2000 application to ICANN

Theon business consulting

School Bans Camera Phones

West Lothian Council has banned mobile camera phones from all 11 secondary schools and 66 primary schools in its area. The council stated misuse of the cameras as its motivation for the ruling – images can be used for bullying or more sinister purposes, though the council has yet to receive any complaints involving the phones.

The Gartner Group estimate that soon 80% of phones sold will feature cameras, and this is causing security problems in companies, as well as personal security issues. Many companies simply do not have the infrastructure, staff or budget to protect their business and employees from misuse of digital camera phones.

Information Week reports on Gartner

BBC News

New Memory Card Format Aimed at 3G Phones

Motorola will be using a new memory card format in their new phones (the E1000 and A1000, reported here this week), with capacities from 32mb to 512mb. These new cards are about half the size of a SIM, making them slightly smaller than the miniSD format, which was launched less than a year ago.

The cards are intended to be removable so that users can share files or transfer data. The specification for the cards will be open, so other manufacturers will be able to adopt it. No details for performance or electrical characteristics have been released yet.

Chances are then, that your PDA, phone, games console, MP3 player, robot dog and camera will all use entirely different memory cards. If that’s not enough to send you sobbing down to the shops to get a new all-in-one device, then we don’t know what is.

PC World almost seem pleased

3G: “The Networks are Ready, but the Phones Aren’t”

One of the many things coming out of the 3GSM Summit is the conflict between mobile network operators like Vodafone and T-Mobile and handset manufacturers: the network operators have made the networks, but the phones aren’t good enough to entice users to subscribe.

Mobile phone operators spent billions of euros on licenses to run 3G networks and are understandably concerned that they have not been able to make full use of new revenue opportunities.

At the 3GSM summit in Cannes, Arun Sarin, chief executive of Vodafone criticised existing phones for being bulky, possessing poor battery life and featuring unsatisfactory heat dissipation. He added “The experience today is unacceptable to our customers.”

Part of the problem is related to poor coverage in Europe. Not only does this mean that services are simply unavailable in areas, but it also requires that the phones run in dual 2G/3G mode, thus consuming far more power – hence the heat and battery problems not generally witnessed in Japan which has far better coverage. Since it is projected that, even by 2008, only 75% of all phones will be 3G, dual mode issues are expected to be around for a while.

Some see Sarin’s comments as a little dig at Nokia, with whom Vodafone have had a stormy relationship over the years, but with Nokia expected to have a strong 3G handset offering by the end of 2004, things seemed to have thawed between Sarin and Nokia’s CEO Jorma Ollila.

The Nokia/Vodafone Lovefest

Sarin: GSM stands for “God Send Mobiles”

Nokia and Samsung Work Together on Push to Talk

Push to talk over Cellular (PoC) is felt by the mobile phone business to become an exciting advance for consumers and business user alike.  PoC give a walkie-talkie style connection between two phones.

Nokia have been working on the technology for a while and have developed an open standards approach, which they have put forward to the OMA (Open Mobile Alliance) for use by the industry. They currently have it on trial with 30 operators around the world.

To underline how useful it is, Nokia must be pleased to announce today that Samsung will be releasing products in 2004/5 that will use the standard.