Wireless

Wireless connections

Vodafone Launches Global Mobile TV
Vodafone has started to roll out its global Mobile TV channels, serving up a feast of “world-class TV brands, pan-European sports coverage and leading entertainment and documentary programmes”.
The global Mobile TV channels will be widely available across Vodafone markets from this month and will include big hitting series like HBO’s “Sex and the City”, “Six Feet Under” and special mobile editions of the old favourite, ’24’ from Fox.
Sports fans will be kept amused on the move with Eurosport, UEFA Champions League and, err, Chilli TV (who?) channels, with the Vodafone service also carrying popular channels like MTV and Discovery.
“With a wide range of ‘good for TV’ handsets, an intuitive, easy to use service and a portfolio of instantly recognisable television brands and programming, the launch of global Mobile TV is a compelling proposition for our customers”, purred Peter Bamford, Chief Marketing Officer at Vodafone.
“Attracting world class content providers, such as Twentieth Century Fox Television and HBO, ensures the premium quality of this product and underpins our confidence in its widespread adoption,” he continued.
Vodafone say that their research into the market revealed that Mobile TV complemented television viewing habits at home and thus demonstrated a hearty appetite for the product amongst consumers.
Their study found that consumers want well-known TV brands and channels and like to “dip” in and out of television as a way of filling up free time (or skiving from work).
Sourced globally, the TV content will work with any 3G enabled handset and will complement existing domestic Mobile TV offerings in eight of Vodafone’s operating countries (namely, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain and the UK) as well as associate and partner networks in Belgium, France, Switzerland and Austria.
Vodafone
6 December, 2005
NTL Bids For Virgin Mobile: 1st Mobile Quad Play?
NTL is currently in talks to merge with Virgin Mobile in a deal that would create a potential rival to the now broadband-enabled BSkyB.
Virgin Mobile’s official word?
The Board of Virgin Mobile Holdings plc confirms that it has received an approach from NTL Incorporated that may or may not lead to a formal offer being made for the Company.
Shares of Virgin Mobile immediately climbed to a record high after NTL/Telewest announced its £835m ($1.44 billion) takeover bid.
If the bid is successful, it will create the first media group to serve up mobile and fixed-line telephony, broadband Internet access and pay-TV.
(Ed: It has a similar resonance as the deal between 3 Italia and Canale 7)
We’ve found that getting straight numbers of subscribers for each separate business is difficult. The figures that the Guardian are quoting for the merged Virgin/NTL/Telewest uber-company are impressive too, accounting for 10m customers, 3.3m television customers, over 5m mobile phone users, 2.5m broadband Internet customers and 4.4m fixed-line telephone accounts.
NTL/Telewest do have to do something pretty radical as they feel the pressure from other previously unrelated business getting in on their main business areas.
The new company will go under the Virgin brand, and would become the biggest Virgin-branded business in the world, outstripping the music retail business which launched Branson’s career and the Virgin Atlantic airline business.
In a fiercely competitive market, cable companies on both sides of the Atlantic are looking to outflank their satellite and phone company rivals by adding mobile phone services to their portfolio of voice, Internet and TV services.
NTL is the UK’s number two pay-TV operator after BSkyB’s Sky and is also the second-largest residential telephony provider after BT Group.
Long seen as a juicy takeover candidate, Virgin Mobile is the fifth-largest UK mobile phone carrier. The company operates on rented capacity on T-Mobile’s UK network.
Virgin Mobile current 4 million users (source Virgin Mobile) in the UK, puts them at less than a third of the UK market leader, o2’s, who have 15 million users.
NTL and Telewest have notched up around 5 million subscribers combined, next to BSkyB’s 7.8 million digital television viewers.
If the deal goes through, it won’t be the first time the two companies have worked together – in 1996 they launched the Internet service provider Virgin Net, which had an original owner ship of NTL with 49% and Virgin, 51%. The enterprise was fully taken over by NTL in 2000 but still trades under the powerful Virgin brand name.
Virgin Mobile
NTL
5 December, 2005
Eutelsat IPO At 14:30 In ParisToday
Today will see the share IPO of Eutelsat, the third largest satellite operator.
Shares are due to start trading in Paris at 14:30 at €12, following its cancelled flotation last month. A total of €860m should be raised.
Some are wondering if, in the year that marks the 60th Anniversary of Arthur C Clarke’s famous Wireless World treatise on ‘Extra Terrestrial Relays’, a shadow may have fallen on Satellite’s hegemony of trans-global communications.
Only yesterday, the great and the good of the satellite business gave their views on the future of the industry at the Arthur C. Clarke event at the IEE in London.There was much talk of uncertainty in the industry, with many small Niche audience’s becoming the expected targets of the future.
Eutelsat is positioned behind Intelsat and SES, the giants of global satellite business. It has 23 satellites of its own, transmiting around 1,700 television channels. It has its main markets in the super-served regions of Europe and the Middle East.
Eutelsat
2 December, 2005
Pure DMX-50 Review: Winner DAB Microsystem (9/10)
Despite our catastrophic experiences with the Onkyo DAB CD unit, we’d developed a taste for DAB radio/CD combos so were right on Pure Digital’s case when they announced their new DAB/FM/CD/MP3 micro system, the DMX-50.
Perhaps better known for their distinctive portable sets, Pure are a world-leading, UK-based DAB radio retailer, with a reputation for innovation.
Rolled out just in time for Christmas, the £230 ($395, €336) DMX-50 is an attractive 40W RMS micro-sized system, cunningly disguised to look like three hi-fi separates.
Finished in a pleasant grey metallic finish, the unit is dominated by a large, five-line LCD screen which provides DAB/FM radio station information, scrolling DAB digital text, CD/MP3 track listings and access to a variety of user-selectable options.
Context-sensitive buttons either side of the display provide a simple user interface offering fast access to relevant features – it’s one of the best interfaces we’ve seen.
Setting up the DMX-50 was an absolute breeze – no sooner had we got the thing plugged in than it was busying itself automatically locating and storing over 50 DAB stations within range. Nice.
Locating FM stations was equally swift and painless, with the large, intuitive interface making it a breeze to find, sort and order presets – kudos to Pure for simplifying a process that can sometimes turn grown men into fist-shaking balls of frustration.
Playing CDs was straightforward enough too, although the CD tray was a little too flimsy for our liking.
We especially liked the fact that it displayed both CD and MP3 track and artist information onscreen, making it easy to find tracks.
A unique feature to Pure is the ReVu function, which lets you pause and ‘rewind’ live DAB digital radio, courtesy of a constantly updating 20 minute buffer.
This means that it’s possible to rewind back to the start of a show you may have missed the beginning of, or pause the radio to take a phone call.
DAB digital transmissions can be recorded (or played back) on the built in SD card slot, and a USB port lets you play back and transfer recorded files to your PC.
The USB connection can also be used to download software upgrades for the DMX-50.
Further connections come in the form of a pair of spring loaded speaker clips, two aux inputs (for plugging in an MP3 player, for example), an optical out and a Line/Sub Out for hooking the unit up to an external amplifier or connecting a sub-woofer.
The package is rounded off by two stylish Rosewood speakers with 5¼” woofers, and 19mm Mylar-dome tweeters, a simple remote control and aerial.
CONCLUSION
Quick to set up and a pleasure to use, Pure’s straightforward interface, massive LCD and impressive feature set make this a great player for music fans who don’t fancy wading through hefty manuals before they can start listening to tunes.
At this price level we weren’t looking for high-end hi-fi quality, but the DMX-50 gave a good account for itself and was a pleasure to listen to.
The bass output perhaps wouldn’t excite dub aficionados, but when cranked up, the sound was beefy enough to encourage a bit of air guitar work around the office.
Throw in CD/MP3 text, a SD slot and the unique ReVu feature and you’ve got the best all-round DAB/CD player we’ve come across so far.
Rating: Highly recommended 9/10
SPECIFICATIONS:
Amplifier: 40W RMS per channel power output (into 8 Ohms @10% THD+N, A-weighted). 10 Hz to 40 kHz (-3dB) frequency response. Bass and treble tone control.
CD player: CD-R and CD-RW playback compatible. Support for CD Text and 20 track audio CD playlist. Multiple playback modes (repeat, shuffle, etc.). MP3 playback, including support for ID3 tags and M3U playlists.
DAB: PURE ReVu™ enables pause and rewind of live DAB digital radio. Full Band III (174 – 240 MHz) reception. Fully compliant with ETS 300 401 and capable of decoding all DAB transmission modes 1-4. Fast autotune feature. 99 presets.
FM: Supports RDS and RadioText. Tune by RDS station name. 87.5-108 MHz frequency range. 99 presets.
SD card: SD card slot for recording DAB radio to SD card.
Speakers: 8 Ohms (nominal) impedance. 40W RMS power handling. Polypropolene mid-bass drivers. Two-way rear ported enclosure. Custom-tuned 2nd order crossovers.
Connectors & Cables: 3.5 mm headphone output on front panel. RF F-connector 75 Ohms for combined DAB/FM aerial connection. Two separate dual phono line-level audio inputs for auxiliary device connection. Dual phono for stereo analogue line-level output. Optical Toslink connector for digital S/PDIF output (IEC958 @ 48 kHz). USB connector for future software upgrades and SD card access. Stereo spring-clip terminals for speakers. Integral mains cable with Euro/UK adapter. Bootlace DAB/FM aerial and two 3m speaker cables supplied.
General: Fully featured remote control (batteries included). Compliant with the EMC and Low Voltage Directives (89/336/EEC and 73/23/EEC). Dimensions (mm): main unit 166 (w) x 240 (h) x 252 (d); speaker 150 (w) x 240 (h) x 255 (d). Two year warranty
PURE DMX-50
1 December, 2005
Satellite Business Joins The Niche Club
The Legacy of Arthur C. Clarke, Review: IEE Lecture
Yesterday evening saw a celebration of The Legacy of Arthur C Clarke at the IEE in London.
Rightly so. His fame not only stretched across the globe, it spanned fathering the communication satellite, to great fiction. Who can forget the seminal Sci-Fi classic 2001- A Space Odyssey?
During the addresses given by the assembled industry heavyweights, pontification was rife as they pronounced on the effect of satellite technology advances and where the industry stood in the communication world today.
To boil it down – satellites would be an important part of the communications mix, but it was unlikely to be as dominant as it was once thought.
Getting stuck right in was Olof Lumberg, formerly Chairman of Inmarsat, remarking on how the cabling of the planet was making some uses of Satellite technology passé.
Seeing quite how far Skype is disrupting businesses was interesting as key figures from the satellite industry noted that customer expectations brought about by Skype and similar VoIP technology had meant that the business model that ‘costs in’ the launching of huge satellites was becoming increasingly redundant.
Professor Barry Evans of the University of Surrey considered the 1980’s and 90’s were probably the golden age for communication satellites and predicted their future as an infill technology. Working alongside terrestrial delivery systems, with the possibility of satellite providing TV connectivity to mobile devices outside the fibred home.
Marcus Bicknell, Commercial Director of SES Global the satellite giant spoke about the importance of niche markets and revealed a new low cost satellite mobile phone designed to help parents locate their children.
Some were more optimistic. Sir Martin Sweeting, who heads Surrey Space Technology, a world leader in small satellite development, saw a future with far less expensive launches. This could lead to the creation of ’clouds of small deployable satellites,’ configurable to provide focused communication at times of disasters.
Happily it wasn’t all business predictions. Arthur C Clarke’s brother Frederick spoke charmingly about his brothers’ early enthusiasm in looking at the skies.
The crowning glory of the night was a recorded message from Arthur C Clarke himself, from his home in Sri Lanka. Projected onto a large screen at the grand, historic setting of Savoy Place, home of the IEE, Clarke’s lucid speech belied his eighty-eighth birthday, only a few day away.
Reassuring to hear that his commitment to technology remains.
IEE – Institution of Electrical Engineers
1 December, 2005
SPH-V6800 Wi-Fi Multimedia Handset Announced By Samsung
With a passion for creating new phones that is beginning to border on pathological, Samsung’s overworked designers have just revealed yet another new hi-tech handset, the SPH-V6800.
Revealed to the world by an obligingly smiling model, the SPH-V6800 looks to be a very tasty number indeed, offering a ton of multimedia functionality, a pocketable form factor and built in Wi-Fi.
Sporting a familiar sliding keyboard design, the black and silver handset is dominated by a bright 320×240 pixel QVGA TFT display, packed into a two inch display.
There’s also a 1.3MP digital camera onboard with MPEG-4 video recording and MP3/AAC audio playback.
There’s also voice recognition built in, video-on-demand, TV-output, EV-DO, and the bit we really like, the built-in Wi-Fi wireless (802.11b, 11Mbps) LAN.
We used a Wi-Fi card with our chunky i-Mate JAM phone extensively on our travels to New York, and loved being able to send off email and surf the web on the move.
With the Samsung packing in wireless connectivity into its tiny 96.8 x 47 x 24.5mm dimensions, we could well be seduced by SPH-V6800 (if it ever makes it to these shores, of course).
The SPH-V6800 will be made available to Korean subscribers for around $477 (~£275 ~€402) and ambitious readers can try and make sense of the press release page in Korean here (we gamely ran it through babelfish, but the results sounded like an acid casualty reading a tech manual).
Samsung
29 November, 2005
3 Italia Buys TV Broadcaster: Now First Euro Hybrid Mobile TV Co
In a sure sign that TV to the mobile is the new European media battleground, 3G mobile operator 3 Italia have announced its plans to purchase the Italian national broadcaster, Canale 7. Reports have put the price of the acquisition at between €30-35m.
The addition of Canale 7, Italy’s fourth largest broadcaster, gives the company access to the country’s existing home TV business. Canale 7 currently broadcasts in analogue to around 40% of Italy, predominantly its north. More interestingly, it also has a terrestrial digital TV nationwide network operator’s license. This should provide coverage for over 70% of the country.
It is expected that 3 Italia will work to develop a Pay-TV and interactive services proposition for handhelds. We also understand their intention would be for Canale 7’s nationwide digital project to be integrated with 3 Italia’s UMTS mobile network to create a DVB-H network.
The company intends to offer a DVB-H mobile TV service from the second half of 2006. Indications are that there will be a minimum of 20 channels, although no line up has yet been decided. 3 Italia already carries Playboy adult entertainment and football via existing technology, and has worked with Mediaset and News Corp’s Sky Italia pay-TV operator.
Italy is already one of Europe’s leaders in mobile consumption and is considered to be a prime market for such services. Reports we’ve seen rather puzzlingly mention a “standard of video quality comparable to DVD” perhaps somewhat unlikely on the small screens that will be deployed for this sector – but we’re sure the picture will be absolutely bella.
3 Italia, which is owned by Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa, has so far invested €9bn in its 3G network since obtaining a license from the Italian government in 2000. It currently has around 4.8 million Italian subscribers. Hutchison Whampoa also own 3G licenses in other countries including the UK.
3 Italia
Canale 7
29 November, 2005
Teenagers Don’t Like Retro
All too often articles about the things teenagers are interested in are written by people old enough to be their parents and teenagers thinking isn’t represented. Lawrence Dudley gives you a point of view that you won’t find in other publications. You see Lawrence _is_ a teenager.
A Whole New Meaning To Retro
As a teenager, retro is your dad when he insists on playing his absolutely appalling Cher records. Not that my dad listens to Cher, of course, unless he only does that in secret, which I wouldn’t blame him for. Anyway, so retro is anything but cool as a teenager. In fact, most people my age that I know are very technology-conscious, and new phones, games etc. are common playground talk. What isn’t talked about is all that old stuff that dad’s seem to always talk about. You can imagine then that I almost choked when I read about people in China hacking old Motorola DynaTAC 8000x phones to feature colour screens and GSM-compatibility.
The 8000x was one of the first mobile phones around, and had quite an impressive feature set: A whole 30 minutes of talk time and 8 hours of standby along with a price tag of $4,000. They’re also the size of a house brick. Why on earth then are the chinese fitting these antiquities with colour screens? Well… The original Engadget entry for the story had a link to the original article, sadly for us, it was in Chinese. Using the Babelfish translation engine, I gleaned a vital piece of information from the nonsense-filled, automatically translated page. The following quote surely explains everything: “However, everybody could not forget it the standard use: Defends self the person!”.
Ah ha! So that’s it: These “mobile phones” are actually weapons. Guess that means the end of taking my phone on the plane then! Still… The smiling Chinese man talking on his glorified, colour LCD display-equipped brick does look so innocent!
While this article is not intended to be taken entirely seriously, it does highlight the weirdness of some of the stuff people do and how stuff like that spreads as a result of the Internet.
While I accept that some strange people might want their phone to look like a car battery with buttons, I can only hope that no-one attempts to resurrect Cher, because let’s face it: There’s no reason to.
Ed: We’ve got a few of the old Motorola Bricks around the Digital-Lifestyles office, that we picked up at DefCon seven years ago. We’d love to them converted for current use. But then again, we some of us remember them the first time around.
28 November, 2005
A Wi-Fi’d Welshman In New York
For techie-obsessives like the Digital Lifestyles crew, keeping connected when we’re away from home is right up there with finding a roof over our heads, so when we went off to New York, we made sure we packed our Sony laptop and Wi-Fi enabled smartphone – even on holiday.
We weren’t to be disappointed.
Unlike the UK, where the provision of Wi-Fi is often only seen as a revenue earner for landlords, café owners and telecoms companies, we had no problem hooking up for free all over New York.
Maybe it’s the fact that the apartments are so small in New York – or that the coffee keeps on getting refilled for free – but we were surprised by the popularity of cafes and bars serving up free Wi-Fi to their customers.
Wherever we went, a quick boot up of our laptop (or i-Mate JAMM smartphone/SanDisk wi-fi card) would inevitably produce a mile long list of networks available.
We successfully logged in for free all over New York – in the East Village, Williamsburg, Lower East Side, Central Park, SoHo, you name it! – and were able to fire off emails and download tunes for nowt while enjoying coffee and bagels in several fine hostelries.
One rather unfortunate side-effect of all this free connectivity was that once-bustling cafes turned into conversation-free libraries, with rows of transfixed surfers staring intently into their screens, with the silence only broken by intermittent bursts of keyboard activity.
The only prospect of striking up a conversation seemed to be when you’re ordering your cream cheese on everything bagel or if someone asked for help logging on.
Clearly, Apple’s promotional machine is doing its stuff in NYC – wherever we went we’d see a cluster of glowing Apple logos emanating from every dark corner, with only a few lonely Dells, Sony’s and IBM’s for company.
In the café demographic, there’s no denying that Apple rule!
In our Williamsburg ~~squat~~ apartment, we managed to find several open networks, and usually had no problem getting connected – even if it did mean sometimes holding the laptop at eye level in the far corner of the room.
One thing to remember when logging in to free Wi-Fi networks is to always have a good firewall and up-to-date virus protection installed – and do it discretely because in the US (like the UK), connecting to open networks can can get you into trouble.
On the street, one handset seemed to be stuck in almost every New Yorker’s hand: the Palm Treo 750. They love the phone!
We found ourselves looking enviously at Noo Yoikers barking into the Treo’s speakerphone or knocking out emails on its natty keyboard – if only Palm had delivered on their promise of a Wi-Fi card (or if we enjoyed the same kind of cheapo cellular data rates as the US) we’d have gladly joined the Treo Club.
Still, our i-Mate JAMM worked well enough, although the limitations of its ‘soft’ keyboard soon started to cut short planned long email messages home, although we managed to keep our New York blog updated using the freeware Blogs In Hand software.
We had no problem finding a mobile signal (via T-Mobile) throughout the city, although we’re fearing the arrival of our next bill.
Finally SMS is starting to make an impact in the US, long-standing network interoperability problems has resulted in texting being nowhere near as popular as in the UK – our messages to New York chums were the first texts they’d ever received!
After gorging ourselves on free Wi-Fi for two weeks (and bagels too, come to think about it), it has to be said New York kicks London’s ass when it comes to Wi-Fi connectivity, but it’s not all good news: have you seen the price of the beer out there? And the diddy mini-‘pint’ glasses they serve them in? Outrageous!
24 November, 2005
Mobile Phone Sales Worldwide Soar 22% In Q3
Market analyst Gartner reports that mobile phone sales have soared 22 percent compared to the same period last year.
In the third quarter, manufacturers shifted a mighty 205.4 million mobile phones, with Gartner predicting that mobile phone sales could total 810 million units this year.
The report observed that consumers are still slow to warm to 3G, but growth is expected in the fourth quarter.
Finnish mobile giants Nokia increased their market share during the third quarter to 32.6 percent, up from 31 percent a year earlier.
Motorola’s hip’n’happening RAZR phone helped increase their market share to 18.7 percent, letting the company leapfrog their rivals Samsung Electronics into second place.
Now sat glumly in third place with 12.5 percent of the market, Samsung’s fading performance was put down to the company failing to address emerging markets as effectively as their rivals – in particular Motorola, who introduced a winning range of basic, very-low-cost phones.
In the US, new customers were thin on the ground but there were mobile phone sales aplenty (36.3 million units) with customers switching operators (“churn”) to get a better deal.
In the Latin American segment, sales were up 46 per cent compared to last year, totalling 26.1 million phones units, while in Western Europe, big sales of 40 million phones were driven by customers upgrading their handsets.
Gartner’s report curiously lumped Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa sales together, arriving at a total of 39.7 million, up 40 percent compared to a year earlier.
The main movers in this area were Nigeria, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Turkey and Ukraine.
Across Asia, sales zipped up to 52.2 million units, up 27 percent compared to the last year’s quarter with China and India contributing strongly to the growth.
Meanwhile, figures were far less rosy in the Japanese market, registering a minuscule growth of 0.6 percent, to 11.3 million phones.
The Gartner report predicts full-year sales of up to 810 million phones, which may even reach 820 million if suppliers and distributors are able to fully meet consumer demand.
Gartner
23 November, 2005