And it doesn’t matter.

The iPhone is great, and part of the reason it’s great is that developers write for the device, not a compromise specification. You need to temper what he says with his US perspective too. As audience member John Strand, one of the said in the truncated questions session, it’s a bit rich for the US to lecture Europe on mobile phones using the iPhone as an example when it’s installed base doesn’t even show on any charts. A Nokia executive said that what Apple sells in a year, Nokia sells in a week.

 It could be worse, he could have been in the room when Dick Lynch, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of  Verizon Communications said how pleased he was to be in Barcelona, as it was his first time at the show. The First Time? This is the major trade show in the industry, and alright it’s a GSM show and he has a CDMA network, but how fortress mentality is that? As CTO he’s never been to the place where all the cool technology is launched. I’ll bet the CTOs from the smallest networks have been to the show every year for the last decade.  I’ve been to some CTIAs and it’s a village fete compared with MWC/3GSM. He then went on to talk about a 3G future and show charts of what people might use it for: things like video calling. Hello? 2002 just called, they want their PowerPoint slide back.

So it’s against this background of ignorance that the heads of AT&T and Verizon talked about the future, open standards and cooperation. 

The mobile phone industry is constantly striving for new standards. We’ve been very successful. GSM and now WCDMA mean with interconnect mean that your phone will work pretty much anywhere. This of course is great, but you can have too much of a good thing.

One of the major moves is to make applications easy to roll out across a wide number of platforms. This is such a good idea that we’ve two overlapping (not competing, oh no, not at all) standards. OneAPI and BONDI.

The idea is that software developers have a uniform way to develop for a number of different handsets. It’s not a bad idea. It’s quite a good one. Unfortunately it breeds idleness. Programs, and I’m thinking particularly of games, are not optimised for a particular handset. Some handsets have graphics accelerators. Does anyone ever write specific code for the difference accelerators in different handsets? Of course not – you can’t that kind of thing is all hidden away so far from developers they can’t touch.

This bubblewrap attitude to code is a java way of thinking. Write once, run anywhere means run badly everywhere. Lots of phones have specific games keys above the screen. It’s incredibly rare to find any application that uses them. Even the applications that come bundled on the phone.

Any yet iPhone applications are great, not because it’s open ; you can’t even control the camera from within an application or run an application in background, nor because it’s a free market; Apple is quite draconian about what it allows on the apps store, but because it’s a great device, with a great SDK and people write to the device.

What’s needed is what we had with computers of the 1980s. Yes, you had APIs but you also had access to the metal. Programmers could find every speed wrinkle and do clever things. An API for GPS will give a position, but it’s unlikely to allow access to the polling rate. If you are using it for navigation the 1Hz rate is fine, but if you want to do car performance testing you need 5hz or 10Hz. APIs don’t let you change that. If you want real performance from an application you need full access. Standards hold you back from that.

Cat Keynes publishes her thoughts on the mobile phone industry every Sunday at www.catkeynes.com you can read the column  the previous Friday by subscribing here . Follow me on Twitter here.

Comment on this here.

Every time you come across an interesting new technology the vendor says “it only costs a few cents, one day all phones will have it”. That’s true of fingerprint readers, push to talk, noise cancelling second microphones, GPS and accelerometers. The truth is that phones are becoming more diverse and the number of features which roll across all of them are becoming fewer and fewer. Even front-facing video cameras which were seen as mandatory on 3G phones are now less common.

One technology, which if not ubiquitous, that does seem to be becoming more common is motion sensing. Let’s get the Wii word out of the way early: It’s made motion cool. But phones have been a bit more prosaic.  It’s typically been used to distinguish between landscape and portrait views of a screen.

The Samsung SCH-310 lets you write a number in the air but how about using the motion sensor to see if the phone has had a sudden impact? Is the user an old person who might have fallen over or down the stairs? How about using it to affect the polling rate – if a phone hasn’t moved does it need to poll the cell to say it’s still in the same place?  Think of the power saving if a phone that’s left on the bedside table over night only polled a quarter as often. It would make a massive difference to standby time.

The accelerometer system measures the g-force on the phone. If you hold a phone steady it will always read 1g pointing straight down. So if you tilt the phone you can measure that. They typically use three cantilever beams as MEMS, and are very simple to work with. It’s also possible to detect an impact on the screen to look for a double click. The software to read the accelerometer needs the programmer to write a low-pass filter to eliminate the effects of gravity.

The typical cost of the three axis accelerometer hardware is $1.61. But there is a way of doing it for free.  A lot of phones in Japan use the camera for motion sensing. This technology is usually supplied by a company called GestureTek and the games for it include boxing and darts where the player puts the phone on the table and waves their hands in front of the camera. Games like fishing and bowling use a swing of the phone while the camera reads the world flying by. Sony Ericsson has built this into the F305.  GestureTek can do optical motion with Brew, Symbian S60 and Windows Mobile as well as JSR 256 and NTT DoCoMo DoJa. This includes gestures for shake, rock and roll.

You don’t need a great camera, indeed it’s best of the resolution can be reduced and the frame rate increased. It works best with the camera at lowest resolution of  160 x 120 and needs 7.5fps, 15fps is ideal. The software doesn’t use colour it  only looks at the image luminance.

Using the camera has a certain elegance. You can build motions into gestures and provide a toll that can record gestures like a bowling swing. Record several user string each defined gestures. The camera can be used to measure distance – which an accelerometer cannot –  but it’s relative, not suitable for dead reckoning. The power consumption of the of the camera is similar to the screen but running the camera at a lower resolution makes a significant difference. Unfortunately this is not possible with all hardware.

But unlike many of the things set to become “standard” in phones which never will, a camera pretty much has, so perhaps motion sensing will too. Perhaps it has been elevated from fashion to style.

Cat Keynes publishes her thoughts on the mobile phone industry every Sunday at www.catkeynes.com you can read the column  the previous Friday by subscribing here and you can comment on this here. Follow me on Twitter here.

For the American readers I’d better explain: Sky is the major satellite TV broadcaster in the UK, it’s major rival is the cable company Virgin Media since Sky absorbed British Satellite Broadcasting in 1990. Officially it was a 50:50 merger but the two companies used different technologies and they went with the Sky one. The Sky offices and pretty much everything else. More Absorbaloth from Dr. Who than Station from Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.

The next big thing Sky swallowed was Amstrad.  If you are British and about fifty, Amstrad made crummy HiFi in chrome fronted boxes. If you are five years younger they made home computers and small business computers, killing the typewriter. And five years younger than that makes you think of Amstrad as the set-top box you got if you bought Sky’s service and didn’t get one from Pace or Thompson.

When Sky bought Amstrad it was like Vodafone buying Sony Ericsson. (I had to get to the mobile phone bit eventually). You have to wonder why they did it, particularly as they paid a premium and Sky never overpays for anything.

My theory is that  it was that to ward off Pace. Since Thompson had stopped making set-top boxes, Sky only had two suppliers, and if Pace bought Amstrad they would have been able to dictate price.

We could see the networks have a similar problem in mass market handsets. Up at the high end where there is Nokia, HTC, RIM, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG, Apple and others there is no problem, but down at the low end there is Nokia and a bunch of Chinese vendors, most of whom the big networks wouldn’t go near. The pricing of the cheap handsets is such that most people have given up. Networks often expect manufacturers to make a loss on the chap handsets and make it up on the expensive ones. They have killed their own supplier base.

There is a triangle of desires in mobile phone design as powerful as any love triangle. The design of a phone is forged between what the networks ask the manufacturer for, what the individual handset manufacturer wants to add to make their phones special and what that manufacturers rivals have done which needs to be copied to keep up.

When two align – say the manufacturer and network both want to add DivX – it makes it easier for that box to get ticked on the development budget. Sometimes regional variations come into play. GPS is mandatory on 3G phones in the US as they have to conform to E911 legislation. This says you have to ask a mugger to hold on for a couple of minutes while you get a satellite  fix, before they can hit you. In Egypt it’s illegal to sell a phone with GPS

So finding something which makes everyone happy is hard. Very hard. Well, actually it’s impossible if you want to be innovative.

The networks have an undue effect so things that they want, thinking you’ll spend money on them, like video calling and MMS jump to the top of requirements, while those that people want but which reduce network revenue fall off the bottom.

Chief among these is dual-SIM. The only reason customers want dual-SIM is so they can spend less. You can imagine just how much operators like that. So the manufacturers which rely on operators don’t make them. Well, except Samsung because they make everything.

This has left the way clear for the companies like Tattu and Hyundai to introduce dual-SIM. There is clearly consumer demand. Just type “Dual-SIM” into Ebay and you enter a wondrous world of devices you would never have imagined.

Ironically the networks killing of the big players in the mass market has left the space open for the small innovative ones. We’ll see more small innovative companies, albeit using factories in China but few of these will be big enough to get through all the horribly expensive approvals processes of the operators.

So when the operators turn into carriers – just bitpipes – they will blame the situation on lack of innovation in the low end, when it’s a situation they’ve fostered.

Cat Keynes publishes her thoughts on the mobile phone industry every Sunday at www.catkeynes.com you can read the column  the previous Friday by subscribing here and you can comment on this here. Follow me on Twitter here.

The big news of the week is. The Simpsons in high def. It’s a chance to see all your favourite cartoon characters  looking brighter an clearer. A bit like being in Barcelona really.
So if the major phone players were Simpsons characters who would they be?  Nokia has to be Mr. Burns. Super-rich and everyone hates him for it. I rather like Mr. Burns for the way he answers the phone: “Ahoy-hoy”. When the phone was invented the customary way to greet someone was to say “how-de-do”. With the phone came the need to have a shorter greeting and “Hello” was pressed into service. Alexander Graham Bell, the fixed line equivalent of Marty Cooper, was a proponent of Ahoy-hoy. It seems that Mr. Burns, as old as the river Nokia is named after never learnt the Hello convention.

Samsung and LG? The clue to their characters is that they always sit side by side. They are Patti and Selma as no-one can tell them apart.
Motorola? Oh dear, Motorola. A company which still thinks it’s important but everyone ignores. It’s got to be Clancy Wiggum. Puffed up with self-importance but a bit bumbling. You’ve got to feel a little sorry for him.

Then it starts to get a bit more interesting. Where does Sony Ericsson fit in. It’s a question that the company never seems to know itself and a diametric opposite to the Officer Motorola. Sony Ericsson is bright and promising but scared to play with the big boys: the Millhouse of the mobile phone world. One day Millhouse will grow up and realise that he doesn’t need to apologise for being at the party.

That’s 85% of the phone market catered for. In an analogy like this it’s easy to forget that other players are just bit-parts. Nowhere is that more evident than when thinking about Apple and HTC whose market shares are pretty insignificant. That might make HTC Side-show Bob. But Apple? There is a special cool about Apple and that’s reflected by only one character in The Simpsons, the bus driver Otto: so laid back it’s not true. Also in that zone between major player and the bit on the pie chart that says “others” is RIM. Held back from being extrovert by their Canadian roots- it might be racist to say it but the Canadians are the nicest people on the planet – there is something Waylon Smithers about the reliability, loyalty, dullness and dependability of a Blackberry.

This is an easy game to play. You can do “what if car manufacturers were..” for lots of things. How about cars. Nokia is BMW, Sony Ericsson Alfa Romeo, Motorola GM, Samsung Audi, LG Seat, Apple and Apple Aston Martin. If anyone is interested I’ll explain my working.
What other analogies can you come up with.

Cat Keynes publishes her thoughts on the mobile phone industry every Sunday at www.catkeynes.com you can read the column  the previous Friday by subscribing here and you can comment on this here.

There is nothing sexier than a boy who can cook. An impressive dinner often leads to breakfast. There is one boy I know who is an excellent chef, but his business is feast or famine and I can always tell what how well he is doing by what I get to eat and drink. If he’s doing well it’s great steaks and medium wines, but last week it was curry and Châteauneuf-du-Pape 2001.

I knew he was in trouble.

The more broke he gets, the more he digs into his fine wine collection. He can’t afford to buy the ordinary stuff so what’s been laid down comes out of the cellar.

Selling the family silver might have helped people through the rough times in the last century, but in these difficult economic times it’s going to be invisible assets which get sold. IP – as in intellectual property rather than Internet Protocol –  will be the next thing to go. Look at all the companies which are currently down-sizing. Many of them have already shrunk to a fraction of the size they were a couple of years ago. Traditional assets like stock and factories have little value in a world of overproduction. Why buy a factory when the chances are it will cost a fortune to keep running and lay off a proportion of the workforce? BenQ has been there with Siemens.

Buying IP, particularly that you already licence, is an asset worth having and brings a cost saving. In particular the clique of core mobile phone companies which see royalties from almost every handset manufacturer. They also exchange IP so pay less themselves. A useful saving on the bill of materials when working to tight margins, and because the royalty is paid on the cost of the finished handset, quite a chunk of money on the more expensive ones. The members of this club include Nokia, Qualcomm, Motorola and Ericsson (which provides an umbrella for Sony Ericsson with the IP). Two of these companies don’t need to sell IP. Indeed Qualcomm sees itself as an IP company and litigation is offense not defense: a profit center. Nokia might be pulling in it’s horns but is a long way from a fire sale. The other two? Well Ericsson has just announced 8,000 redundancies but its still profitable. It’s not buying any more wine to lay down but can still nip out for a drinkable Rioja.

Motorola, however, is so far into the cellar it’s eyeing the champagnes and vintage ports.

That IP bottle might be the “one they will never open”,  but these are extraordinary times. Motorola has always had – still has – the best RF engineering. It’s so good they take it for granted. And the patent portfolio reflects this skill. The time may have come when the IP is worth more than the company. It certainly makes lots of money $319m last year according to the last accounts. If someone made a large public offer for that IP it  would be hard to turn down. Not just because it would provide a respite from the constant redundancy waves, but because if the shareholders saw a potential for enough income to balance the books in 2009 they would see it as a way to claw back some of the money they have lost since the shares tumbled from over $26 a share to under $4. They wouldn’t say that of course. They’d claim it was a way to put the company on an even keel and a start to reclaim former glory. The Wall Street parasites are lying, as soon as the money appeared and there was a blip in the share price they would dump their holdings, leaving Motorola without the one great source of revenue it has. That would be like drinking the Margaux and pissing off, but VCs probably do that too.

So who would be in line to buy the IP. If it was worth say $2bn? The obvious “who would buy” answer is always Nokia, but they are already part of the IP club so it’s worth less to them. Microsoft might be an interesting candidate. They sniffed very hard at buying Motorola, didn’t like the smell and walked away. That would be A Bad Thing. One of the great enlightenments of GSM IP royalties has been how the cost of IP has been reduced over the years. It’s one of the reasons GSM has been so successful and has been an issue between the traditional manufacturers and Qualcomm over 3G IP. Microsoft is unlikely to understand the benefits for the world and keep royalties high.

The most likely candidate is one of the Chinese companies.  A couple of weeks ago I looked at how the awarding of multiple 3G standards hurts China’s export capability. This would have the opposite effect. Many of the small Chinese manufacturers don’t pay for the IP. They can get away with this if they don’t export the phones and not even Motorola and Qualcomm whose nationalistic pride would normally have them reaching for the lawyers believe they could sue a Chinese company in a Chinese court and win. The big names, the ones you’ve heard of, like ZTE and Huawei, do pay for the IP. If they joined the club it would be possible for them to lean on their compatriots and defeating local competition is always very attractive.

Of course if Huawei was to buy Motorola’s IP it would just hasten the decline, and like James, my friend the chef, they will go to the cellar and find it’s bare. I’ll still pop round to James for a curry, because the food and company are great but I’ll have to start taking my own Fleurie

Cat Keynes publishes her thoughts on the mobile phone industry every Sunday at www.catkeynes.com you can read the column  the previous Friday by subscribing here.

8/2/09

This is my guide to visiting Barcelona. It’s a great city. Except when Mobile World Congress rolls into town. Then you can’t get an hotel room, the bars are full and Taxis as scarce as an MMS from an iPhone user.

So here is my guide to making it bearable.

If you want to get a sense of the place and don’t have much time do it from the air. The  Barcelona Helicopter  city tours are a great way to see the whole place in one go in half an hour. Why not take a customer for a bonding experience.

For surprisingly good Tapas the cafe attached to   El Cafe  is here and great, they have apartments too which would be a great way to have a retreat during the show. The cafe is a bit small so I hesitate to recommend it now that this site has so many visitors, but if you do get in try the scrumptious ham.

A great English- speaking bar, out of the way is Dusk Bar, you might find me hanging out there.

Of course the Americans love the show having moved to Spain because they all learnt Spanish at school while the Brits all learnt French so preferred Cannes.

One of the companies I had hoped to catch up with at the show isn’t there, but their technology is cool so I want to share it with you. Coresonic makes what would have been called software defined radio except it’s kind of in hardware, albeit flexible hardware, and SDR has such a bad name everyone who knows runs a mile. I’ll try to catch up with Rick Clucas,  the boss of Coresonic, I knew Rick when he was the CTO of ARC the configurable chip company that made its name by putting a RISC processor in Nintendo games cartridges. Techies say what Coresonic have done is impossible until they look at it. It’s what would be called Software Defined Radio, except it’s a special processor to do the software. This means it works (which other software defined radio does not - yet)  and can do multiple radio standards fast, low power and cheaply. But what really appeals to me is that the chip could be made to do CDMA2000, WCDMA and TD-SCDMA so one phone could be sold to all the Chinese 3G licensees. They see the strength as for LTE and WiMax but as lots of these columns have said technology doesn’t move as fast as we expect it. We’ve had 3G live for six years and 70% of users are still on GSM.

Other things to watch out for at the show are a rash of Android phones from companies which are not known for making phones, Acer, Asus and rumours of Dell. The strange Dutch car manufacturer Spyker is expected to have a phone too.

And for the UK readers I’d like to point you at the Bus Slogan Generator. This will let you generate your own ads in the style of the Atheist Bus Campaign. This aimed to raise £5500 to promote atheist thinking as a balance to religious advertising. It has nothing to do with mobile phones but I thought it cool so posted it on Twitter. Follow me on twitter for more of this kind of stuff.

But whatever you do in Barcelona, keep your valuables close. Those kids on motorbikes are cruising to snatch handbags and laptop cases. Don’t go out for your Rioja until you’ve safely locked your bag away.

I’d love more tips on making the most of Barcelona. Please feel free to comment on my site. I won’t even mind if you use it for self-promotion of your products or services.

Cat Keynes publishes her thoughts on the mobile phone industry every Sunday at www.catkeynes.com you can read the column  the previous Friday by subscribing here.

Before he was famous the magician Derren Brown used to do close up magic tricks at parties and corporate events. I met him a couple of times and he could read me like a book.  So I asked him not how to do the tricks, but what makes his tricks fail. He said the people he most worries about are not those watching closely, but those chatting in the corner of the room half watching. They don't get misdirected by the details.

That's the trick to knowing where mobile goes next . The “What will win, WiMax or LTE” battle won't be about technology. It will be about looking at what is going on in the right way. Standards wars used to last years. The great Betamax, V2000, VHS war left a lot of consumers with useless hardware and a bitter feeling.

But more recently it's become clear the raw technology isn't particularly important. It's about who supports it.

The fairly quick abdication of HD DVD in favour of Blu-Ray meant not too many people are stuck with the wrong format.. What powered the Blu-Ray victory was Sony having the movies and the PS3 getting into enough bedrooms.

We saw a similar victory in Ultra Wide Band (the successor to Bluetooth), this started as a battle between Motorola and Intel on a technology basis, but when Cambridge Silicon Radio which makes the majority of the Bluetooth chips in the world backed Intel it was Game Over for the Motorola flavour.

This trend from “The market decides”, which penalises the consumer who jumps the wrong way to “The industry decides” where a critical mass of companies in a semi-democratic way is ultimately better for everyone. GSM is perhaps the poster child for this where sharing IP to build a standard has worked to everyone's benefit.

Of course it can go wrong. Apple tried to licence the Apple OS and quickly recanted. IBM didn't think the PC would come to much and everything was out-sourced. Today Apple does really rather nicely from the personal computer market and IBM is no longer in that business. But from a consumer point of view the defacto standard of the PC (no-one set up an industry standards body to define home computers) did rather well for them and allowed an eco-system to grow and flourish.

So understanding the technical benefits for WiMax and LTE are valuable but they will not crucial to the outcome. Traditionally a mobile standard has been won by having Nokia and one other major player on board. Nokia can’t do it alone: HSCSD, Visual Radio and Nokia Picture messaging were all attempts by Nokia to go it alone that failed. The super-SMS standard EMS was tried by a number of manufacturers with Nokia and that failed too. Bluetooth was Nokia and Ericsson (well, perhaps the other way around). Nokia and one other makes for a success.

As Derren Brown would appreciate it’s not the hand of cards that matters, but as is so often the case in poker, who is holding the cards which dictates the winner.

25/1/09

Sunday lunch with my folks and the discussion turned to Obama. “How can he possibly hope to deliver everything that’s expected of him” opined my father. I’m hopeful that he can, because a lot of the economic woes are down to confidence and if he can capitalise on the confidence he inspires it becomes a virtuous circle.

Being me my mind wandered to mobile and the great hope for 2009: Android.

I like Google. I think that Google Page creator is fantastic, I use Adsense, Google Earth and friends connect. I don’t go for any longer than ten minutes at a time without using Google Desktop. It’s a company which has changed my life for the better. This isn’t knocking Google because everyone else things they are great. I think they are great too.

But like Obama, there are great things expected for Android in 2009, unlike Obama the most important thing isn’t confidence but compatibility. Shipping a phone is hard, building a platform harder and maintain a platform hardest. The challenge will come in 2009 when so many handset manufacturers, operators and developers are pulling the software in different directions. Google’s Rich Miner may have a view of software survival of the fittest but such Darwinian evolution takes time. A long time. It will need millions of mutations to work out which rival shopping application is the best.  Remember when the best search engine was Alta Vista, then Yahoo and now Google. Getting it right takes time and the interrelationships between applications on a mobile device are much tighter than those on a PC.

Against this Android is the king of cool. The new president of mobile OSes. The development community is abuzz with excitement and expects Android to be on every phone in an instant. Like monkeys at typewriters they are coding like there is no tomorrow. When the phones sell in merely reasonable numbers the applications in competition with too many others will ship in pathetic volumes and the developers who were looking to Android as their future income will turn against it.

Then phones will start to ship late. Actually it’s already happened. The second Android phone, the  Kogan Agora has  been delayed indefinitely.

All this is normal. The consultancy Gartner calls this the hype curve you get a cool new product, people expect too much of it, become excessively disappointed, and then with no expectations set, realise it’s really quite good and become productive. For Android 2008 was the technology trigger, we are now at the top of the Peak of Inflated Expectations and 2009 will be the slough of despond.

So it will take a couple of years to get going. That’s not so bad. Symbian and Windows mobile took three times that.

Unfortunately another factor comes into play. Google is doing all the work on Android for free. It cost Symbian and Microsoft an estimated billion dollars each to get to where they are today. Some people say a lot more. Even if Google can do it for a tenth of the price thanks to the leverage of the open source community it’s still a lot of money for something you give away.

Of course Google has famously deep pockets so what’s a hundred mill to them? In 2008 a lot of money, but in 2009 it’ll be very much more. Google is an advertising funded company, it’s seen growth at a multiple of the speed of the growth of the internet. The poster child of new media and as advertising executives like to play safe Google has been the place they want to use their money. With the economy boom Google growth was in overdrive.

This year is very different, there is some protection because Google is about classified advertising but it will be the first time Google sees falling revenues and significant bad debt. As advertisers go into recession mode the media planners will revert to the security blankets of TV and printed media. Yes, they really are that dim.

Google won’t know what’s happened. It will start to look for cuts. A nice-to-have mobile operating system that’s draining more money than expected and no real business plan will be high up on the list of cutbacks. While the software community screams that Android is what the world needs and the power of open source is the future, Google will be frowning at the bank statement.

Who would want to be on the list of companies reliant on Android? Well it’s a short list, there is only one name: Motorola . Although Bill’s article on The Reg doesn’t realise that Motorola has bet on the nose for Android, rather that the three way he thinks. P2K is dead too.

So if Google gets cold feet on Android, Motorola will have to take it on. You won’t see which way the other OHA members went if that happens.

While I’m optimistic for Obama I’ve doubts on Android, and I’d much rather it was that way around, my world might be mobile phones and Android would make it a better place, but to people in the real world, peace and prosperity is much more important.

China has just awarded 3G contracts. The numbers of subscribers there are huge, with ten times as many mobile subscribers as there are people in the UK, and twice as many as there are people in the US, but the decision to use three different technologies is puzzling. China Mobile gets TD-SCDMA, the uniquely Chinese standard, China Telecom gets Qualcomm’s almost as proprietary CDMA-2000 and China Unicom the WCDMA we all love and use.

Like betting on three horses in a race you know that you are going to have more losers than winners. As a quick run down it’s bad for Nokia which is great at cheap GSM phones and will see that market eroded. Nokia is good at WCDMA, but has it’s opportunity curtailed as they are weak on CDMA-2000 and TD-SCDMA is new and a level playing field for all entrants. Of course that’s what the Chinese government wants to help domestic manufacturers. The real handset winners however will be Samsung and LG who have the CDMA experience and have shown handsets. Nokia has said it will produce TD-SCDMA but hasn’t shown anything yet.

China Unicom will have the benefit of a very much broader choice of handsets and more price competition. It’s not just handsets it’s laptops with built in connectivity, USB dongles, netbooks, satnavs and whatever else has connectivity.

The biggest loser however will be China. We’ve seen from the last big experiment in multiple standards that competition doesn’t always lead to more choice and lower prices.  That experiment was the US, the place that leads in technology, internet and computer design yet trails in mobile phone technology. US phone websites constantly bemoan the lack of availability there of the cool phones we have in Europe.

It’s ironic comparing US legislation with China, but the way the US awarded contracts led to a mess of technologies: AMPS, TDMA, CDMA, GSM (at new frequencies) and iDen, made network roll-out expensive. America, like China is a big place and as a result coverage is unreliable.  It also makes networks more demanding of RF performance from the phone. There is no opportunity for network sharing.

The top reason for someone churning is poor coverage at home. The us has very high churn rates and penetration is lower than most Western countries (82%) and replacement rates slower.

The US is the only place in the world where the carriers (networks) brand is more important than the handset. People buy a Verizon, Sprint or T-Mobile phone rather than a Nokia, Samsung or Sony Ericsson.  A couple of exceptions are the iPhone and the Razr. The number of SIM-Free phones is insignificant. China is setting itself up for the same situation. TD-SCDMA might be aimed at protecting the home market and driving innovation but it could have the opposite effect.

The different technologies led to interworking problems. US Text messaging is still behind most other countries. The volumes are comparable but when you look at who uses text it’s only about half the phone owing population. The other half uses text twice as much. Pre-pay is a very small, around 6% of the market (contrast with Europe’s 70%).

It will be interesting to see what the Chinese do about security. Take a GSM phone to China today and you’ll get a warning that there is no encryption. WCDMA has much better encryption and you can be sure the Chinese authorities will want to be able to intercept calls. Perhaps they will have to rely on listening through the network operator. Of course that’s not an option they have in the UK which might account for some interesting network planning issues around the Chinese Embassy in London. They wouldn’t perhaps be running a phantom cell so that they can listen to calls and read the text messages of the Free Tibet protestors outside would they?

Cat Keynes publishes her thoughts on the mobile phone industry every Sunday at www.catkeynes.com you can read the column  the previous Friday by subscribing here.

Links

The Palm Pre is just what the world needs: Another mobile operating system, PC Magazine asked some sensible questions about it

Making money sometimes means taking risks, and with new builds of mobile phone networks becoming rarer someone will want the contract for a new Iranian network.

News of new devices from HTC have leaked and not surprisingly they are both Windows Mobile and Android.

Something you might like to run on one of those Windows Mobile phones is the new version of Microsoft Live Search as the land-grab for mobile applications goes on.

A few weeks ago I said that Mobile Advertising was overhyped. Yet some people still think it’s a treat to privacy.

I spend most of my time looking forward, but, from time to time it’s worth looking back.

My first column started with the prediction that Lewis Hamilton would win the Formula 1 championship, so I can claim accuracy on that, although I did say he’s walk it much as Nokia rules the phone market.

I then predicted that there was no future in mobile gambling, and nothing significant has happened there. My riskiest prediction of the year was that Vodafone would buy T-Mobile US. That didn’t happen: it was the uncertainty over Sprint that dominated  the US carrier scene. The game hasn’t played out yet so the T-Mobile debt/Vodafone cash pile scenario might yet happen, although Vodafone does seem ore interested in Africa.

One prediction that has become more likely is that Nokia will buy a bank. Back then it seemed that Nokia’s love of end to end services would drive it, but today banks are so cheap that when my credit card was refused on the basis of  “insufficient funds” I wondered if that was mine or the banks which didn’t stretch to the Blaniks.

I’d hoped that there would be more reaction to my spilling the beans on how broken the systems are on the London Underground. It seems that everyone is so used to the tube being dismal that no-one was surprised.

I sang the praises of phone retailers, and warned of the dangers of your company being bought by Motorola. I looked at the future of mobile TV needing an attitude change, and how mobile standards are tied up in the heads of a few great men.

Perhaps my most powerful prediction, and one I still think will come true is that Nokia will dominate Google in mobile search.

Pyramids and Egypt go together, but when marketing geeks talk about the “bottom of the pyramid” they mean poor people. Unlike the Egyptian edifices the people are the future. And the future of mobile payments.

One problem the mobile industry seems to be incapable of conquering is how to get good ideas to market. Rich Miner of Google told the Future of Mobile conference that when he was at Orange Ventures he couldn’t get Orange to launch the things he’d backed. What hope is there for the small developer? It’s a problem I tackled in my column in May.

It’s not all doom and gloom, the phone is the most powerful tool we’ve seen for truth and justice. By making everyone a journalist it’s the enemy of the oppressive regime. Maybe that’s hwy it has taken until 2008 for North Korea to put in a network.

Even in the West we can be looking to the mobile as being our savour, mobile healthcare will become increasingly important. If we don’t get it right we’ll die, our kids won’t look after us and the health system won’t cope with an aging population..
One column in June was very different to my usual fare, it was an interview with the SpinVox co-founder Daniel Doulton telling his incredible personal, near death, story.

A couple of columns looked at the importance of software teams. How a few good men are better than lots of average ones and how programming has moved from science to art.

There has been one Guest Column, Bob Schukai, Turner’s head of Mobile looked at how the promise of 3G has delivered.

I looked back at the Pogo, a device of the future, why the smartphone has failed to deliver and how Appsstore is more important than iPhone.

In August I explained the importance to phone manufacturers of a hardware abstraction layer, mobile security,  fashion in phones,   the battle over the MID between ARM and Intel and what makes a phone a classic rather than a hit.

Some future directions are clearly lucrative, mobile advertising is one of them, but timing will be important and most people are running too fast. Now running against the tide I looked at the slowing of the Smartphone market and the strength of the mid-price sector.  Something that’s essential for small developers, people with the next great idea, to understand is the handset manufacturers risk mitigation, which is a shame because the smartest users would want the cool new stuff, especially since they are eleven. More mature people, like me will want fashion phones, and I came up with my own recipe . And if they want both they’ll want Multi-SIM. But can’t get it.

Careful shoppers will like my views on scope.com. I’ve used it a bit since and really like it. Note however that I got the Text shortcode wrong, it should be 6555. I do like shopping, which is why I compared operating systems to shops.

One of my favourite columns of the year was when I looked at the evolution of networks and services, and how they interrelate. One of the services which is over estimated is LBS, specifically GPS, another is UMA.

In a period of doom and gloom it’s good to realise that something always comes along, and that something has been about to have its day for a decade. It’s mobile data.

Which brings us up to the end of the year when the anti-virus vendors got a Christmas Present.

So to the future, well of course there is Mobile World Congress. I’ll be putting together my Barcelona top tips, and to future technologies. Software Defined Radio looks like it has been around the corner for long enough to become real.

Have a good New Year.

Cat Keynes publishes her thoughts on the mobile phone industry every Sunday at www.catkeynes.com you can read the column  the previous Friday by subscribing here.

Did you have a quiet Christmas? What about New Year? Last week I talked about how New Years Eve is the busiest time for text messages. Maybe you didn’t get any. Did you think that was strange? Instead of the usual Morse code dit-dit-dit da-da dit-dit-dit of your Nokia receiving an SMS you got nothing.

You might have been struck by the Curse of Silence bug that has been floating around for a while and has been recently made public at the Chaos Computer Club. When a suitably vulnerable Nokia phone receives an SMS which has been crafted in the right way it is struck deaf and becomes unable to receive SMS text messages without a factory reset: type #7370# to do this, but you’ll lose everything.

And because MMS is triggered by SMS that’s killed too.

This will be an unusually technical column as I explain what happens. Text messaging is strangely powerful. There are lots of buried features such as flash messages which appear on the idle screen of the phone instead of in to the inbox. The 3GPP standard includes the ability to send emails. There are various types of text message such as those which update your internet settings or make a voicemail icon appear. Other types include paging systems and fax. You can, if you know what you are doing, fake that by putting characters with those values in the right place in a message. For email the special type is "SMS and Internet Electronic Mail interworking". One of the things which differentiates an email from a text message is you have a “from” address as well as a body. To allow for this the standard uses a space between the “from” and the message.

To make this all a bit friendlier Nokia phones using Series 60 version 2.6 or newer scan the bit before the space to look for what might be an email address – something with an @ in it. Clearly this seemed to be a good idea to the right developers at the time but it’s a minor feature and didn’t justify significant testing. Unfortunately if the email address is longer than 32 characters, Series 60 2.6, 2.8, 3.0 and 3.1 phones go into the kind of strop most families experience at Christmas and and fail to communicate. Phones with version 2.6 or 3.0 don’t shrug their shoulders or slam doors. In fact they don’t give any indication that anything is wrong at all.  A factory reset fixes this but will take all your personal data including the games high scores you spent so long on over Christmas. If you back your phone up after you’ve been attacked when you restore the data you restore the problem.

It’s a bit harder to deafen a version 2.8 or 3.1 phone. These need to receive 11 maliciously crafted SMS text messages and then they say that there is not enough memory to receive further messages, and something should be deleted. These phones will seem to work if you soft reset them, but the next text message of over 160 characters will kill everything again.

The work on tracking this down has been done by Tobias Engel, and was presented to the Chaos Computer Club.  I’m not going to go into detail of how to do it, but plenty of other sources have done and there is a detailed video here.
Of course some people are very happy about this: the doom-mongers who’ve been peddling anti-virus phone software for years must think it’s Christmas. Finally something that phones need protecting from.  They’ve rushed home from their families and turkeys to put out press releases: Fortinet and F-secure both have offerings. There is nothing the user can do to detect or prevent the problem without them. And these will only prevent, not cure the problem.

But the real Curse of Silence isn’t in the software it’s Nokia. They’ve known about the problem for a while and not reacted. There is nothing on the Nokia website. No press releases, no links on conversations.nokia.com and nothing on the developers forum. I know it’s Christmas but the time for Silent Night is over.

What is the ideal phone to go with a little black dress for the party season? Of course stylewise it’s a Motorola Nevis, ooh, I mean Aura. It’s cool while Vertus are gauche. But what features should the party season phone have? Although the Aura is patently not about technology it could have a few useful features.

There is the “drunk on the train feature”. Using CellID because GPS doesn’t work in a clutch bag on Network South East, the phone would ring, very loudly, when I got near to my station. If, sorry, when, I fell asleep it would wake me.

It would also have mail merge in the text messaging. It’s a bit impersonal sending a text message to everyone in my phonebook to say Happy New Year. So want I want to do is automate my being impersonal. I want to be able to put wildcards in the text message which read the name so that the first line of my text could read “Hej Glen”. It would need to be smart enough to just take the first name “Hej Glen Wright” sounds too formal for a new year greeting. I’d have to make sure I was sober while doing it. One friend would get the message “Hej Brain”. He’d no doubt complain that his name isn’t Brian, ‘cos the full name is Brain Dead.

And for wanting to know what my squeeze has been up to at his work do I’d also want a lie detector like this one, what I like best is the description that says “You must disclose to subjects that they are being submitted to a lie detector test prior to any testing”. Yeah right. What you do is tell them after testing to see how they react.

But most of all I’d want to be able to enter a long message to be displayed on the screen when its locked. That would allow me to have something which said “If you find this phone please email me and I’ll give you a reward”. Something polite enough that the finder would return it, and that will need to be very special if I lost a $2,000 phone.

So if you’ve just got back to work with a post-Christmas malaise and are reading this in your backlog of email, and can make it happen, you’ve got a year in which to do it.

Cat Keynes publishes her thoughts on the mobile phone industry every Sunday at www.catkeynes.com you can read the column  the previous Friday by subscribing here.

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There is something quite special about being retro and up to date at the same time. A great viral video on You Tube is this one. You might want to wait until no-one is around before clicking on it at work.

Thanks to Jeff Bloom from Singtones, who liked the plug in this column last week so much there is a special offer for readers. If you log into www.singtones.com and use the code CK1208 this week he will give you four free tones to send to UK mobiles. Singtones uses the revoice technology that recording studios use to make your pathetic singing sound on key and in time. Register with the code this week and you can use a couple to practice with and keep a couple for Valentines day.

One device maker is more subject to city perceptions than any other: RIM. Because the people in the city use Blackberrys they know that early Bolds were flaky and Storms disappointing, but perception and fact are often very different which is why the Wall St has been surprised by RIM’s great figures.

If you enjoyed midnight mass this Christmas perhaps you should try the church a bit more often. They’ve discovered tech you know.

What would the Mobile Industry want for Christmas? Well for a lot of the people in the industry it’s a new job. Most of the major players are going through rounds of redundancies. I don’t think it’s quite what Motorola meant when they said "We will be #1". More P45s than anyone else.

The thing to remember however is that there are still opportunities. The mobile industry might be seeing growth slow. We might even see 2009 having lower sales than 2007 but it’s not the catastrophe other industries are suffering. Flat sales would be a dream for any car manufacturer. They’ve seen a 40% drop in demand in a single month. For the phone industry that would be like Nokia disappearing.

If you are in a mobile company and despairing at your spreadsheets think where you would rather be. Certainly not banking, entertainment, travel, property, retail. It always used to feel that the high tech industries were the dangerous, volatile ones and those that had been around for centuries, like banking, were much safer.

A friend once said that the best science fiction was written when science fiction wasn’t in vogue. Popularity lowered the bar on quality. This might happen to mobile innovation; making phones better where “better” does not mean more complicated. Better means understanding people.

How about supporting Advice of Charge? The GSM standard which tells people what each call has cost. It’s been in the standard since the dawn of digital phones and yet never used. Or a ring tone which automatically changes its pitch and speed based on the CLI of whoever is calling. You’d soon get to recognise the difference between your mother, your best friend and your boyfriend.

Or a phone that listened, and worked out for itself that where you are is very noisy so the ring tone has to be louder. It could even listen to itself and use the camera to try and work out if it was in a pocket or handbag.

Or a phone that listened for  DTMF tones during a conversation and put the corresponding numbers into a new phone book entry so that someone calling you could give you a third person’s number by typing.

While the people in the industry need the jobs, and the industry needs innovation to drive the future. History has shown that it’s the small teams that do the innovative stuff so there is plenty of opportunity. What it needs to make it work is for the big players to share goodwill and understanding with the small and agile. A spirit of co-operation is just what we need for Christmas.

Cat Keynes publishes her thoughts on the mobile phone industry every Sunday at www.catkeynes.com you can read the column  the previous Friday by subscribing here.

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If you are in the usual Christmas panic about what to buy a loved one how about a cheesy Christmas ring tone. Made all the more cheesy by you being the one to sing it. Singtones.com takes your singing and uses the technology used in recoding studios to make it on-key and in time, the send it as a ringtone.

Research in the mobile industry is often done very well, but understanding the research is a different kettle of fish. Perhaps the people at the first mobile research conference will find a solution to that.

When I read a headline about Stella McCartney doing mobile things I was hoping it was that she was designing something. Unfortunately it’s just using male-designed mobiles to sell her wares.

If we can’t work out the difference between a high end feature phone and a budget smartphone what hope does the EU have. Well, none really but that’s not going to stop them trying to use it to tax them. One great example is a survey which shows Motorola as being strong in Smartphones in China . It probably means devices like the A1200 which are closed Linux and not ‘smart’ in the open OS sense.

If you are well enough to text you are well enough to party. This, according to the BBC, is an official medical view.

Last Christmas Expansys ran out of netbooks. Repeatedly. Shipments of the EEE701 sold out before they were delivered. And if you were after a black one you might as well be after an Hermés Birkin.

Back then only geeks wanted netbooks, and even geeks had thought the Palm Folio was a bad idea, then the Asus with the unpronounceable name sold a million units and a new category of device was born. OK, reborn. Today it’s the big thing.  The Sunday Times even ran a “which netbook” feature and Carphone advertises them on the X-factor. You don’t get more mainstream than that. A new category is just the thing we need. Handset sales have slowed to 4% growth and everyone is worried.

It’s a telling tale for the future: there will always be new categories of products. While operators might bemoan dropping ARPUs and handset manufacturers the slowing of sales, the march of new areas continues, albeit a tad abated.

A fantastic opportunity for developers. Just as consumers don’t want a full-fat laptop they will want OptiFast applications.

So what operating system should they be developing for?

The answer is Symbian. Never shy of trying something different L’Amour/N-gage/Vertu, Nokia is looking at the Netbook market. It could be an N810 with a keyboard running Linux  but rumours point to something more exciting: A Symbian netbook. This ties in well with the battle between Nokia and Microsoft, Intel and ARM and growing the Symbian Foundation. Imagine an HTC Shift but done better. It wouldn’t be the first time either.

The spies say this plan was pulled from being announced at Nokia World and won’t be at Barcelona MWC either, it’s a leisure device with a focus on blogging, social networking and entertainment. Not unlike the N97.

Nokia is showing itself as being increasingly agile. The company which said people don’t want two-handed touch screen phones was quick on the heels of the success of the iPhone, brining touch down in price and adding free music. Proper aggressive response to Apple.

Lighter than a Macbook air with all-day battery life, mobile broadband and best of all almost instant on and off. Ok, given the overhead that’s happened to Symbian in the form of Series 60 – it’s multiples of the size it was in the EPOC days, this might be a bit of a dream, but it’s a good one.

Cat Keynes publishes her thoughts on the mobile phone industry every Sunday at www.catkeynes.com you can read the column  the previous Friday by subscribing here.

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First a bit of self-promotion. Accesses to my site are growing apace. There were over 7,000 unique visitors in November and December has started very strong with over 2,000  in the first week. If you want to promote your product to an influential and knowledgeable base of mobile phone industry people please contact me about advertising.

What have code and music got in common? People think they should be free. With Android being open source and Symbian going Foundation, it seems that the value of software is disappearing. Just as at the same time music does the same thing. All you can eat music deals are the current battleground in Sweden.

Sony has announced that its cutting 8,000 jobs, but this does not affect Sony Ericsson which in the throes of shedding 2,000 jobs announced last summer.

There are 14 new members of the Open Handset Alliance , which is the name Android uses when it is wearing a suit. They include ARM which is no surprise since they have been demonstrating Android at shows, , ASUSTek  the PC manufacturer, Ericsson which one would guess is looking for a port to the Ericsson Mobile Platforms chipset, Garmin International which having killed Nuvifone seems to be having another stab, Huawei Technologies which will be doing what Vodafone tells them,  The Japanese companies Omron Software Co. Ltd and  Softbank Mobile Corporation, Sony Ericsson, Teleca AB, Toshiba Corporation and Vodafone.

The latest mobile marketing innovation is to send you a ring-back tone which sells something to people who get to hear it before you answer the phone. Coca-Cola’s 2008 annual Christmas campaign, bringing Christmas onto user’s cell phone. Coca-Cola is offering its famous Christmas song ”Holidays are coming“ as a free ringback tone for T-Mobile and Vodafone customers in Germany. Ah, the true spirit of Christmas: commercialism. It’s only on T-Mobile and Vodafone in Germany. You’ll notice I’ve not included a link for this one.

Orange has launched Orange Money, an M-pesa like mobile payments system in Ivory Coast. The system uses an extension to the existing pre-pay billing platform. It’s a shame they were not brave enough to licence M-pesa from Vodafone as critical mass matters.

But not everything is wonderful in the M-pesa camp either. A deal with Western Union to send money from that great centre of Kenyan community that is Reading (not) to M-pesa phones in Kenya is horribly expensive as this blog post notes. They claim that this is to promote small value payments but the numbers don’t stack up. A typical M-pesa transfer is about £10, or about $15. If you send that from Reading to Nairobi the recipient gets 619 Kenyan Shillings, or about $8. Half the money goes in transfer fees. This compares with a cost of less than 2% on an M-pesa to M-pesa account. Western Union argue that this is just a trail and that when there are phone to phone transactions that cut the Western Union agents out of the loop it will be a lot cheaper.

Talking of doing things cheaper is BillMonitor a site which you supply with the password for your online billing account. It then reads your mobile bill and works out which tariff you should be on. It’s a shame Orange ditched OVP, the two would work together brilliantly.

The six winners of The Vodafone Foundation’s UK World of Difference programme have started their year working for their favourite charities. They have been sponsored by Vodafone with £25,000 towards outgoings and expenses and £20,000 for each of their projects. Winners met the Queen during her recent  visit to Newbury. The 2008 UK winners are working for the following charities:

SolarAid - Miguel Ramirez will research renewable sources of energy and train local communities to modify devices such as kerosene lamps so that they use solar power.

Spitalfields City Farm - Naomi Glass will work with the City Farm in London to educate disadvantaged young people and their parents.

Mzizi Africa - Lucy Calson will dedicate her time to fundraising to help relieve the hardship of AIDS orphans in Africa.

Engineers without Borders UK - Andrew Lamb will place engineers on voluntary projects to learn about technology's role in helping to reduce poverty worldwide

Cerebral Palsy Africa - Jean Westmascott will establish a training centre to educate therapists in Africa who will design and make low-cost equipment to improve the lives of those with cerebral palsy.

African Prisons Project - Alexander McLean will set up projects that help improve the welfare, health and education of detainees in African prisons.

Thanksgiving  dinners in London are odd affairs. A bunch of Americans who are uncomfortable about how integrated to be.  But they are a fine opportunity to meet new people.

Like the eco-warrior who had a Sony Ericsson T68. He believes that it’s wrong to throw phones away and what’s wrong with something seven years old? Or the dentist who has just signed her business up for BT Fusion. She spoke at length about how great it was.  She talked about the great deal on the broadband and she talked about how you got your fixed like and mobile all from BT.

And I listened. Partly because I was eating, partly because when you are with a cosmetic dentist you keep your mouth closed as much as possible, you don’t want to be inspected, but mainly because I wanted to know her views on fixed/mobile convergence.

And I kept listening as she talked through tariffs and services but not once did she mention the ability to pick up her landline calls on the mobile.

Eventually I cracked, and I asked her if she knew that her phone did it. She did but didn’t use it. For her the deal was all about good, cheap broadband and mobile tariffs. She didn’t care that she was limited to which handsets she could have, ironically she might have been better off with Virgin Media as that would give her higher speed broadband and she could still have had the combined mobile and broadband tariff.

This is the polar opposite to how the mobile world sees Fusion. Even the name is targeted at the advantage of having one phone, just like the OnePhone of 1999.  We see it as being a great piece of technology that does seamless handoff between fixed and mobile lines, that allows the consumer to have a single handset for both. The consumer doesn’t care about that, they see it as cheap tariffs and a single bill. The hard bit, the really hard technology of HLRs and handover isn’t even interesting.

T-Mobile is trying something similar and Orange in France but seems to have given up trying to sell it in the UK. You have to really hunt to find it on the UK website and even then, like my dentist friend, it doesn’t talk about fixed/mobile convergence. BT has now closed down Fusion – existing subscribers are supported but they are not taking on new ones. A bit of me is impressed that they are prepared to take the risk with Vision and Fusion, but properly thought through they were never good ideas. It wasn’t just at Thanksgiving that it was easy to spot the Turkey.

Cat Keynes publishes her thoughts on the mobile phone industry every Sunday at www.catkeynes.com you can read the column  the previous Friday by subscribing here.

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Sony Ericsson might be crying into its sushi  and meatballs but thanks to the C905 (and probably the T303) it’s done better than ever for market share, number three in the world and  top dog in the UK.

China mobile is  preparing its own mobile OS. It will be interesting to see how this affects Nokia’s strength in the Chinese market.

I reported on how mobiles on London underground have been pending for over ten years. They are still no nearer, but Glasgow has a system up and running

The battle over mobile search is in the land-grab phase with Yahoo signing up with Virgin Mobile. I still think Nokia will be the winner.

Meanwhile Nokia has trumped my wanting an N85 with the N97. I never wanted the N96 which always seemed a bit lame and now we know why. It has homescreen widgets – Nokia bought the company Widsets a while back.

A quick reminder to donate to the Mobile Industry Review Christmas competition There are some amazing prizes to be won, and its for a good cause so everyone wins. Indeed the mobile industry has been so generous with prizes it looks like you have a really good chance of getting something special from it.

Nokia is building a vision for home control and seems to be asking some sensible questions – it’s been around for decade with the Red Boxes and Orange had a ‘home of the future”. One thing they have got right is building and ecosystem. If you have a domestic automation product you should speak to them.

Kenya leads the way with mobile payments but now Sweden and Norway are trying to steal the crown. It’s WAP billing so I don’t think they have much chance.
If you have no taste, and I mean really no taste at all you might like one of these Crystal phones. But I doubt it

In three years the world will be ready for on-line, mobile gaming.

That’s been said before but it’s been wrong. That before was about five years ago when on-line gaming was the new thing. World of Warcraft was announced but not launched, games like Doom and Quake had laid the foundations. Even The Sims was going on-line.

The thought was that mobile was imminent. This is a thought which shows how badly people learn the lessons of the past. There is a lag between a technology becoming accepted and it going mobile. For email this was about ten years, for the telephone it was one hundred. There is an attitude latency.

On-line gaming is now an embedded part of our culture, and not just youth, I heard that so many game-geeks are middle-aged the games shops think they damage the youth ambience of their stores. The man who invented on-line gaming thinks this is A Good Thing..

Gaming on mobile might not be living up to the fanciful analysts predictions of massiveness but it’s a solid industry. Plenty of people spend plenty of time playing games on their mobile. There is a significant overlap with those that play online games on their PCs and consoles.

The problem with that overlap is that people know what to expect. To understand the technology limitations you need to listen to what the men-who-should-know-better talk about when they are cluttering up those games shops. They don’t talk about bandwidth speed, they talk about latency. Ping times. How quickly another player sees what you are doing.

Non-gamers don’t understand this. Bandwidth is what matters, So the drive has been from GPRS to EDGE to WCDMA to HSDPA with the magic number being bandwidth. The diamond in the dirt here however is latency. GPRS had a round trip time of around two seconds. You could play chess and battleships (indeed a very early Symbian tutorial was SMS battleships) but not Pong. HSDPA however has very low latency. It’s the missing bit in making mobile gaming work.

That missing bit is now in place, phones have HSDPA – and HSUPA – it’s all ready to roll, fast interactive games can be rolled out. Flat rate means no-one worries about cost. Except they can’t. There is the attitude latency. It will take a few years before HSDPA handsets are the norm and coverage is ubiquitous and most of all for people to get used to the idea. It will happen but we’ll see the London Olympics first.

Cat Keynes publishes her thoughts on the mobile phone industry every Sunday at www.catkeynes.com you can read the column  the previous Friday by subscribing here.

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Samsung has an ordinary Windows Mobile phone called the i780 so to give it that extra buzz it’s been made the flagship of the new BizBee business brand.

Whatever Microsoft says, it must be disappointed how few manufacturers make Windows Mobile phones. It’s market share is a small part of that small part of the phone market which is smartphones, and even then most of the Windows mobile phones are made by HTC even if they carry a variety of brands.  This is the smoke behind the rumour that Microsoft it to build it’s own phone, X-box style, under the Zune brand.

People who know say that Symbian is a mean, lean operating system with a slow bloated Series 60 UI on top of it. Almost as bad as Windows Mobile. So you might have mixed views that S60 is winning out over other user interfaces.

America has about the same text message traffic per capita as most of the rest of the world but it is split differently demographically. A minority of people use it a lot, as is shown by a report from Scarborough.

Do you remember the Alphaville track “Big in Japan”, no, neither do I but we are not alone. Nokia has decided to give up in Japan.

Is comes with music going to be as big as Nokia hopes. Analyst Ben Wood thinks so.

DivX codecs have been around for Symbian phones for ages, but there is a converted badge of compatibility which Samsung has won.

About half the readers of this site are in the US. To them I apologise, not for the slight about coverage in the week before last’s column – that was justified – but for the following comment about something a parochial as a British soap opera.

Roxy took a photograph of her dodgy husband holding a stolen TV on Eastenders and threatened to email it to her cousin from whom it had been looted. This is interesting not for the daft plot but for Roxy’s understanding that an MMS can be sent to email, something few consumers understand – they think they can only be sent to another phone.

There is a way of thinking where the obvious isn’t the same as what happens. Part of the standard Android presentation is that being an Open system it’s flexible. “Why”, the presenter asks, “can’t you click on the address in your address book and look at it on a map in Google maps”. This makes a lot of sense.

If you come from a PC world.

But it misses one thing: People don’t hold contacts addresses in their phones. They have a name and a phone number. They might have an email address if, like Roxy, they are clued up enough to have an email address for sending MMS, but generally they will have a name and a number. They might also have a photo which is used for CLI and a dedicated ring tone. Photos and custom ring tones are the next most common things to have, but the .vcf format – from the PC world –  has never heard of ringtones.

This is a general problem with new people coming into mobile. Rumour has it that Microsoft wanted to leave SMS out of Windows Mobile because it competed with email.

We’ve long struggled for a dividing line between feature phones and smartphones. One of the things that makes it even more grey is the dividing line between small computers and big phones. Nokia talks about phones as pocket computers, Motorola in its last flash of brilliance a few years ago talked about “The device formerly known as the cellphone”,  but they both do this from the perspective of phones adding computing. This works very much better than the Windows Mobile/Android/Palm way of adding voice as a computing application. You can’t have “ringing please wait” dialog boxes on a phone.  Indeed the worst phone crash I’ve seen was on a Windows Mobile phone which crashed when it rang. You could see who was calling you but all you could do was hit reset. Then you had to wait until the thing rebooted – and did the screen calibration – until you could call them back.

The computer people who are touting mobile operating systems really need to get their heads around what “phone first” means. At the moment they only think they know.

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That cool mobile website that I steal links from – Mobile Industry review – is running a competition for good causes. Please donate and you could win some great stuff.

Working out what standards will succeed isn’t about how good the standards are but about who backs them. The announcement that Qualcomm has gone LTE makes the future for WiMax look a little more shaky.

Omio has run a keyboard competition. I still don’t think it would beat the average Filipino with T9.

Apple is planning an iPhone  launch in China. If you’ve not been there and seen the Rolls Royces, Maybechs and Prada stores you might think that it’s an odd marke but China will soon have a bigger middle class than Europe.

More powerful batteries might lead to price rises. The battery needed for a car to travel 200 miles currently weighs a tonne. This is about six times as much as a petrol engine. A new Toshiba technology can shift the balance. Bit if batteries become practical for cars the market for them multiples and there is already a shortage of elements like cobalt which is needed. Fuel taxes will make the car market more attractive than phones, so we’ll not see the benefit.

I don’t understand how this works. It’s SIM-based GPS. If the antenna is in the SIM how can it get line of sight to the GPS satellites?

I’ve been sitting in a lot of meetings recently, hmm who am I kidding. I always sit in a lot of meetings, and the more I do that the more I become convinced that the smart boardroom table is a brain numbing device.

Sit in the pub or a wine bar and the ideas are free, intelligent and forthright. Meet the same people when they have an afromosia table and a ceiling mounted projector and they talk bollocks.

In particular about Location Based Services. There seems to be a view that if you give an eight year old a mobile phone with five buttons and GPS it will be what they want and allow you to track them.

This is wrong on both counts. An eight year old is smart enough to know what a mobile phone is. They are more likely to send an MMS than a 48 year old.
But worse is the ignorance of those who think that GPS on phones work.
In a fit of exasperation in a meeting last week I asked for a show of hands as to who had used GPS. Most hands went up. Then I asked who had used it on a mobile as opposed to a car sat nav. None did.



The idea that GPS in phones knows where you are all the time comes from a very different experience. Most factory-fitted car sat navs use the GPS very little. It gives broad brush location which is combined with a map on a DVD and wheel sensors using the anti-lock braking. When a car goes around a corner the sat nav finds the appropriate corner on the map. Something like a Garmin or a TomTom just uses the map with the GPS and without the sensors but even then it’s streets ahead of a phone system. Phones live in pockets. TomToms live on dashboards.  Dashboards are in the middle of the street with a view of the sky. Pockets, not only don’t have this, they spend the majority of their time indoors. To use GPS on a phone you spend as much time switching it on and getting a fix on the requisite satellites as you do using it. Even with AGPS it can take a few minutes to get a fix.

The idea that you could use it to locate a kid who had one in his pocket is laughable. The only use-case for a mobile phone with a GPS based mapping application is as a replacement for a better, dedicated in-car system. Things would be different if the phone side was used to download the latest maps and traffic info but as it is you are better off with doing the other way around – the Trafficmaster Smartnav and the latest generation TomToms are navigation devices with GSM modules to download the information. You can bet whoever came up with them did so in the pub and not around a boardroom table.

Cat Keynes publishes her thoughts on the mobile phone industry every Sunday at www.catkeynes.com you can read the column  the previous Friday by subscribing here.

The UK network 3 has launched a Facebook phone. I see this as a trend for the future. There is certainly scope for an ebay phone – photograph something and post it to ebay automatically. Maybe other web companies might do a phone. I must suggest it to Google.

Qualcomm has taken Brew into the netbook market. The Kayak is a reference platform but it’s an interesting approach to emerging markets. Demo units  use an external screen and keyboard.

Orange has recently re-discovered it’s old form on customer service. It once housed them in the biggest porta cabin ever built – in Darlington. My recent experience with them has been great. The next step is to move call centres back to the UK .

The Jitterbug founders Martin Cooper and Arlene Harris have been voted the top innovators in wireless by Fierce wireless, being an American list it doesn’t feature anyone who invented anything like GSM, SMS or reverse billing.

A classic magician’s tricks is three solid steel rings which he’ll hand to a punter to examine before spinning and linking them as though metal passes through metal.

Carriers might wish to turn to magic to help with Subscriber Acquisition Cost. Margins being squeezed by regulation is a problem they treat with the blunt implement of price. It’s not the magic they need, it’s the rings.

Price is only one of the three rings of mobile. This isn’t in Powerpoint and I’m not going to start posting Venn diagrams, but imagine, if you will, three overlapping circles in a straight line. Like the Audi logo with the last ring missing. In the first one you write Coverage, in the second Price and in the third Service. Go on, get out a pencil and do it.

This is the growth path for carriers and it is the overlaps that are important. When a network is new it has limited coverage. In the days when all the networks in a country were new they all fought on coverage. Indeed this is still true of some emerging places like Cameroon, Ghana and North America.

If coverage is poor, particularly if there is a better established rival, the new entrant needs to be cheap. Really cheap. Smart handsets discounted to zilch and masses of credit for cents. This is at a time when money needs to be spent on infrastructure and makes for a very expensive business. Governments don’t help with what they charge for spectrum. Live through the pain and build enough customers and coverage and you can start to recoup the cost. One of the nice things is as kit and costs get cheaper tariffs can be kept fairly static and the margin improves.

Then comes the second ring. As consumers realise coverage is much of a muchness, everywhere is reasonable and all the networks have the same blackspots – imposed by geographic conditions – there is no longer a need to pay a premium for better coverage and prices decline to that of the cheaper operator.

Operators then fight on price. A subtle war with offers which cannot be compared directly. Are anytime free calls to a few friends worth more than free weekend calls to anyone? Free calls on your Birthday? Free at Christmas? Bundles of minutes and texts, In the overlap between coverage and price there is the opportunity for showing off: “Our network is so good that if we drop your call we’ll give you the next call free”. Once, however, things stabilise, the savvy customers who are the focus of churn realise all the deals pretty much amount to $30 a month for a low to medium user and it doesn’t matter which network you are on.

Then comes the Service ring. In the mature UK market this is the focus of the battle and it is what is behind the music services and particularly the interest in social networking: Post to Facebook, Flirtomatic or Last.FM from your mobile. Teens are more loyal to their social network than carrier, and will happily swap carrier if it means they have better communication with their circle of friends. Other services make different customers sticky –  SpinVox, Zyb, Blue Book or Gypsii.

Regulation on price is actually destructive because it harms the two rings to which it is attached. If prices are kept low then so will be coverage and you won’t get new innovative services.  Of course the price of these services matters which is why the ring overlaps. Services don’t overlap with coverage. You can’t roll out a great, compelling service before coverage is a non-issue. This will be a major obstacle to the fourth generation, be it LTE or WiMax. The proposition of super services needs to be built on complete coverage, unlike the magician’s three rings where one of them has a gap in it hidden by his hand. The punter only gets to examine the two solid ones, although one gets passed over twice. Any fourth generation network with gaps will get passed over in an entirely different way.