Author: Martin

Multitasking on the Bicycle

As a tech-savvy person I used to carry a lot of gadgets when going on a bicycle ride for fun: A mobile phone, a photo camera, a paper map, a GPS, an MP3 player and a PDA to surf the Internet and to check my e-mail. Yes, I know what you want to say now, that was a couple of years ago (but not too many ago when you think about it) and today, all these devices have shrunken into a single smartphone.

It's a strange feeling, my backpack is now almost empty with only my N95, the sun glasses, the door key and some money in it. And who knows, the door key and the money might just be included in the mobile phone in a couple of years as well with an RFID chip for mobile payment and a Bluetooth solution to open my apartment door.

It's amazing how many things the phone now does simultaneously while being in my pocket:

  • It runs the MP3 and podcast player so I am entertained while enjoying the ride
  • The camera application is always ready and while I take a picture, all other applications keep running in the background
  • Nokia Sports Tracker runs in the background and uses the GPS chip to record the trip and upload my position in real time to the Internet. Once back home the program looks for pictures I have taken during the ride and the songs I have listened to and uploads them as well. For example, here's the data from the bike trip I reflect on in this post.
  • I've uploaded some of the pictures I have taken in full resolution to Flickr with the help of Shozu on the phone, which also accesses the GPS information to geo-tag the pictures. To save cost, I've configured Shozu to only upload the pictures when it detects my Wi-Fi network at home. No manual intervention necessary.
  • In the pictures you might have noticed a little camouflaged box. That's a geocache which I found with the help of a Geocaching application using the GPS chip in the phone. An interesting and healthy hide and seek game and sometimes motivation not to stay at home sticking my nose into books or working on new projects.
  • In case I get lost, I can fire up Nokia Maps which also uses the GPS chip. Note that all programs can access the location data simultaneously. Very nice!
  • Needless to say that my e-mail program (Profimail) was also running in the background to alert me of incoming mail.
  • And for the quick information fix, Opera Mini is by default always lingerning in the background. Very helpful to get quick information from Wikipedia, often replacing the tourist guide on paper.
  • And everyone of course takes for granted that incoming voice calls and text messages are also treated. That's two separate tasks running in the background as well.

With all of these things running, the impact on the battery is quite significant. After four or five hours the battery is empty. So for longer trips, that spare battery adds a couple of grams to the weight of the backpack. Acceptable I would say.

So what else could be improved in the future? While the N95 8GB already has quite a big screen, I think I am ready now for the higher resolution and size of the screen of the N97. Hello Nokia, how long do we still have to wait? Also, the touch screen should be great for some applications like the built in web browser, which in itself can still be improved. There are still some pages I don't go to on the mobile because they take too long to load because the processor is not powerful enough to render them as quickly as on the PC. A higher capacity battery at the same size and weight of today would obviously also be good. On the software side I am waiting for that geo-info application that lets me take a picture of something, combines it with the GPS coordinates, goes to the Internet and comes back with a Wikipedia entry on it. Nokia's CTO has mused about such a program in the past but so far I haven't seen one.

So, what's missing for you when you take your smartphone for a walk or a bike ride?

Twitter for Instant Presentation Feedback

During the recent Future Technology Conference at the University of Oxford, I found a new personal application for Twitter:

Quite a number of people including me were twittering during the conference and either used a notebook or smartphone to virtually comment on the presentations and to seek the opinion of others. After my own presentation and Q&A session I noticed that the twittering during my session resulted in excellent feedback on my own presentation and served as a good starting point to engage people afterwards in the real world to continue the discussion.

Cool stuff!

Verizon’s first Draft Specification for LTE Devices

Unstrung has an interesting pointer to Verizon's first draft spec (v0.9) which details what they want devices to be capable of to allow them on their future LTE network. While they are mainly referring to relevant 3GPP specification documents, there are some nuggets of information in there that took my attention:

  • The 700 MHz band they intend to use seems to be band 13 in 3GPP talk. I wonder if that encompasses the complete 700 MHz band in the US or just a part for it!? In other words, will band 13 devices also be usable in other LTE networks (e.g. that of AT&T)? According to this post on Gigaohm, the total bandwidth of the 700 MHz that was auctioned off was 18 MHz per direction (uplink/downlink), so the answer is probably yes.
  • The channel bandwidth they will use: 10 MHz (double that of HSPA today but short of the theoretically possible 20 MHz as per the standard. Again, by looking at the link above, that's obvious because that's all there is available.
  • Devices must have RF connectors for testing purposes for all antennas. Haven't seen that in years on mobile devices. RF designers will have fun…
  • Devices will be assigned an IPv6 address when attaching to the network. IPv4 addresses shall be requested by the device if an application requests an IPv4 connection. The IPv4 address shall be released once no applications are executed on the device that require it. Interesting requirement, looks like an IPv4 address is not initially assigned to the mobile device by the network. This should not be a big deal, S60 for example already has a dual IPv4/IPv6 stack today.
  • Mobile device timer for moving from Connected to Idle state: The document says that the LTE standards say that the move from Connected to Idle state (on the radio layer, this has nothing to do with the IP address assignment) is controlled by the network. The standard leaves it open for the mobile to also initiate such a state change, for example if the device detects (by whatever means) that no applications currently wants to send and receive data. At this point, however, Verizon does not mandate devices to implement this. An interesting side note: Today, HSPA only knows a network initiated state change in the standards. In practice, however, there seem to be some devices that also trigger it from the devices side with a bit of an unorthodox signalling message exchange. Looks like standards people have learnt from that and included this feature in the LTE specs from day one.
  • No mention is made of dual mode CDMA/LTE capabilities. I wonder if that means that they expect that first devices will be LTE only? That wouldn't make a lot of sense to me. I can't imagine people would be very happy using a CDMA USB dongle and a separate LTE dongle, depending on where they are.
  • Verizon expects that first devices are data only, no voice capabilities. A pity, but who knows, they might yet discover the benefits of VOLGA.

Note that the current version is only a draft, there are still many unfinished chapters.

SMS and Generation 60+

When do you know that a technology has not only reached the main stream but that virtually everyone uses it? I think that stage is reached when not only kids are "doing it" but the 60+ generation as well.

Only a couple of years ago my mother was saying "yes, I have a mobile phone but I don't like it and it's only lying around at home and dust is settling on it". Now in 2009, she's sending me SMS messages on a regular basis and even admits that it is fun. (!?)

Why this change of heart I asked her? "Well", she said, "all my friends send me text messages these days, so I do it too now and it's great fun". Incredible, generation 60+ is using SMS now and they like it. And all of that despite the horrible user interface of a mobile phone, especially for people who keep insisting that the TV remote control is too complicated. I am amazed!

Evolution of Mobile Networks – Impact and Possibilities for Future Services

As promised in the previous post on last week's ForumOxford Future Technologies Conference, here's my presentation I gave on the evolution of mobile networks and how operators can benefit from that when designing new services and applications. The slides pretty much speak from themselves so I won't go into the details in this post. If you have some thoughts, comments and questions on the topic, just leave a comment below, I'd be happy to discuss it in more detail with you.

Evolution of Mobile Networks – Impact and Possibilities for Future Services

Some Thoughts on the ForumOxford Future Technologies Conference

Yesterday I returned home from the Future Technologies Conference at the University of Oxford and after a good night's sleep and some contemplation I thought I'd write down some impressions as I very much enjoyed the event and received lots of good feedback on my own presentation. More about that part in a separate follow up post.

The end of April is a perfect time to come over to England and spend some time in London and Oxford prior to the conference as spring has already arrived and everything is green and new. In addition to there are two reasons for going to this particular conference. The first one is of course the presentations and speakers of which most are not pushing the company line for a specific purpose but openly talk about a specific topic and the experiences they have gained, for their business and also personally.

The second reason to attend is the audience. Being a small conference on purpose, the people attending mostly do so for their private benefit and the resulting conversations I had with many have been very insightful to me. It was good to talk to people doing so many different things and who I'd normally not meet at all. Also interesting to hear that many people attended the event on their own without being sponsored by the companies they work for. That's great, they are the real enthusiasts and innovators!

So here are some examples of what I particularly enjoyed during the presentations and what I will follow-up on in the weeks to come:

  • Tomi Ahonen pointed out that some of his readers have asked him to not only talk the talk but also to walk it. So he decided to publish a book online (his Pearls book volume 1 and 2) instead of in hard cover and he seems to be very statisfied with the results. He said that he earned more with his online books in the last two months than what he got in royalties last year from his books published by John Wiley and sons. Yep, earning a living on book sales in our industry is very difficult, to put it mildley so its good to see that a different approach is paying off.
  • William Webb said that the biggest improvement for wireless networks in the future is better wireline, referring to the current backhaul bandwidth crunch. I couldn't agree more and he's put the issue in a sentence with an interesting twist.
  • Graham Trickey of the GSM Association (the GSMA) talked about driving inovation with open network API called OpenAPI. I wasn't aware of that initiative yet and will have to find out more.
  • Nick Allot: Having different mobile phone operating systems is both good and bad. On the one hand it's driving competition and innovation but on the other hand it also makes it quite difficult for developers to do cross platform development. This is where the Open Mobile Terminal Platform initiative comes in and Nick talked about the BONDI project which aims at standardizing how functionalities most phones have can be access in a standardized manner.
  • Phil Northam of Samsung has given us a taste of how Orwell's 1984 looks like translated into the mobile ecosystem. With his 'War is Peace' presentation he made the good point that while the different players in the game are sometimes not very friendly to each other, all the fights going on are not really aiming at total destruction of the other. In fact it would be rather pointless since everyone gains from the other remaining a strong power. If you've read 1984, you'll get his point. If not, I strongly suggest to read the book and to return to Phil's presentation afterwards.
  • Last year, Simon Cavill of Mi-Pay made me aware of for the first time of what's going on with mobile banking and mobile money transfers in Africa. This year, Simon gave an update and had lots of now and insightful stories to tell about the topic. I agree with him that what is learnt on mobile money transfers in Africa has a good chance to coming back to other parts of the world. Good to see some innovation flowing in the reverse direction!
  • Great presentation from Flirtomatic's Mark Curtis on the life in a startup company, how things never quite work out how you expect them and good examples of how you have to keep innovating to stay ahead of the curve.
  • Next was Ed Candy from network operator 3 in the UK with his thoughts on the evolution on networks and services. He spoke very positively on the take-up of data services in the UK and praised 3's initiative to abolish roaming charges between the 3 networks worldwide. His presentation also contained a number of interesting slides with graphs that had values on both the x- and y-scales that are usually left out in such presentations. I hope his slides will be made available on the conference web site to take a closer look. He also mentioned mobile marketing with user consent and Turkcell as a positive example. Have to research that in a bit more detail, too.
  • In the afternoon we came to a presentations of Tony Fish, Helen Keegan and Agustin Calvo on mobile marketing issues. Some good bits and pieces I took away from those presentations are thoughts on thinly disguised contempt, that you can't hide behind a PR wall anymore (so true!) and Agustin's reflections and actions on VRM (Vendor Relationship Management), that's CRM put upside down. Have you head about the new unit of a Yoad yet, which is 3% of your income? Me neither. Very interesting concept, have to find out more!

A big thanks to Ajit Jaokar, Tomi Ahonen and Peter Holland for organizing it, it was a great day! Looking forward to coming back in 2010!

The 2.1 GHz situation in London

While in London recently, I had my network analyzer with me to see who of the UMTS network operators uses how many 3G carriers (frequencies) in London.

Back in February at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, I noticed that the nework operators spared no expense on the exhibiton ground and had fine grained coverage installed in the different halls and used most of the carriers available in the UMTS band. In Barcelona itself, however, only a single carrier was used by each.

Back to London: Here, the situation is similar: Despite the recent uptake of 3G dongles, all but one operator use only a single 5 MHz carrier so far. The exception is Vodafone, who’s consistently using 2 carriers throughout London, even in the outskirts. In some areas, they might even use three, as a third carrier is configured but I didn’t pick up a signal on that one anywhere.

Interesting facts and good news, there is still enough space on the 3G band for further capacity enhancements when they become neccessary.

Kudos to Vodafone for their 3G network capacity in London, it’s unmatched at the moment!

Nokia Dungeon vs. Apple Cloud on Regent Street

On my way to the future technology conference in Oxford I’ve made a detour to London for some sightseeing. Walking down Regent street, I noticed that the Apple store and the Nokia store are just accross the street from each other so I visited both to get a feeling for how each markets their prodcuts.

While Nokia obviously only markets their mobile phones, Apple’s focus is mostly on their computers and peripherals. The iPhone is everywhere in the shop but most people seem to be more interested in the computers and the demos which are either one on one or for groups. Great idea, train the multipliers and they will spread the word.

The Apple store is several times bigger than the Nokia store and everything is held in white or very light wood color. Together with huge windows and the big glass stairs between the two shop stores it creates a very bright and daylight like experience.

The Nokia store on the other hand almost feels like a dungeon. Everything is held in black, lighting is scarce and there are no windows. That is of course good to bring out the best of the displays of the phones. However, I still felt much more comfortable in the bright Apple store.

Nokia is pushing the Music experience and the 5800 touch phone quite heavily, not only in the store but also advertises it very heavily throughout the city. No wonder sales a huge. Nseries and it’s multimedia capabilities on the other hand don’t seem to be emphasized at the moment.

Thinking about it, group courses on the multimedia capabilites of current Nokia smartphones would be a great thing for the store. After all I don’t think they are used yet by most Nseries owners.

If I ran the Nokia stores, I would also stock some pre-paid SIM cards with affordable Internet access already activated on them that are available in the UK. That way you can still sell the devices separately but have SIM cards ready for those people who want to buy the device and use the services right away. I wonder if mobile operators would be interested in that?

Around the World in a Split Second – Communication Fixed and Mobile

Sometimes when I reflect on how and with whom I communicate in a single day I am truly amazed at how fixed and mobile communication networks have so much internationalized my life that time and place only seems limited by different time zones.

Myself, I was in Germany today and here's the people and their countries of residence I communicated with:

  • Sent an e-mail to one of my readers to Korea who had a question on a reference in my recent book
  • Received an e-mail from a friend in Australia who wanted to have my view on the state sponsored fiber deployment for a country wide high speed network.
  • I chatted with a friend living near Rome in Italy
  • Had lunch at an Italian restaurant owned by a "real" Italian
  • Arranged an ad-hoc meeting at a company in Germany nearby while in the car
  • In the afternoon, I called someone already driving home in Germany to arrange a telephone conference for the next day.
  • Ordered train tickets from the French railways via the Internet for an upcoming trip to Holland
  • Listened to a classical music radio station from the US via the Internet
  • Answered an e-mail from a German reader of my blog
  • Received an e-mail from a friend in the US with a thank you
  • Transferred some money from Germany to Austria
  • Received an e-mail from the UK
  • Read my blog roll via Google Reader based in the US, forget to write down from which countries the blog entries came.
  • Received some travel information from an airline based in Ireland
  • Met with Swiss friend working in Germany and living in France
  • Wrote this blog entry with Typepad, servers probably located in the US
  • And finally, my blog was read today (so far) by people in 67 countries

And all conversations / e-mails / IM / Internet browsing was done wirelessly of course, via Wi-Fi, GSM, UMTS, etc. from the notebook, the mobile smartphone and a plain old DECT cordless phone depending on time of day and location 🙂