Martin – Page 279 – WirelessMoves

Test Driving Nokia Maps / Smart2Go – Part 1

How delighted I was when I heard Nokia’s announcement that they would release their Nokia Maps (a.k.a. Smart2Go) mapping application for handsets other than the Nokia N95. Right after coming back from the 3GSM congress, I downloaded a copy for my N93 and used it in the past couple of days together with a Nokia LD-3W Bluetooth GPS receiver. If you want to get a basic idea of what it does and how it works I can recommend a good intro on Antony Pranata’s blog. After using it for a couple of days now I sat down tonight to blog a bit about how the application performs in practice.

I decided to split this report in several parts as the mapping software is quite powerful and has more features than can be described in a single entry:

Part 1: Navigation to close-by (100km) destinations.
Part 2 (to come soon): Nokia maps as a guide for finding a location in a city while walking
Part 3 (to come soon): Route planning and navigation for destinations 500+ kilometers away (more demanding than the task in part 1)

Part 1: Car Navigation To Close-By Destinations

License and Payment Model

Most features of Nokia maps can be used for free. The most important ones are certainly the free download of all maps, route planning and GPS city navigation on foot. Car navigation with voice commands, however, is not free. The pricing scheme is quite interesting. Western Europe maps for car navigation for a 30 day period are 10 euros. A three year license is 99 euros. In practice, I think this is quite a good idea as it’s possible to try the application for a month for a small sum before making a longer and more expensive commitment. For Nokia, selling their service this way has the additional benefit to bind customers to their phones for the next three years as the 3 year license can be used with another phone as well by safeguarding the activation code received during the payment procedure. Paying for voice navigation can be done directly in the application by entering your credit card information or by premium SMS.

Getting The Maps

There are several ways to transfer the maps to the phone. The most convenient way is to download them as they are needed over the air directly into the phone, either via Wifi or via the GSM/UMTS network. For my first test I tried both ways by searching for some destinations all over the world. Maps for the surroundings of these destinations were quickly downloaded. When zooming in or out or moving around the selected destination, additional parts are quickly added as well. Maps are not discarded after exiting the application and are re-used. In order not to use the GSM/UMTS network for my other tests I decided to download additional map parts via the Nokia MapLoader, a program on the PC. Over the PC additional maps can be downloaded to the memory card of the mobile phone within a matter of minutes. I decided to download the maps of Southern Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Rome (Lazio) and Paris (Ile de France). Together, the maps require around 200 megabytes, no big deal for my 2 GB memory card.

Selecting the Destination And Calculating A Route

A route for navigation is selected by using the current GPS location as starting point and by searching for a destination either by address, by previously stored location (landmark), from additional guides (to be bought separately), from recent searches or directly from the map. When searching for a specific address the application searches the maps already loaded and also remote maps in case an Internet connection is available. The beta version of the software I used had a pretty ugly bug in the search function. When I entered several words for the street name (e.g. "Rue Lafontaine") the search became stuck in an endless loop and I had to restart the phone. Searching for addresses works o.k. for single words ("e.g. Lafontaine") which also finds my "Rue Lafontaine". Search times are acceptable and a search takes about 15 seconds. Once the destination has been found the next step is to calculate the route and to display it. For my test I selected a destination about 50 kilometers away to see how long the route calculation would take. For my destination, the calculation took about one minute. Quite a long time when you already sit in the car, poised to go. Once the route is shown on the map one can start navigation. Again, the application takes about another minute to re-calculate the route before the first voice command is finally issued.(**) This is quite long in practice and the software designers should concentrate on making this process faster. However, it is still acceptable and usable.

Navigation

Navigation is pure joy. One can select 2D or 3D mode. The picture on the left shows how navigation looks like in 3D mode. Unlike on the picture, which was taken just when a turn occurred, the route to be taken is always shown in vertical direction, i.e. you always drive towards the upper side of the phone screen. I was a bit concerned that the screen would be a bit too small in practice. To my positive surprise, however, I had no issues with the screen size while driving, possibly also because the voice commands where clear and were given at the right time. Also the maps were up to date and newly built roundabouts were already known.

Running Other Applications While Navigating

I like to listen to podcasts while driving so a main requirement for me is that the application allows other programs to run in the background. This works quite well in practice and on my way back I listened to a 45 minutes podcast running in the background while navigating. The occasional navigation speech commands and podcast audio were mixed and played over the speaker simultaneously. Incoming calls mute the podcasts and one can accept or reject incoming calls as usual. When rejecting, the phone returns to the mapping application and resumes the podcast. When accepting a call, the mapping application was terminated, probably because the phone ran out of memory. Not good in practice as you have to stop afterwards and repeat the route planning. It could be that the mapping application was terminated because the podcast application was also running. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed with some additional memory…

Stability

Taken everything into account I am quite happy with the mapping application. It does its job and it does it well. Stability however, could still be improved. While using the mapping application this morning for example, the calendar reported an upcoming meeting while I was driving and using the mapping software. This prompted the phone to make a reset and to deny reactivation until I removed the battery for a couple of seconds. Not quite what you want to do while driving. It could have been the OS, it could have been the application which malfunctioned, but as a user I don’t care.

Summary

Part 1 was already quite convincing for me. If the application also performs well for navigation to destinations more than 500 km away (part 3 of this review), I’ll leave my old navigation system at home for my next trip. So much for today, more on other things you can do with Nokia maps in part 2 of this review. If you have any questions in the meantime, please leave a comment.

(**) Update: It’s also possible not to display the route and instead hit the back button a couple of times to leave route planning once the destination has been found and displayed on the map. Once out of route planning, the application still shows the selected destination on the map. From the menu, it’s now possible to select "navigate to" which saves the time required to calculate the route. Not quite obvious to do it this way but it saves a lot of time.

Deep Inside the Network: Wifi WPA authentication

In the past, Wifi networks were criticized a lot for being insecure. In the meantime, however, the IEEE standards body and the industry have reacted and designed WPA and WPA2 (Wireless Protected Access) which is implemented in most products today. WPA and WPA2 deal with both authentication and ciphering and a lot of information is available on the net about the ciphering part. Information on the authentication part, however, is scarce. Time to change this:

As shown in figure on the left, a client joins a network by performing a ‘pseudo’ authentication and associating to the network afterwards. In a WPA network an additional authentication and key exchange follows this procedure. The first authentication has thus become completely obsolete but has been kept in place nevertheless. The access point announces that WPA is to be used instead of the older WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) by including an additional WPA description parameter in beacon frames which are required to inform nearby stations of the presence of the access point. This parameter informs clients that an additional step for authentication and ciphering key negotiation is required after the association procedure. The parameter also contains additional information concerning the algorithms to be used for authentication and ciphering. First WPA implementations use TKIP (temporal key integrity protocol) for ciphering, which is described in more details below. Current devices also optionally support AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), which has become mandatory for WEP2 as also discussed below.

The figure on the left shows the four step process required by WPA in pre-shared key (PSK) mode to authenticate the client to the access point and vice versa. In addition, client and access point agree on ciphering keys during this process, which are used for encrypting user data frames once authentication is complete. In the first message, the access point sends a random number to the client. The client then uses the random number and the pre-shared key, i.e. the password the user types in once, to generate a response. The pre-shared key has a length of 8 to 64 characters. The response is sent back to the access point together with another random value. The access point then compares the response to the value it has calculated with its own secret key. If the secret keys of client and access point are identical the two values match and the client is authenticated. The access point then generates a session key which it then encrypts with the pre-shared key and sends it back to the client. The client uses its pre-shared key to decrypt the session key and acknowledges proper reception in the fourth message. This implicitly activates ciphering in both directions. In a final step the access point then informs the client of the session key used for broadcast frames. This message is already encrypted. While the session keys for individual user data frames are unique for each client, the key for deciphering broadcast frames is the same for all clients because such frames have to be decrypted by all.

By using session keys instead of the pre-shared key for ciphering it is possible to change the session key frequently to prevent brute force key generation attacks. A typical value to negotiate a new session key between the access point and a client is one hour.

Additional information on Wifi and other wireless technologies can be found in my book as advertised on the left side of this blog. And finally, if you like to trace these messages yourself, take a look at this blog entry.

Interviewed By The Voice Of S60

While I enjoyed the sights and sounds of Barcelona over the weekend, Phil Schwarzmann, a.k.a. the Voice of S60, was already back in Helsinki and was busy putting up the podcast we recorded on Thursday at the 3GSM congress. In the podcast we discuss the congress, the exhibition, S60 competition as well as my blog and a my latest book. The 14 minute podcast is available for download here.

Prepaid Mobile Internet Access Keeps Evolving

Just two weeks have passed now that three German Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs), all using the networks of E-Plus, have announced to slash costs for mobile Internet access to 0.24 Euros per megabyte for their prepaid offers. I’ve tried it out myself and I really like the prepaid way of being connected wirelessly while on the go. The companies haven’t gone silent since and have kept the press busy with new announcements.

At this time only AldiTalk SIM cards give users access to the UMTS network while subscribers of the other MVNOs are restricted to the GSM/GPRS network of E-Plus. One of them has reacted now has announced that SIM cards which allow access to the UMTS network will be available shortly. I guess some people must be really busy right now getting this in place to catch up with the competition.

To keep the press writing about the new tariff, one operator has announced that new subscribers will get a welcome bonus of 80 megabytes. Not too bad! Keep going guys, hopefully the competition using the T-Mobile network will wake up and enter the prepaid mobile data realm as well!

3GSM: Public 3G Networks Get Their Fair Share of Load

3G has been around for a couple of years but I guess even at the congress, networks have only been lightly loaded in the past as most people were still using 2G phones.

This year, things are a lot different. Except for ‘proud’ Berry owners, most other people these days carry a 3G phone and are using it heavily to make calls. I’ve also seen people skipping the Wifi coverage, which is a bit slow at times from what I have heard, and instead use their 3G PC card to access the Internet.

One of the toughest 3G environments in the world must be hall 8 this week with all major mobile phone manufacturers being present and showing their latest and greatest phones using the four public 3G networks. There must be hundreds of phones in this hall using the networks simultaneously and still they manage to show their online demos with good performance.

Every now and then I go online as well to get my eMails and to post my blog entries with my mobile phone. The network feels a bit slower in the halls than elsewhere but still I get my work done.

I think this speaks for a number of things. Firstly, all operators on site must have made sure their networks have enough capacity. It also shows UMTS is able to perform well in such demanding environments. And lastly, I think that 3G network use for both voice and data this year at the conference is most likely is higher than the use of the GSM networks.

The public does not seem too far behind. Yesterday, T-Mobile announced a revenue of 1 billion (dollars?) from data services excluding SMS in their group last year. Agreed, this is only a tiny fraction of their overall revenue, but data use has increased 8 times over the previous year and the amount of data transfered is doubling every quarter. Looks like competitive and attractive prices for mobile data finally get the mobile Internet train rolling.

3GSM: Talking About WiMax

I find it a bit strange that at this years congress there’s lots of talk and demos on WiMAX. I wonder if the organizers are very happy about this as the exhibition is focused on GSM and UMTS. WiMAX on the other hand, once ready for the market, is direct competition for established UMTS operators. Most infrastructure vendors like Motorola, Lucent and Nokia are showing some kit and there is even a dedicated WiMAX booth in hall 1. From the demos I think it’s quite clear that 802.16e hardware is still in it’s early phases. Sprint is exhibiting on the WiMAX booth and, just like Intel, they are showing Samsung WiBro handsets and PCMCIA cards. While WiBro is a close cousin of WiMax 802.16e, it’s not the ‘real’ thing. Other companies showing their kit on the WiMax booth are Motorola, Samsung and Nokia. However, it’s mostly chartware for now.

3GSM: My Nokia, Publisher and Party Day

Day two of my conference was packed dawn to dusk with interesting stuff. After all the announcements of new S60 devices the day before, I was more than keen to take a closer look at them at the Nokia and S60 booth. Unlike the year before, S60 joined their mother company in the main hall but fortunately was still separated a bit so most people rather went to the hopelessly overcrowded Nokia booth to stand in line rather than to go to S60 to check things out without any hassle.

I very much liked the E90, aka the new Nokia Communicator. Great resolution screen on the inside, smaller screen on the outside which is however fully usable. You can start web browsing on the big screen, close the Communicator and continue browsing on the smaller screen on the outside. Very smart. The E90 does GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA and Wifi, so fast Internet access should be no problem anymore where ever you go.

As hoped, I met Jouni, aka Marketing Man of S60 on their booth and we had a long chat about the new S60 3rd edition feature pack two. Things which stood out for me were for example the enhanced animation when browsing through the menus. Also, the new memory paging feature, which is a bit less obvious for the user, but which will hopefully prevent applications from being closed once the device runs out of memory because two many applications are open should further enhance usability a bit. This is my main pain point with the N93 at the moment as the browser just takes monumental amounts of memory when browsing on normal web pages. Memory paging in feature pack 2 allows the OS to page out parts of the memory used by applications waiting in the background to the Flash memory thus making room for the memory requirements of other applications running in the foreground. I didn’t see the new paging feature running yet so it remains to be seen how fast memory is paged in and out in practice.

I also went away very impressed from the N95 mapping application demo. The mapping application is now available for download from smart2go.com for lots of other S60 devices and I can’t wait to try it out myself as soon as I have some time to install it one my phone. Stay tuned for my usability report which I will do shortly.

I was also happy to finally meet Ganesh in person, who is in charge of the S60 browser marketing. You should check out the podcast Phil Schwarzman made with him a couple of months ago, which is available on the Voice of S60 homepage. I very much liked the new floating menu in the browser and the offline RSS reader capabilities.

In the afternoon, I was kindly invited to the S60 press panel and I got to talk to Lee Epting, Vice President of Forum Nokia and Matti Vaenskae, Vice President of Mobile Software Sales and Marketing. Quite an interesting panel for me, it gave me a lot of insight how S60 works on integrating all people from the value chain including mobile operators. Some interesting statistics from the panel: 85 million S60 devices have been shipped to date and 25 3rd edition phones models are already on the market (Compare that to a single iPhone which is not even on the market yet…)

Before completing my Nokia day at the exhibition at the S60 party at the Palau de la Musica, I went to my publisher to see how sales of my book are doing at the exhibition and in general. As every year, Wiley is at the Congress to show their wide variety of telecom books at the exhibition and I was glad to see that people were eagerly buying books.

So much for the days events and news, pictures as always on Flickr.

3GSM: MobileMonday Global Peer Awards

The first highlight of my 3GSM experience yesterday were the MobileMonday Global Peer Awards. Lots of people showed up and it was very much a Web 2.0 / Conference 2.0 feeling. Many people knew many people from their blogs and other activities on the net.

Rudy de Waele of m-trends and founder of Momo Barcelona did a great job to bring everyone together: A first class jury for the awards with people like Carlo Longino of MobHappy, Russell Buckley of AdMob, and Daniel Applequist of Momo London just to name a few. Next to the jury there was a first class audience, first class networking during the breaks and first class sponsors like Telefonica and Reitek without whom something of this dimension with several hundred people attending would not have been possible.

To the hard facts now: 24 (!) Mobile Monday chapters have sent their best startup to Barcelona to present. I was quite impressed with the AsiaPac Region with India having had at least three cities presenting as well as several chapters from China. My personal favorites for the best startup idea were PartyStrands of Barcelona with their interactive party music system, the people from the chapter in Ukraine with their online game (sorry, I forgot your company name…), the people from MoMo Paris with their browser scrolling idea, the mobile payment solution from the Bangalore chapter and the S60 MMS and SMS encryption and security solution from the Bangkok chapter. I was also quite fascinated by the Wifi positioning presentation, of which I have heard before but never quite understood the concept until yesterday. Very cool stuff!

In the end, the jury award went to Plazes, quite known already in the blog sphere for their mobile social location service. Another award went to the guys from the MoMo Paris chapter with their innovative scrolling solution about which I have to find out more and about which I will write separately. Finally, Rudy de Waele got the award for the best Carnival of the Mobilist post of last year. All very deserved!

To close this post in Techdirt fashion, I have to note that I did not see a single Blackberry user at the event. Nokia Eseries and Nseries devices on the other hand were everywhere. I leave it to you to figure this one out 😉

For pictures, head over to Flickr.

3GSM: Day One and Mobile Sunday

So it is finally Monday morning and the exhibition has opened it’s doors. It’s still rather quiet here no queues and shoving scenes at the entrance and inside the halls yet. It’s not going to last. This morning is my free morning, no appointments to run to, just walking through the exhibition halls to discover new things.

Some people are saying that the most important thing about 3GSM is not the Congress itself but what happens around it. I tend to agree. Last night I went to the Mobile Sunday Barcelona, organized by Stuart Mudie and Rudy de Waele. Lot’s of people came who I knew, who knew me and lot’s of people I haven’t met before. William probably got the prize for coming from the most distant place, the Philippines. Rafe of AllAboutSymbian.com had difficulties making sure his N95 prototype didn’t get lost while wandering through many hands 😉

To make it a real mobile party, MyStrands was there with their PartyStrands (http://mystrands.com) music system which lets people influence the choice of music that is played via SMS, or via the Internet either via GPRS/UMTS or over the free Wifi which was in place last night. The system also allowed party goes to send text messages and pictures which were then displayed on the big screens. A truly enjoyable evening. Thanks to the organizers and a hello to all people I met last night.

Zooming back to today: This is going to be a short exhibition day for me as the Mobile Monday Peer Awards will take place this afternoon starting at three. 700+ people have registered and it’s going to be a monumental event. Looking forward very much to it.

So, before I sign off for the moment, here’s a link to Flickr where you will find the images I take during the week: http://flickr.com/tags/mtrends

Pre-3GSM: Prepaid 3G Data – Tested

Last week a number of German Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs)announced that they would slash prices for mobile Internet access to 0.24 Euros per megabyte. The news almost sounded to good to be true. Thus, I decided to test one of the new prepaid offers myself while on the way to the 3GSM Congress.

I decided to go for the ‘Aldi Talk’ offer for two reasons. First, Aldi is the only MVNO currently offering SIM cards that are not only allowed to use the GSM network of E-Plus but also their UMTS network. Second, getting a SIM card is straight forward. Aldi is a big supermarket chain in Germany and their offer is available in all of their stores. The SIM card costs 15 euros and includes 10 Euros worth of voice calls (14 cents a minute to all networks, 4 cents between Aldi’s customers) or data traffic. Activating the SIM is straight forward and can be done for example via the web. Within half an hour my SIM was usable. Access to the Internet with my notebook via the UMTS network of E-Plus worked immediately and without any difficulties, as I looked up the required GPRS access point name (APN) before, which is internet.e-plus.de. Also noteworthy: It seems Nokia has done a lot of homework as my N93 automatically added the necessary configuration for on device browsing and MMS when I first inserted the new SIM card. Well done, Nokia!

I surfed the net for a while with my notebook and checked the traffic counter before hanging up. I used about two megabytes and right after the session my balance was reduced by about half a euro, just as expected. The remaining balance on the prepaid account can be checked at any time by sending *100# to the network and so users have full control of how much they spend.

Aldi Talk, or E-Plus in general, seems to use a transparent proxy for web requests which compresses pictures on web pages to improve page download times. While not really necessary while being in the UMTS network, this is a very nice feature while surfing the net via the slower GPRS network. Unfortunately, the compression can not be turned on or off and a lot of people are thus quite unhappy about this functinonality. However, there is a way around this as further discussed below.

The Aldi talk offer is not restricted to web surfing. I also sent and received some eMails via SMTP and POP3, sent a picture to Flickr via Shozu and used my IPsec client to establish a secure tunnel to my company. All applications worked just as they should. Very well indeed!

I can also set my IPsec client to send all packets through the encrypted tunnel instead of only those destined to the company intranet. This has the added benefit that pictures on web pages can not be compressed by the E-Plus web proxy. The same effect can be reached by other means as well. Many DSL routers at home these days can act as a PPTP (Point to Point Tunelling Protocol) server and if the Windows XP built in PPTP client is configured to be used as default gateway, all packets can be made to traverse the encrypted PPTP tunnel to the DSL router and from there to the Internet. This, however, should only be done if the DSL uplink has a higher capacity than the UMTS downlink in order not to slow down the connection.

To me, the new prepaid mobile data offer holds what it promisses. I have full access to the Internet at a reasonable price for the data volume generated by my applications. On top, I get very competitive prices for voice calls as well, so I am one step closer to using a single mobile phone for both voice and data again. The next step would now of course be to offer affordable international data roamig as well. Hutchison’s Three networks have made the brave first step in this direction and I hope others will follow the good example.