Category: Uncategorized

Like every year I will post live from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona again and provide my own angle on the show off the beaten path. Last year, I had a Nokia N93 and a Nokia N800 Internet tablet with me for the job. This year I was thinking about replacing the N800 with my eeePC as the web browser of the N800 is just too slow, i.e. very painful to use. However, after some deliberation, I decided against it, it is just too heavy to carry around all day. The benefit from having a full web browser and spell checker is just not big enough. So I decided that less is more and I will exclusively use my Nokia N95 and my Bluetooth keyboard to keep me connected during the week. Let the show begin.

I've noticed today that after the launch of my new book last month in Europe, it is now also available on Amazon in the US. It took a bit for the bulk shipment from the UK to arrive but now that it's available, sales seem to have picked up quite quickly. At the moment, Amazon.com says only a few copies are left and more are on the way. Thanks to all who have already ordered a copy! So if you live in the US or Canada and have considered getting a copy from Amazon.com, now's the time. At some point it will go back to "shipping in 7-10 days" status but it's usually restocked much quicker now that it is available from a local distribution center.

Interesting trend to observe these days in Europe: The revenue generated from data services in mobile networks is now close or even surpasses the revenue generated by SMS services. Recently, Vodafone Germany reported their numbers of the previous quarter compared to the quarter a year ago here and the table shows how data service revenue is now slightly higher than SMS revenue. Only a year ago, data revenues were still significantly behind.

What the table does not show, however, is that from an earnings point of view, SMS is probably still far ahead. After all, transferring 160 character messages through the network at a price of around 10 cents makes a far better bottom line than the megabytes of data transferred at a flat rate. But nevertheless, things are changing and it shows how mobile Internet access continues to increase in importance to mobile network operators.

This week, the Carnival of the Mobilists has stopped over at Ram Krishnam's "The Mobile Broadband Blog". It's edition 159 this week, quite amazing, and I still remember how I was part of one of the first single or double digits ones by accepting to run an edition by exchanging e-mails with Russel Buckley on my mobile phone while being on the way from Lisbon airport to a meeting. Nothing special these days anymore but at the time, quite something. Tomi Ahonen would probably say it was a magical moment. So without further ado, I can warmly recommend to head over and enjoy the great writeup.

Here’s some free advertising for T-Mobile. Stunning, so I had to link. Watch in HQ and full screen!

The T-Mobile Dance in Liverpool station:

And the ‘making of’:

Enjoy!

Not a truly mobile story today by itself but one that started as a such some time ago on this blog. A while back I reported on a first weakness found in the Wi-Fi WPA encryption. I didn't get all the facts right the first time and was promptly corrected by a reader who was kind enough to supply a link to Security Now, a great podcast show, that each week explains security issues at great length but easy to understand. I listened to the podcast, corrected my mistakes and subscribed to the podcasts on my N95 to have interesting podcasts while traveling. Recently I listened to podcast 172 about a program called Sandboxie for Windows machines that I think is so useful that I would like to mention it here.

With Sandboxie, you can put programs like web browsers, e-mail clients, instant messengers, etc. in a sandbox that redirects write access to files and the registry to a copy instead of to the original. This way should you catch a virus via a web page or via that attached power point file of an e-mail from a trusted friend, all the malicious code can do is harm a copy of the file and the registry. It can still steal data as it has standard read access to all other files but it can't harm the machine anymore. As soon as the last program in the sandbox ends, the files in the sandbox are deleted and gone is the threat.

It's even possible to install programs in the sandbox. They just run just fine afterward, but only in the Sandbox of course. Once you are done with testing, delete the sandbox and you can start from scratch. No orphan files remaining, no extra clutter in the already fat registry. So the concept of Sandboxie is quite similar to that of a virtual machine except that the applications have read access to the outside. The big advantages are that it requires no extra memory and processor resources, it just adds a shell of protection around those programs so they can't do any harm.

Completely blocking write access has it's drawbacks, too, of course. With a complete isolation, it's not possible to permanently store bookmarks for example and you will also loose your e-mail that is stored in local files once the sandbox is deleted. But the author has thought about that as well and it's possible to activate exceptions for the most well known programs so that their configuration and data files are not sandboxed. For less well known programs, it's possible to configure files or directories that are excluded from the sandbox manually. And, with the registered version, it's even possible to define programs which are automatically run in the sandbox when they are started. Great for an installation for less computer savy users to make the sandbox almost transparent for them.

So while it's not the purpose of Sandboxie to replace an anti-virus scanner it's a great tool to add another layer of protection. It takes some knowledge to configure it for individual purposes but once done, even less computer savvy users should not have a problem with it. So while the proof for that is still outstanding, I'll install it on a normob notebook soon 🙂

I love it how one gets from A to B on the web, I would never have heard of it would I not have blogged about the Wi-Fi WPA attack, if someone would not have commented and left a link and if someone else hadn't bothered to do a great podcast every week I listened to on my mobile phone during a long car trip. In this way, it is actually a mobile story after all.

This week, the Carnival of the Mobilists has stopped over at Tsahi Levent-Levi's blog, aka the VoIP survivor for an as usual impressive roundup of what's been happening in the mobile blogging sphere over the past week. To my great pleasure and surprise, my entry on the use of Wi-Fi in mobile devices has been voted for being the best post of the week. Thanks for that, I really appreciate it! So for all the best from the mobile blogging sphere, don't hesitate, head over and enjoy!

Quite often I discuss with colleagues and friends what went right and wrong over the years in 3GPP standardization. We usually agree that the first version of UMTS didn't get the data part quite right and that the first version of LTE has a serious problem with missing voice capabilities. Recently a friend said 'When 3G was designed, data was forgotten. When 4G was designed, voice was forgotten'. At first, I agreed to this but after some more reflection I think it doesn't quite hit what's happened.

I still remember vividly that when the 3G UTRAN (UMTS Terrestrial Radio Interface) was first designed, it was done with the purpose to add data capabilities beyond what was possible with 2G GPRS at the time. From that point of view, 3GPP has succeeded, because the 384 kbit/s downlink speed reached by first networks was an order of a magnitude higher than what was possible with GPRS at the time. However, the mindset at the time was still very much focused on dedicated channels on the air interface. So this was the method of choice for data transmissions despite the rest of the network being packet switched. Unfortunately, this lead to a very inefficient use of the air interface for packet data transmission such as web browsing with the resulting limitation in speed and number of simultaneous users. The situation was eventually fixed with the introduction of high speed shared channels, known as HSPA today.

Fast forward 10 years and we are now in the days of E-UTRAN, aka, LTE standardization. This time, the mindest was on packet switched only, at any cost. The cost was the 'down to earth – works out of the box' voice capability, which is sadly missing so far. I am sure there are quite a number of reasons for this but I think one of the main ones is that a majority of the companies in 3GPP are pushing for IMS and have been vehemently against any other form of voice capabilities. Other companies have made good suggestions, such as connecting the MSC to the E-UTRAN but so far the suggestion went nowhere.

Well, I guess it will be as in the case of UTRAN: A second round might be required before LTE can truly succeed UMTS.

After a year of hard work, it's a great pleasure to be able to announce the general availability of my latest book "Beyond 3G – Bringing Networks, Terminals and the Web Together". If you are a regular reader of this blog you can probably already guess what it is about. While the topics discussed in the book are similar to those I write about here, a book offers the opportunity to discuss them in much more detail and show the interactions between them.

O.k. so what's it about?

I start with giving a sound technical introduction to 3GPP LTE and SAE by explaining the decisions taken during standardization while also examining the likely competition for LTE such as HSPA+ and WiMAX. Capacity considerations follow. Then, I describe the latest mobile device developments, voice and multimedia services and the mobile web 2.0. Throughout the book, I do not only analyze how the systems, devices and software work but also the reasons behind why they are designed in this particular way. How these elements strongly influence each other is discussed as well as how network capabilities, available bandwidth, mobile device capabilities and new application concepts will shape the way we communicate in the future.

Some More Details

• I examine current and next-generation network technologies such as UMTS, HSPA+, WiMAX, LTE and Wifi
• Performance and capacity in practice are analyzed as well as future capacity requirements and how they can be fulfilled.
• You get an Introduction to the current cellular telephony architecture and to voice over IP architectures such as SIP, IMS and TISPAN.
• I look at mobile device hardware and mobile operating system evolution.
• And finally, I examine the major global wireless standards for application development and the latest state of the mobile web 2.0.

Where Can You Get it?

If I've aroused your interest and you are thinking about picking up a copy, there are many places to get it. It's available at Amazon.co.uk for next day delivery and Amazon.com in the U.S. will start shipping it in the next couple of days.  You can also order it directly at my publisher John Wiley & Sons, their worldwide shipping department is very efficient. You can of course also go to a book store and give them the title and the following ISBN number: 978-0-470-75188-6.

Browsing The Book Online

For more details, Amazon offers a 'look inside the book' function and a keyword search which brings up a list of all pages where the word is mentioned. From there you can jump to a page and also see a couple of follow up pages.

There we go! If you like this blog, then this book is definitely something for you! As always, I am glad about feedback and I wish you happy reading!

When I see one of my non-tech friends having bought a new mobile I always ask them a lot of questions about their new toy to figure out what works and what doesn't. Recently, one of my friends bought a Nokia N78, following my advice, as he wanted to have a nice phone, a good camera and mobile Internet connectivity. Also following my advice, he installed OperaMini, all by himself, I might add, and has figured out how to use the built in Wi-Fi to browse the web at home. Not bad I would say. But here are a some basic things he has not figured out by himself:

• Multitasking: He always used the 'red' button to end an application instead of the Symbian menu button. When I showed him he was very surprised and asked me how he could have known this. Right, how could he have known this!? But he was very happy about it because he immediately saw the value of just sending the browser and other applications to the background and returning to it later.

• GPS: He wasn't aware that GPS is only working outdoors. Therefore he was not sure if his GPS was working or not and a bit displeased with Nokia Maps for not showing him were he was. At least, the APN for the A-GPS was configured automatically so if he had tried it outdoors it would have worked. Maybe a notice when starting up Nokia Maps for the first couple of times to try it outdoors would help.

• E-Mail configuration: He asked me if he could also receive is personal e-mail on the phone. Sure you can I said, let's configure it together next time we see each other and you have all the required configuration information (pop, smtp server, etc.) Hm, the right answer would have been: Sure no problem, just type in your e-mail address and password and the phone figures out the rest. To this end, I think Nokia has made great progress already, as it worked pretty much like that on the Nokia 5000 when I was tested that device a while ago.

• Idle screen configuration: To start OperaMini he always went to the menu, selected applications and scrolled down to the OperaMini icon instead of putting it as a small icon on the idle screen for fast selection.

If I remember right, Nseries mobiles have a kind of "First Steps" application to inform new users about the capabilities of the device and maybe to teach them some tricks. However, I don't have it on my own device I must have probably deleted it. In any case, he did not use it, not sure why. So it might help to put that application into a more promiment place, add some more basic tips and tricks and maybe to ask the first couple of device startups if the application should be started. Or how about a discovery mode where tips&tricks are shown until the user turns it off? For the moment, I've sent him this link for further advice.