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The specs for the latest and greatest Nokia N78 lists a new feature which so far has only been available as an add-on for various products: An FM-transmitter to stream music and podcasts wirelessly to a Hifi set or the car stereo. What puzzles me is where they put the antenna inside the mobile or how it looks like!? At 100 MHz, the wavelength is around 300 cm. Even at a quarter of the wavelength the antenna still needs to have a length of 75 centimeters. How does that fit into a mobile phone? Can anyone shed some light on how this works in practice?

Neuf Telecom, an ADSL and fiber Internet service provider in France has started a fixed line voice service replacement offer via GSM and Wifi enabled phones. The difference to UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Acccess) services that use Wifi/ADSL to connect back to the wireless network, their solution is a true VoIP over Wifi solution, (probably) using naked SIP over Wifi. For the GSM part of their service they use SFR’s mobile network. For them, UMA does not make sense as they are a fixed line operator and do not have a mobile network. According to their FAQ, voice calls initiated over a Wifi network to fixed line numbers in France and a number of other countries are included in the monthly subscription fee. Further, the FAQ says the mobile can be reached both at home and outside via it’s mobile number but doesn’t mention anything about being reachable with a fixed line number while attached to Wifi. So it looks like VoIP over Wifi is only used for outgoing calls for the moment. Let’s see if they are bold enough to add Voice Call Continuity (VCC) to their offer to allow seamless roaming between GSM and Wifi and a fixed line number to be reachable for an acceptable price. Unlike most UMA services that can just make use of Wifi access points allowed by the network operator this solution works over any Wifi access point that has been configured in the phone, i.e. also from abroad. Very nice! I’d like to get one of those phones into my hands to see how well the integration of the service has been made into the GSM phones they offer for the service.

After four days of hyper-blogging from the Mobile World Congress I am both sad and happy that the show is over now. Well, at least for this year. Time to take a break. I hope you enjoyed the posts. Normal programming resumes over the weekend.

Ovi’s going to be a lot of things for Nokia in the future. During the congress, I’ve been looking at Ovi Share, one of the first Ovi applications, to see what the difference is to using Shozu to upload to Flickr, YouTube, etc. What Ovi does is to combine all of those services as it let’s you upload all kinds of content from pictures, videos to PDF files to Ovi to share with others. The S60 Ovi client syncs with the portal and knows the groups that have previsously been created to share content with predefined user groups or the public. Also, the client can grab recent uploads of friends and show thumbnails of their new pictures, etc. right on the phone. Very nice integration into the S60 platform. I was also quite impressed with the AJAX implementation on the desktop. Very smooth user interface to view pictures and videos and add information to uploaded material. Forwading content to other people via eMail and the like is also possible. If the Ovi Share client runs on my N93 I’ll create an account once I am back home. Could become my new content home.

I’ll leave it up for others to judge if it has been a smart move of Sony-Ericsson to use Microsoft Mobile along UIQ as an OS for their high end phones. So I have a different pitch for this story: When browsing the specs of their new Windows OS Experia X1 phone I noticed that it will come in two hardware versions: One supporting HSPA in the 850/1700/1900/2100 MHz bands and another one in the 900/1700/1900/2100 bands. The first variant is probably targeted at the US and Australian market since they have networks in the 850 and 1900 MHz bands and that one odd HSPA network of T-Mobile in 1700 MHz. The 2100 Mhz is for roaming. The second variant seems to address the European market where we might see UMTS migrating to the 900 Mhz band soon beyond the first network in Finland using this frequency. So while I am happy to see quad band HSPA support coming soon I have the feeling that the story does not end here.

I am an international traveler so Internet access anytime anywhere no matter where I am is of grate importance to me. I am glad to see that there are now chipset solutions on the market which integrate CDMA and UMTS in a single chip for notebooks. I’ve spoken to Regine Pohl of HP during the congress about this as HP has integrated Qualcomm’s Gobi platform in some of their business notebooks. For HP the advantage is that they can use the same chipset for all their notebooks worldwide while the user benefits from global seamless access no matter of the network technology. The chipset, however, is only one part of the equation, roaming agreements and affordable roaming tarrifs another. To this end, Regine said that HP is in contact with mobile operators to not only offer notebooks to their customers but also customized global access solutions. I am looking forward to this initiative to bear fruits.

Today I noticed an interesting shift in mobile phone usage behavior at the congress. Despite the mobile Internet being evangelized in the past years by many, most people still had their phone at their ears for making phone calls. This year when I look around the majority of people at the event have the phone in their hands to check eMail and browse the web. Good to see that it’s finally happening on a larger scale.

Believe it or not but I have not touched my notebook since last Sunday. The reason is simple: I leave the hotel at 7:30 in the morning and come back home around midnight. During the day carrying a notebook is simply not practicable and once back in the hotel, sleep is much more important. So as you might have noticed due to the spelling errors here and there that I’ve been blogging and picture uploading to Flickr only from the mobile phone. And it has worked very well this year. Typepad has finally managed to get their eMail posting feature straight and posts are now instantly put on the blog. So kudos to them, it works a lot better than last year. To see what others are doing and to keep myself informed, accessing the web from the mobile during the past days has been just as equally imporant. I’ve installed Opera Mini on my N93 before coming to Barcelona for the purpose and played around with it a bit before arriving in town. I’ve been a bit of a sceptic concerning Opera Mini before, being a Java application and all. However, I’ve changed my mind since as the experience of accessing standard web sites via its transcoding features is simply amazing. Especially over the crappy Yoigo network, it shows how its strenghts as it compresses web pages to something that can be downloaded even over such networks in a fly. And on the phone itself the application is very fast despite not being a native application. Might have something to do with the ARM Jazelle extension for executing Java code in hardware. So my prize for the application that gives me the best mobile experience this year goes to Opera for the Opera Mini web browser.

It has been good to meet with John Edwards of picoChip at congress with whom I’ll be holding the WiMAX course at the University of Oxford later this year together with Chris Beardsmore of Intel. Since my scope of interest in wireless ranges from layer one to the application on the top I very much enjoyed to see picoChip’s latest chip for LTE and WiMAX base stations in action. While others use Asics for the lower layer protocol handling and decoding, picoChip has designed their own chip with an ARM 9 processor and their own DSP to do the job more flexibly. The ARM processor used for the higher levels of the protocol stack runs Linux and the chip is used both for WiMAX and LTE. Looks like their solution has become quite popular as their WiMAX implementation has been chosen by testing houses as the reference design all other WiMAX companies have to test against. Chris allowed me to take a picture of their base station reference board and you can find it in my 3GSM Flickr stream on the right of the page.

It looks like somebody at HP has noticed that I think and write a lot about mobile network infrastructure so I was invited to a number of interviews with key people managing HP products for mobile network operators. One striking thought I had during the discussion with Peter Dragunas of HP was that I need to turn my view on how telcom operators and web 2.0 companies could work together totally upside down. So far I was always arguing that the relationship between the two parties is difficult at best as Web 2.0 companies go for the global audience while network operators usually only have a national view. Dealing with hundreds of mobile network operators to bring their applications to mobile is a difficult task at best that few Internet companies will try to undertake. But what if the network operators went out and created services to link their assets to Web 2.0 applications instead of the other way around? Peter gave me a practical example: Telecom Italia Mobile has created an application with HP’s help that allows people in SecondLife to get a virtual mobile phone in their virtual TIM store and then send and receive SMS and potentially also voice calls between virtual phones and phones in the real world. Quite a fascianting applicatio and it’s easy to see how TIM can make revenue with the service. Peter could not say whether the idea came from TIM or SecondLife in the first place but I think it’s a good role model for other wireless operators to think about (mobile) web 2.0.

Anyone out there with other examples of how mobile operators reach out to the web 2.0 world?