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Chetan Sharma has taken over the Carnival of the Mobilists this week on this blog Always On Real-Time Access. As always, the carnival is diverse, entertaining and thought provoking, so head over and enjoy! The two posts that especially stood out for me personally this week were James Cooper's report on mobile Internet use in South Africa and C. Enrequie Ortiz's short enty on one click for effective use of bar codes and NFC.

It's interesting to see how RIM attempts to push their Blackberrys beyond their core market, email business users, and how it advertises the new models. It's funny when you come across the same poster in different countries in different languages, it's almost like a deja vu. Below are two examples of the same poster, one from the U.K. and the other from Italy.

While Michael Mace says RIM is not in the same market as Apple except for some overlap, it seems to me that this overlap is not that small anymore. With their campaign they are definitely trying to increase the overlap, just as Apple tries to add functionality to appeal to business users to increase the overlap in their favor.

I think even before this advertising campaign, RIM has already moved beyond the typical business user anyway. When I was in the US recently, I saw lots of definitely "non-business" people carrying a Blackberry. Maybe that's because there is not a lot of choice. In operator stores, there was the iPhone, a couple of Blackberry variants and a couple of very low end phones. Nothing much in between.

Today, a friend showed me Opera Mini on his new 'Nokia 3110 Evolve', an entry level phone with supposedly a slow processor (compared to Nseries phones) and a screen resolution of 'only' 128×160 pixels. Since he's using OperaMini it was a good opportunity for me to find out how practicable web browsing is on this phone compared to higher end phones. After upgrading from the default OperaMini 2 to OperaMini 4, the browing behavior is the same as on my N95 including the overview mode and zoom in functionality. Concerning browsing speed and scrolling through the page I didn't notice any uncomfortable delay after pressing a button. Even scrolling quickly through a long page is very quick as well. I didn't quite expect such a smooth behavior. Great stuff, kudos to both Nokia and OperaMini!

It’s good to see Nokia presenting two new Nseries models yesterday. While I leave it to others to report on all the multimedia details, I was intrigued that both devices support several UMTS frequency bands, a first for Nseries devices.

The N85 has the most wide ranging UMTS band support. According to the datasheet, there will be two versions: The first one supports UMTS in the 900/1900/2100 MHz and is thus clearly targeted at Europe and the starting deployments of UMTS in the 900 MHz band in addition to the 2100 MHz band. The 1900 MHz band is at least partly usable in the US, where AT&T has deployed UMTS in some cities. The second version supports 850/1900/2100 and is probably mainly targeted at the US since AT&T uses both frequencies. Too bad it doesn’t support all four bands, it would make a great world band phone that way.

But despite the support of three UMTS bands there are some combinations which don’t work so well: For Australia, both models are needed since Telstra uses the 850 MHz band for 3G and Optus deploys 3G in the 900 and 2100 MHz bands. So should both operators sell the phone in the future they will each sell a different version.

Some people in Europe might actaully prefer the US version of the phone as there are only few places where 3G is deployed in the 900 MHz band yet and they might thus benefit more from the 850 MHz band when roaming in the US (e.g. with an AT&T prepaid card for Internet access). Bizare… Also interesting is that T-Mobile US won’t be able to sell the phone since it doesn’t support the AWS 1700/2100 MHz band.

The N79 seems to support 900/2100 MHz for now, so clearly targeted at Euope and potentially Optus in Australia. I wouldn’t be surprised though to see a 850/2100 MHz version soon.

Well done, Nokia, it was really time to add multi band 3G suport to Nseries, especially for roamers like me!

The Carnival of the Mobilists is back for a week where it all started, at Russel Buckley's and Carlo Longino's MobHappy. It seems a lot of people have come back home from vacation as this weeks Carnival is filled even more than usual with lots of great links to wireless insight. So don't hesitate, head over and enjoy!

Teltarif reported recently that O2 Germany have now configured their packet core to accept any kind of Access Point Name (APN) configuration of the mobile to activate a default Internet connection. According to O2 this will make it easier for customers to use the mobile Internet as configuring the mobile is simplified.

However, the article also mentions the bad side of this move: In the past, a non- or wrongly configured APN prevented accidental use. Now if the user forgets to lock his mobile before tugging it away in his pocket and that "@" key gets pressed, O2 happily starts charging. It already happened to me a couple of times under different circumstances. Especially nice when you are abroad…

So despite their probably good intentions I am a bit sceptical that this is a good move for consumers. From my point of view it's not the APN configuration that keeps people from trying the mobile Internet but the inadequate standard pricing many operators still have in place.

This week, the Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted by Debi Jones over at mobilejones. A post not to miss since Debi does a great job of covering all the latest news, thoughts and ideas around mobile and the Internet of the past week. So, head over and enjoy!

In a recent press conference, Vodafone UK gave some numbers concerning the use of their 3G network. According to them, 50% of the data traffic is handled by only 10% of the cells. As I don't know what was said around that statement I wonder if they see this as good or bad!?

I can see several conclusions to draw from this statement:

I guess mobile operators would prefer a uniform traffic distribution in their network, both in space and time. But it doesn't even happen for voice calls as traffic is much higher in cities compared to the countryside and highly varies throughout the day. That's why operators use high capacity cells and increase base station density in cities.

So if most of the traffic is occuring in only few cells it could be good for Vodafone because they only need to upgrade those cells for higher data capacity on the air interface and the backhaul while while leaving the rest of their network as it is. And if that is not enough in high use areas additional base stations could be put in place, but again only in certain areas.That is simpler and maybe also cheapter than to densify the network throughout the country because traffic distribution is uniform.

On the negative side it could of course also mean that they can't keep up in the future adding capacity fast enough. For the moment, I hear that Vodafone's network is still doing fine, even in densly populated areas.

So if you are reading this and have some more background information or want to share your own thoughts around this statement, please consider leaving a comment.

Another week, another Carnival! This week, the Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted by AllAboutIphone.net by Matt Radford. As always, a great compilation of what happened in the mobile blog sphere in the previous 7 days. So don't wait, head over and enjoy!

Do you know Ajit Jaokar and Michael Mace? If not I suggest to head over and check out their blogs (here and here) for great insight into the mobile domain. Or, even better, use the opportunity to meet them in person on the 8th of September at the University of Berkeley, California at the Mobile Web Megatrends Conference on September 8th, 2008. Topics of the conference range from mobile browser evolution, browser offline capabilites, advertising models, the iPhone (of course…), mass market impact with Nokia's S40 6th edition, cloud computing, etc. etc.

Lots of other great speakers, I let the conference's web site speak for itself.

Definitely a conference not to miss if you can make it. Unfortunately my calender is already booked for that date so I won't be able to make it. But good for you since I have one free ticket to give away! First come first served.