Category: Uncategorized

While waiting for the train this morning I read on Intomobile (sorry, can’t provide the link when moblogging) that Vodafone Germany will start an image recognition search trial in cooperation with news tabloid “Bild”. Readers can get more information on specially tagged articles (and maybe advertisments) by taking a picture and sending it to a Vodafone image recognition server. The server analyzes the picture and returns the requested information (I assume by MMS). That sounds very much like the technology from Barcelona based company DAEM Interactive. If that’s you, well done and lots of success! For the sake of the project I hope Vodafone thinks a bit about pricing before launching the project. The standard price of 39 euro cents for an MMS would be a major showstopper.

Interesting numbers I’ve been given during the MWC in Barcelona last week: To date, the Opera Mini browser for mobile phones has been download 35 million times. Currently, the browser is downloaded 100.000 times a day! According to Opera, their Transcoding Servers for Opera Mini serves about 1.5 billion pages a month. They estimate that the total traffic going to their servers represents around 25% of the total Internet traffic of Norway, the home country of opera. Despite Norway only being a small country it says a lot about the quick evolution of accessing the web from mobile devices.

One should think that it’s a good thing if a web site has a mobile optimized version of their content. With Opera Mini, a mobile browser that compresses full web pages in a way that they can be nicely viewed on mobile phones, I have quickly discovered that this is not always the case. Here are take two examples:

• Amazon: While the mobile pages are loading a bit faster than Amazon’s full web pages the mobile version only contains a fraction of the information of the full page. When looking at an article I can not even browse the description. Sorry guys, that’s too limiting. I want to see the full page compressed by Opera Mini and not Amazon’s mobile version.

• Another example is Spiegel online, a German news magazine. Again, the mobile version, if reachable at all from Opera Mini only contains a fraction of the articles and pictures present on the full page. Again, I would very much prefer Opera to fetching the full web page and then compressing it.

I am not sure if Opera is actively requesting the ‘mobile’ versions of these web sites (I don’t even want to say ‘mobile optimized’ anymore) or if the web sites choose themselves to send the mobile optimized version based on the browser identity string. If so, Opera should make the request with a full web browser identity. Opera, any chance of adding a ‘mobile/full version’ selection feature in the next release?

This week the Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted by Taptu over at Taptology. Lots of stuff to find there around mobile application development and an avalanche started by Michael Mace, commented by many fellow blog writers. Haven’t seen so many individual blog responses on a blog post of someone for quite some time. Looks like Michael has struck a nerve 🙂 For this and more, head over to the Carnival and enjoy.

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.