Category: Uncategorized

Here I am in Boston and thanks to no data roaming agreements and use of different frequencies for UMTS my 3G mobile phones are pretty much useless. Well, pretty much but not quite as my N93 has Wifi on board which works over here just as well as back in the old world. So before I started my recent trip to Boston I was not quite sure how well free and municipal Wifi would keep me connected. After having been here for a couple of days, here’s what I experienced:

Free Hotel Wifi

Before coming over I searched the net if there are any hotels which have wireless Internet access included in the room price. While you would not find such a thing in Europe, there are actually a number of chains in the US that do this. A quick search came up with BestWestern and DaysInn hotels. It’s important to check that Wifi is  available in all rooms or at least in the room you reserve. Otherwise, "Wifi available" could also mean that you can only surf in the lobby. I decided to stay in a DaysInn hotel as the room rates are around 75 dollars a night including Wifi. I double checked availability by calling the hotel before making the reservation and was not disappointed. The Wifi signal in the room was strong and the bandwidth with about 400 – 600 kbit/s good enough for VoIP, web surfing, business and of course, blogging.

Wifi on the Go

I like to check my eMail and my favourite news web sites every now and then while I am on the move so the next crucial thing was whether there were enough open Wifi hotspots along my path to keep me connected. I toured Salem, Portsmouth and Boston and was never disappointed. Many coffee shops along the route offered free Wifi. Salem was the most noteworthy city with free Wifi almost at every corner. This might be due to the SalemOpen.Net initiative started back in 2004. Well, it paid out to get me as a customer as the local coffee shops sold more to me than if there had been no Wifi around. I also noticed that many restaurants and coffee shops offer free Wifi without advertising it at the door. Some of them seem to do it intentionally as their Wifi network name (SSID) is usually the name of their business. Others just seem to have put a Wifi access point in place without doing anything and I encountered "linksys" access points more than once. Well, thanks for the ride.

While small businesses seem to have caught the idea of offering Wifi to their customers as an incentive to come and stay, bigger businesses like for example "Borders Books" only offered paid Wifi. Well, looks like they don’t need the moving elite to buy books from them. Also, I found directories of establishments offering free Wifi like this one a good thing to get a first idea of what’s available where you go but it’s impractical to plan your trip around the locations that are listed.

Summary

All in all I am quite happy to see that the idea of open and free Wifi for customers has taken hold in the U.S. (or at least here in Massachusetts) and much more so than in Europe where this phenomena is not yet wide spread. Also searching for free Internet access before sitting down somewhere is a charm with a Wifi enabled phone or PDA. If I lived here, however, I’d still take a service contract from one of the wireless operators, as hunting for a hot spot is definitely not something I would like to make a habit out of.

I am back in the U.S. after 8 or 9 years of absence, reflecting my first impression over pancakes at Denny’s. Glad to see that since my absence GSM networks have sprung up here as well and my triband phones pick up both Cingular and T-Mobile U.S. just fine.

My German T-Mobile prepaid SIM card works just fine for both incoming and outgoing calls and even GPRS (no comment on costs though…). T-Mobile’s network around Boston has EDGE activated but since the cost for my roaming SIM card is prohibitive I rather not make any speed tests. Strange that Cingular still runs on GPRS, no EDGE in sight here.

My E-Plus (KPN) prepaid SIM card is also able to attach to both the T-Mobile and Cingular networks and incoming calls work fine. No GPRS though and outgoing calls are blocked. I already knew from their Web site but I would have liked to be positively surprised.

Here’s a link to an interesting video called "Shift Happens", giving some facts about individuality, growth of the human population, life long learning, growth of information and knowledge, computation power, transmission speeds, etc. etc. The background music it will give you goose bumps and the facts might trigger some interesting thoughts to play with.

Looks like I’ll be in Boston at the beginning of June for a couple of days. As I haven’t been at the east coast before please let me know if you have any suggestions for things to see in and around Boston, wireless, technology and historical. My schedule is packed with interesting and exciting stuff but I am sure I’ll find the time for a bit of sightseeing as well. If you live near by and would like to meet, please let me know as well. My eMail address is "gsmumts AT gmx.de".

Wow, a year has passed since I last had the honor to host the Carnival of the Mobilists on my site. Last time I got the heads up for hosting the Carnival via eMail while sitting in a taxi on the way from Lisbon airport to the city center. This time around, Rome’s the place, and my notebook is wirelessly connected via HSDPA.

It has been a great time since then in many ways and people contributing to the Carnival have sparked many great thoughts and ideas in me. The Carnival has also been invaluable to me in finding new people entering the mobile space and helped me a lot to keep my blog roll fine tuned to my interests and the ever growing, sometimes shrinking, but greatly evolving blog sites on mobile out there on the web. So thanks to all of you contributing to the Carnival and I hope you enjoy this week’s selection again:

• Nokia’s Transition To An Internet / Computer Company: Not to miss, and thus my favorite post of the week, is Michael Mace‘s analysis at Mobile Opportunity of Nokia’s transition process which top managers of the company keep mentioning to the press.

• Open Motorola: A lot of articles in this and previous Carnivals on Nokia so I was delighted to see Jason Devitt of Skydeck submitting an article about open OS platforms being pushed by Motorola.
  He doesn’t only discuss platform strategy for the 2007 Motorola device
  collection but also what OEMs are doing to get a presence in the
  wireless market.

• Innovate Europe 07: Rudy de Waele of m-trends.org must have had an exhilarating and busy week at Innovate Europe 07 as it seems he aimed for the Guinness Book of Records with the length of his blog post. His post contains tons of interesting information and is well structured so you’ll find the pieces of information that interest you very quickly.

• MobileCampNYC: More meeting and conference reporting: Marshall Sponder of SmartMobs has posted his impressions of MobileCampNYC which took place this week. Too bad New York is so far away from here, looks like it was worth going.

• Widgets: Sprung over from PCs to mobiles a hot discussion has set in on whether they are useful or not, about their advantages and shortcomings and if they are going to be the killer application for mobile (do they attempt to be?). Ian Wood, aka the Digital Evangelist discusses his thoughts after returning from a Mobile Monday London on the topic.

• AOL Mobile Portal Review: Dennis over at Wap Review has a great blog where he reports about hot new stuff for your mobile web browser. His contribution to this week’s Carnival deals with AOL’s mobile portal and how the services there compare and compete.

• Web 2.0 Micro Payment: Mobile Web 2.0 evangelist Ajit Jaokar writes about content discovery on YouTube and about finding a song/video so dear to him that he had to keep listening/viewing all afternoon. Dreaming aside he starts thinking about how producer, artist and distributer could be paid for their effort and his pleasure. Check it out at his Open Gardens blog.

• Bluetooth and Spam: Tim Trent over at "Marketing by Permission" takes a look at Technorati statistics of blog entries mentioning "Bluespan", "Bluecast" and "Proximity Marketing". Interesting information for mobile marketeers.

• S60 Font Sizes: Ever thought the fonts on your S60 phone should be bigger or smaller? Zach over at "Symbian in Motion" reports about a new tool that does just that for you.

• Hardware/Software Bugs: The functionality of mobile phones
  keeps growing and growing which is both good and bad. The down side is
  of course that the more stuff is inside the more can break. Tarek El Ghazali from "Symbiano-Tek" reports some trouble with his N80 that keeps forgetting time and date.

• Warranty Service For That Mobile Computer: Ricky Cadden of "Symbian-Guru.com" writes about his bad experiences with the NokiaUSA warranty service.
  I have to agree with him, 24 days return time for a broken N-series
  mobile is not acceptable. Nokia claims their n-series devices
  replace computer, camera, maps, etc. etc. That’s nice but it also
  creates a single point of failure that needs to be fixed ASAP an not in
  24 days…

• The World Before And After The iPod: I very much like Tomi Ahonen‘s thoughts about mobile on his "Communities Dominate Brands" site. This week he features an exciting article in which he postulates that soon mobile history will be seen as a time before the iPhone and a time after the iPhone. An article not to be missed.

• The Mobile But Non Web Device: In contrast to the article before, Barry Welford over at "Stay Go Links" argues that the mobile web is only a thing for geeks and companies should rather concentrate on developing a keyless phone just for making phone calls and not much else. He must feel a bit lonely with his opinion among the other articles in the Carnival this week. Nevertheless, his blog entry contains some interesting points!

• JavaFX: Sun seems to have decided to enter the mobile phone OS market. Competition is good and David Beers over at "Software Everywhere" takes a critical look at JavaFX, a mix of Linux and Java.

• U.S. Wireless Data Revenues: Chetan Sharma reports the latest numbers from wireless operators (sorry, wireless carriers) in the U.S. on "Always On Real-Time". 5 billion dollars revenue from mobile data services in the last quarter, 60% of it from non-SMS revenue. Here are the details.

• Where To Store The Data: Mark Wickersham sent in a post for Barbara Ballard of "Little Springs Design" with an introduction of where to developers should store their data. "local, server, and mixed mode applications" is the title of the post.

• Mobile Music Store Marketing: Xen Mendelsohn of "Xellular Identiy" reports on Sprint’s advertisement campaign for their new mobile music store. Looks like it’s a clever melange of virtual characters, MySpace and of course, music.

• HSDPA Performance: Those of you who already know my blog will probably not be surprised by my own blog entry for the Carnival this week. Since I am a network guy I tend to look at the wireless world from "the other side" = "the network side". So here’s the latest part of my ongoing series on reporting on HSDPA performance in live networks.

Wow, what a selection again this week, I hope you enjoyed it! We are almost at the end of the post and I have changed location in the meantime from Rome to Paris. Next week, Andreas Constantinou of the VisionMobile Forum will host the carnival.

And last but not least, if you want to submit a story of your own, send an eMail by next Friday to "mobilists at gmail.com" or use the carnival form here.

Wherever I go these days I see people with Nokia N-73 phones walking around. Incredible for a phone that has just been available for a couple of months. I think there are even more people now with an N-73 than with an N-70 which I think has been announced by Nokia as their so far most successful smartphone. Take a look at the Flickr statistics for picture uploads from Nokia phones. The curve for the N-73 shoots up like a rocket and has surpassed all Nokia’s by far already. A comparison of picture uploads between different brands would be interesting. Anyone aware of such a statistic?

The Nokia N95’s had me in it’s ban every since it was first announced. Finally, it’s also making it into the shops. I especially liked what I saw today when I walked by a shopping window of a mobile store in Rome. Take a close look at the trash bin on the left of the second picture 🙂

When I saw the first N95 in a store a couple of weeks ago the price was a hefty €739.-. Last week I saw one with a price tag of €699.-. And this week I saw it for €649.- (taxes included), no SIM lock. Very nice, I hope it keeps going in this direction. Amazon.de ships it (to Germany and Austria) for €663.95, postage and packing included.

DVB-H has been introduced in Italy already last year and it looks like it’s catching on. Now offered by Three and TIM, Italy not only seems to be the land where you can see people making video calls, it also seems to be the land of people that are watching TV on the go. It might have something to do with football as both people I observed, one on Saturday and one today, where watching a football game. While one of them was a hotel employee using his break outside to peek at a game, the other might have been an office worker waiting at the bus stop in Rome. People watching mobile TV are unmistakable because the mobile TV phones currently offered in Italy are mostly by Samsung, have a screen that can be rotated by 90 degrees and have a nice little extractable DVB-H antenna. Hm, maybe I should give it a try while I am here…

I am a bit late to the Carnival of the Mobilists this week, probably because of some violent stomach problems and night shifts to get some equipment running in a wireless network in Italy. Anyway, here’s the link to this week’s edition of the Carnival of the Mobilists, this time hosted by Xen Mendelsohn. Great job I very much enjoyed reading it and many of the articles you point to. Next week, I’ll have the honor of hosting the Carnival, so stay tuned here!

Here’s a picture of an Orange France advertisement for their UMA service called "Unik" for which they now also offer a Nokia 6086. I like advertisement that is clear, easy to understand, that makes me want something and that gives me all the facts. But this one!? It tells people nothing… How should people know that this panel promotes a fixed/mobile convergence product and that you need a France Telecom DSL connection and Wifi access point to use it? Why should people want to buy this phone after seeing the pannel? There are so many other 1 Euro (with a * to the fine print) ads out there. I am really puzzled. Maybe my French readers can enlighten me?