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It is said that all good things are three and I feel greatly honored to host the Carnival of the Mobilists for the third time now. The mobile ecosphere is moving at an astounding pace and it becomes quite obvious when I look back to when I first hosted the Carnival early 2006: The first usable 3G phones slowly coming to market, Nseries in it’s infancy, no iPhone, not a lot of talk then about mobile web 2.0 applications. Today, all of this is in full swing and this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is the proof:

Kindle: Starting off with Michael Mace’s analysis of Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader. I like Michael’s drill down approach of looking at new products and services including their impact on the industry. He always goes far beyond ordinary device reviews. He writes to the point: "Kindle makes the wireless network do what it should do: Disappear". True words of what should happen, not only for the Kindle. Vero over at Taptu has also taken a look at Kindle and shares her thoughts whether this will be the future device for book reading.

Education: Judy Breck over at the Golden Swamp writes about the "The Million" program which is an initiative considered in New York to give mobile phones to school students with on board learning software. Students get rewarded when using the software by additional voice minutes, SMS messages, etc. Great stuff!

More Education: Judy is not the only one writing about education this week. Mark van ‘t Hooft has attended Handheld learning 2007 in London and gives us his impression from the exhibition/conference.

Mobile News From China: To most non-Chinese the Chinese mobile market is a big mystery especially due to the total absence of 3G because no licenses have been given out yet. Paul Ruppert gives some insight in his post on Mobile Point View about a Chineese future of Vodafone.

Mobile and Africa: I think Tomi Ahonen and his Communities Dominate Brands blog needs no further introduction here. This
week, Tomi has written about short wave transmissions of SW Radio
Africa being blocked by the Zimbabwean government and what the radio
station does about it: To bring uncensored news to the people in
Zimbabwe, they have started using SMS messages. 8000 people have
already signed up with 100 additions daily. A great service and let’s
hope that those who have figured out how to block radio waves don’t
also figure out how to stop SMS messages.

The Real Web on the Mobile: Dennis Bournique over at Wap review has written a pretty extensive article on the “real” web on phones and what it means for designers. A very difficult topic and I am still waiting for a one approach does it all as everything he mentions in his article has happened to me in the past.

Missing Local Wifi Apps: Dean Bubley over at Disruptive Wireless is also somebody to whom you should listen closely when he’s got something to say. This week he joins the Carnival with an analysis of why Wifi now built into many cellular mobile devices have not yet started a revolution in the local network.

More Android: Andreas Constantinou of the VisionMobile forum has written a great piece about the significance of Google’s Android – A long, analytical thought piece on why Android is different to every other OS out there. Definitely worth to be checked out!

Battery Life: Staying in the mobile device area for another moment, Amir has analyzed battery capacity enhancements in Nokia’s N95 evolution to see what effect the larger batteries and new hardware have on the latest N95 versions.

IMS and fixed/wireless convergence: And finally, here’s my contribution to this week’s Carnival: I guess there’s not a lot that can be found on YouTube today. So I am not sure why I was a bit surprised to see Telecom vendors such as Ericsson, Nortel, Nokia-Siemens-Networks and Alcatel-Lucent spreading the word there, too. The mobile world from the vendors perspective!

Next week, the Carnival goes to to Symbiano-Tek in Egypt. I wished I could go there fore a little vacation, too 🙂

I didn’t know the IETF had a sense of humor! RFC 1149’s title is ‘A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers’. Definitely worth a read. And it looks like a quality of service extension was added with RFC 2549 ‘IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service’. 🙂

Recently, Finland’s Elisa has started the operation of one of the first UMTS/HSPA networks in the 900 MHz frequency band. While I heard this news some time ago I never quite figured out which mobile devices they had for the product launch. Most mobile devices shipped in Europe only support UMTS/HSPA on the 2100 MHz band. One of the few exceptions is Sony-Ericsson with their K850i, which also support U.S. frequency bands. But even this model does not support the 900 MHz band. Now Wikipedia reveals the secret: Elisa offers the Nokia 6121 classic for use in their network. As confirmed by this page on the Nokia web site it supports 3.5G on both the 2100 MHz and 900 MHz band. An encouraging first step! Keep going Nokia!

The Carnvial of the Mobilists celebrates its 100th edition today over at Abhishek Tiwari’s blog today. As always great insight from this planet’s top bloggers on wireless. BTW: Did you know Android applications will be written in Java? It was quite a surprise for me. For more, head over and discover.

Next week it will be my pleasure to host the carnival on mobilesociety. So keep these entries coming!

Switzerland has had some pretty good tariffs for mobile Internet access via mobile networks for a while now but only for postpaid customers. Looks like times are slowly changing there, too. Sunrise and Aldi Switzerland (using the Sunrise network) now at least offer data tariffs with prices that should allow mobile eMail and web surfing via the mobile phone browser.

Sunrise and Aldi Switzerland ask for 0.10 Swiss Francs per 20 kb block which is 5 Swiss Francs per MB or about 2.90 Euros. Well, way to go, but it’s a start. But I definitely would not use it with a notebook.

When roaming the price per 20kb block is 0.30 Swiss Francs per 20 kb block for all roaming countries according to the price list of Sunrise. That’s 15 Swiss Francs per MB or about 8.90 Euros. Not really on the cheap side but still cheaper than many other roaming alternatives for countries for which you don’t have a SIM and don’t want to spend a full 15 Euros for a 24 hour Vodafone Germany Websession.

I had a look on the Aldi Switzerland homepage for the details. To get a SIM card a registration form has to be downloaded, filled out and taken to one of the Aldi supermarkets when buying a SIM card together with your passport. Activation of the SIM card then takes around 24 hours. I wonder if things work quicker when going to a Sunrise shop!?

One more note: Orangeclick also offers mobile Internet access but prices are not competitive unless you subscribe to a 5 Swiss Francs add on which is deducted from the prepaid account once a month. This gives you 2MB worth of data and a price of 2.5 euros per megabyte afterwards.

More information on prepaid wireless Internet access via cellular networks for many countries can be found here.

While driving back home from a weekend trip I listened to this very interesting BBC world service podcast on Nokia, Finland and the land of the mobile millionaires (of course on a Nokia mobile phone…). A very entertaining 22 minutes story about a BBC reporter’s trip to Finland to discover how Nokia has shaped the people, the country and how they have shaped Nokia. So if you are interested in Nokia, rubber boots, Finland, mobiles or a combination thereof, it’s worth to listen in.

Since the EU has stepped in prices for mobile phone calls to and from the home country of a subscriber while traveling have fallen to (almost) usable levels. A nice move for people like me who travel a lot. But prices for calling from one country to another are still very high, even with a local SIM card. The same is true when you want to call a friend in another country (who has a SIM card of that country) while you are mobile. This is where Rebtel comes in.

Rebtel’s idea is based on the fact that national mobile calls are usually a lot cheaper than international calls.  So instead of calling an international number you create a ‘national’ number in Rebtel which then forwards your call to the person in the other country. An example: You are in Germany, have a prepaid SIM card and want to call somebody in Austria. If you do it directly, this will cost you around 1.5-2 Euros a minute. The alternative is Rebtel. Once registered you can use their web page or their mobile site to create a local number for your friend abroad. Calling that number costs around 5-15 cents in countries where competition among mobile operators is healthy. Rebtel then charges around 2 cents to connect to a landline or around 14 cents (VAT included) to a mobile number.

The method also works the other way round. You can give your friend a local Austrian number he/she can call for little money which then connects to your mobile in the other country. Rebtel charges you for the incoming mobile call (again around 14 cents a minute, depending on the country of course).

And the best is that the local numbers follow you! Rebtel allows you to configure up to 5 different mobile phone numbers. When you go to another country, say Italy, and you have a local SIM card you can switch to that SIM card in Rebtel. All contacts you have created will then automatically get an Italian local number. In case you use the local SIM card for Internet access things are very easy since the contacts on the mobile web page which you can access from the mobile phone are automatically updated to the Italian numbers.

I’ve given it a try over the last couple of weeks and have to say that I am very happy with the service. It works most of the time (o.k. it’s still beta) and voice quality is usually excellent. The only negative thing I can really report is that a connection is established even if the other end is not available or does not pick up. Consequently you always have to pay the local mobile operator for the first minute. This aside, however, Rebtel has saved me tons of money already.

Time flies… another week another carnival! This week the carnival is hosted by Andreas Constantinou over at the VisionMobile forum. So for all the latest on the mobile web 2.0, applications and devices head over and enjoy!

It’s a strange situation: Most mobile operators today would like to retain control over the application layer and rollout new services themselves instead of letting Internet economics do the job. In practice however, they do not spend a lot of effort to making even the few advanced services they have universally usable. MMS is a prime example as I had to discover recently.

Situation 1: I am in France, I have a French SIM card and wanted to send an MMS to a prepaid subscriber of another French operator, Bouygues. Instead of receiving the MMS, only a text message arrives at the other end with a web link. The reason is that the other end did not have a GPRS subscription. 5 years after the introduction of MMS!? It leaves me puzzled.

Situation 2: O.k. so I can’t send my French friend an MMS but maybe I can send one to a friend in Germany. Message sent, I’ve been charged for it but the MMS never arrived. How nice.

Situation 3: Some days later I was in Spain and repeated the international MMS scenario with a Spanish SIM card. Again, the MMS to a German SIM card was not delivered.

To me it looks like even 5 years after the introduction of MMS, there are still no international agreements in place to forward MMS between operators. Could you imagine eMail not being delivered because the recipient lives in another country? No, probably not. That’s because no international agreements for applications have to be in place to forward eMail. And if there had to be, just imagine how the Internet would look like today and how many people would use it.

Some might say, the difficutlies stem from the fact that telephone numbers are used instead of eMail addresses for MMS messages. True, but international SMS messages which also use telephone numbers work just fine these days. But maybe 5 years is too short a time to make it work? One should not think so.

In case you haven’t heard of Nokia’s Mobile Web Server yet, go check out my blog entry on it. In short the mobile web server is a port of the Apache web server to the S60 platform with a front end to access your mobile phone via the Internet or via a local Wifi network. Not a main stream application yet but with a lot of potential for the future. For those who want to stay informed what’s going on with the project check out the mobile web server blog which has just been created over at S60.