Category: Uncategorized

Public Transportation – I like it when there is a bus every 5 minutes. But every now and then you end up in places with less frequent service. So how long to wait for the next bus? Dennis over at Wap review describes a couple of interesting projects that bring the information right to your mobile phone – in some cities at least.

Dean Bubley over at Disruptive Wireless has written an interesting article describing why applications running on multi bearer mobile handsets (read GSM, UMTS, HSDPA, Wifi, UMA, Femtocells) must be aware of  which networks are available and react accordingly:

• Some bearers are not terminated in the operator network: Think local network, phones interact with local equipment such as PCs, VCRs and home appliances in general.

• Different bearer characteristics. Some bearers are fast, some are slow, some are cheap others are expensive. Applications should adapt to this.

• To access web pages and services outside the operator’s domain it’s not necessary to tunnel the IP traffic through its backbone in case several bearers are available and one gives direct access to the Internet.

A well researched article, I fully recommend to read the full piece. And a quote from it to finish:

"A lot of people don’t understand all this [the points above], particularly if they work at a mobile operator and still fervently believe that anything you do on a handset is "a service", rather than understanding that sometimes you want to do non-service activities as well."

Another week, another Carnival! This time the Carnival has stopped over at Wap Review and Denis has done an outstanding job to give an overview of the best people in the blog sphere have written on mobile topics in the past week. So if you haven’t done already, head over and enjoy!

This week, the Carnival of the Mobilists has arrived at All About Symbian. In it’s 66th edition, it’s as always a great roundup of what mobile bloggers had to say in the past week. Great job, Rafe, thanks a lot! So don’t wait and head over!

This year has started with a lot of positive creativity on the operator side in Germany and elsewhere. Examples: Affordable prepaid mobile data is now available in a number of countries (Germany, Austria, Italy for example). Also, Vodafone has introduced a €15 euro a day roaming for data on prepaid SIMs and Three has even scrapped roaming charges for mobile voice and data altogether. It seems, however, that there is also some anti-creativity on the operator side these days when it comes to inventing new fees for so far free services. As reported by Teltarif in this article, Arcor and 1&1, two Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNO) of Vodafone Germany, have silently put fees for incoming SMS message while roaming into their fine print. Prices for incoming SMS messages are foreseen to range between 59 cents and 1.49 euros depending on the country. Charging for incoming SMS messages will start by mid of this year.

The problem with charging for incoming SMS messages is that the user can not stop receiving SMS messages while roaming today. So if these MVNO’s really start doing this, then the least I would expect of them is to offer the possibility for the user to block incoming SMS while roaming. Also, I would expect them not to charge users for sending SMS messages which are then blocked by the receiver. Well, let’s see what happens, I am still not convinced that they will prevail with this.

I am not sure yet if this is a move intended as a threat against current activities of the EU to lower roaming charges or if this will be another nail in the roaming coffin which will inflame decision makers in the EU even more and push them to reduce roaming charges even further.

More Anti-Creativity Suggestions

It seems some operators are getting desperate these days to compensate for falling prices for voice minutes. Here are some suggestions from my side in case you need more destructive ideas for your business:

• Charge users for switching their mobiles on and off
• Charge users making a call which is never answered
• Charge users for switching voice mail or call forwarding on and off.
• Charge users for the time their mobile is switched on per day
• Charge users for mobility, i.e. charge them when they don’t leave the phone at home but instead carry it in the pocket while roaming out and about.

All these events require network interaction and all of them are recorded. No problem to forward these records to the billing server. I am getting goose bumps…

So all jokes aside dear operators. Instead of this roaming SMS anti-creativity why are you not considering some positive creativity like your competitors as shown at the beginning of this entry to increase your revenue by offering interesting services at affordable prices?

A couple of days have passed since I posted the first entry on the Nokia Maps / Smart2Go application and how it fares for car navigation. In this post I’ll take a look at how well the application fares while being on foot in an unknown city. I am in Rome at the moment and since I don’t know the city very well, a great opportunity to use the application. Be warned, there are quite a number of things to be described so this blog entry is not going to be a short one.

The Tools

In the past days I’ve been using the Nokia Maps application on a Nokia N93 together with an external GPS receiver connected to the phone via Bluetooth. In addition, I downloaded a map of the metro system of Rome as a pdf file to the phone and archived a couple of eMails on the phone containing addresses of places I wanted to go and phone numbers of people I wanted to meet. As a backup I also printed out all of this information since I am a strong believer of always having a plan B. Having all information on the phone turned out to be much better than the paper version as the information is instantly available without having to open the backpack or going through half a dozen sheets of paper to find what one is looking for.

Preparation Phase

Before going on a trip I usually do some preparation work at home to ensure I have all the information I require and to get an idea of where the hotel, work place, train station, airport etc. is located. I usually do this on the PC with an Internet mapping application such as Map24 or Mappy or the PC application of my ‘old’ navigation system. This time I additionally located the places I wanted to go in Nokia Maps on the phone and saved them as landmarks for quick retrieval later on. I felt that the step on the PC is still required as the mobile phone screen is too small for getting an overall view of the situation. Also, the mapping application behaves quite slowly when zooming to a resolution that covers a couple of kilometers on the screen. Scrolling through the map in this resolution is quite frustrating. Scrolling through the map while only showing a few streets around a location, however, is very quick. Since this is the view which is later on also required for navigation it’s still tolerable.

Warning: Being in an unknown city and not knowing exactly where to go is a stressful situation. Trying out new things while already being overwhelmed by external impressions is not advisable. Thus, knowing how to use the mapping application before one has to rely on it takes a lot of stress out of the situation.

Navigation vs. ‘Free’ Walking

For street navigation on foot two application modes can be used. If you’ve paid for navigation you can use the on-foot navigation option to plot a course from the current GPS position to the selected place. While this works great for car navigation I found it quite awkward to use for street navigation on foot. When walking into the wrong direction for example, the application re-calculates the route instead of just asking the user to turn around. Also, the application constantly switches back to car navigation for which routing rules are quite different. For the moment, I therefore prefer the standard mode as shown in the image on the left in which the user saves a destination as a landmark which is then displayed on the main map. The current GPS position is shown as a cross and the location is updated as the user walks down the street. As destinations are usually in walking distance (less than 2 km for most occasions I would say) it’s easy to zoom in and out at the beginning to find the right direction and keep the zoom level low for the final turns. In practice this mode worked well for me and on top is even free of charge.

Usage Scenario 1: Airport to Hotel

It’s midnight and the plane touches down at Ciampino airport. After waiting endlessly for the baggage to finally show up on the transportation belt there is only one thought left for the day: How long does it take to get to the hotel!? A Taxi is found quickly and somewhere in the twilight zone between being aware and asleep I manage to start the mapping application on the mobile phone to observe the progress to the hotel. The GPS receiver takes a couple of minutes to find the satellites but one locked I see the distance shrinking and shrinking. It’s also a good tool to see if the driver takes you on a sightseeing tour to increase the fare. In my case the driver was honest, tired or both as he took the direct route to the hotel. Great!

Usage Scenario 2: From Work To The Train Station To The Apartment

Getting picked up by a local in the morning for work at an unknown place has its benefits. Being dumped on the street after work to find your way home through a foreign city is less fun. But hey, I’ve got a navigation system now, so finding my way from work to the next rain station worked like a charm. Off I went with the metro to the station closest to the apartment I’ve rented for the next weeks. I’ve never been at this place before either, so the mapping application has to prove itself once again. Now that the GPS receiver has kind of understood that I am in Rome, it usually takes less than 15 seconds for getting a first position. Again, finding the apartment is easy as walking in the wrong direction immediately becomes obvious on the mobile’s screen.

Usage Scenario 3: A Ride To The City Center And The Search For A Bookstore

I am sure you’ve been in a similar situation as this. You are in a foreign city and somebody tells you to take this or that bus to ride into town to go to a certain place, a book store in my case. Great, you are on the bus but you are not really sure when you should get off. Be it because instructions where not quite that detailed or be it that the bus stop signs are not really very well visible. No problem with a navigation system in your hand. I’ve created a landmark in the mapping application for the book store I wanted to visit and was following the progress of the bus towards my destination. No more anxiety of when to get off or to miss the right stop. Once it looked close enough on the phone’s map, I got off and walked the last meters to the book store. I am impressed. Wandering through the narrow streets of Rome I noticed that the GPS receiver has some problems now and then giving me a precise position. Sometimes the position fix is lost altogether. In practice this is not much of a problem as reading names of crossing streets is good enough to follow your progress on the map.

Summary

I have to say that I am impressed by the possibilities of Nokia Maps. Similarly to car navigation, using the application for navigating through a city on foot takes some of the uncertainties and detours out of the equation. Finally, I have a feeling of direction which I was so desperately missing when wandering through unknown cities. Not all people feel as disoriented when coming to a foreign city as me. For those who do, however, this application will be a real help. As processing power increases on mobile platforms, some hiccups described above will surely be fixed as well, improving the experience further. And looking even more into the future a total navigation solution with voice commands and instructions is quite imaginable. But that’s for another post.

After winning the awared for the "best host of the Carnival of the Mobilists in 2006" during last month’s 3GSMWorldCongress in Barcelona, Rudy de Waele over at m-trends sets out to do it again for 2007. Once more, Rudy has presented the best blog entries from the mobile world in his very special way. So don’t wait and head over for a great read!

According to its name, the Nokia E65 is an S60 business phone. Three Italy, however, sees opportunities for the phone in the consumer market as well as impressively shown by the three beauties on the pictures.

I’ve known for some time that there are special mobile and fixed line phones out there which can encrypt calls from end to end. I recently met Dr. Björn Rupp, CEO of GSMK, a company developing such phones. While probably not of much interest for the average person, there are a lot of people out there from politicians, police, top level managers, etc. who want to be sure their call is not intercepted. Not by the government, not by a secret service, not by tech savvy reporters or nosy mobile phone company employees. All these people can get access to normal mobile calls as the only interface over which the call is encrypted is between the mobile phone and the base station (GSM) or the radio network controller (UMTS). Over all other interfaces, the call is sent without any encryption and core networks even contain standardized interfaces for law enforcement agencies to tap into calls.

The phones developed by GSMK encrypt calls end to end by establishing a data connection between the two ends instead of a normal voice call and then use a strong encryption algorithm to ensure eavesdroppers have no chance. Dr. Rupp’s business card is also the first one I’ve ever seen which contains his PGP key ID and fingerprint. Also, they’ve published the source code of their encryption algorithm on their website, so no security through obscurity. Cool stuff, I am impressed!

The 3GSM Congress 2007 is over but the year continues to provide interesting meeting and discussion opportunities in real life for people working in the mobile industry. London is not only attractive for it’s monthly Mobile Monday gatherings but also for Symbian’s Smartphone Show and the Mobile User Experience Conference (MEX) which will take place on the 2nd and 3rd of May at the Wallacespace near Covent Garden.

It seems this conference is different for a number of reasons. Firstly, the conference has a 10 point ‘manifesto’ which deals with the current state of the mobile user experience and how the organizers around Marek Pawlowski think it can be improved. No beating around the bush, they come right to the point. The manifesto was then given out to potential speakers of the conference for them to choose one of these topics to kick off discussion from their point of view during the conference.

The speaker lineup is very interesting indeed as well. Christian Lindholm for example, one of my favorite ‘mobile’ personalities, formerly director at Nokia and serving as a VP at the mobile division of Yahoo for some time will lead a session on how mobiles and applications should adapt to changing physical environments of the mobile user. Among others, the speaker lineup also includes Cliff Crosbie, Director of Retail Marketing at Nokia, Al Russell, head of Mobile Internet & Content services at Vodafone, Mathew Menz, Head of Interaction Design of Motorola and Antti Ohrling, co-founder of Bylk.

The venue itself is also quite interesting. Instead of a standard conference place, the organizers have selected Wallacespace, which, judging from the pictures on their web space, is quite comfortable and very much different from normal conference places. I am quite thrilled about the whole lineup so if my daytime job allows, I’ll attend.