Nokia N97 Review Part 2 – No SIP – No Skype

Part one of my N97 review series focused on the touch based web browsing experience with Opera Mini. Today, I'll take a look at the Voice over IP, presence and instant messaging experience on the N97.

Unfortunately, there is not much to focus on at the moment. What I very much like on my (current) N95 is the integration of SIP telephony. Whenever I come home the N95 detects my Wi-Fi and automatically registers to my SIP VoIP provider sipgate and the phone becomes a combined cellular / cordless phone with a fixed line phone number and a cellular phone number. One would expect to find the same functionality in Nokia's latest flagship product but TO MY GREAT DISAPPOINTMENT the functionality was removed. The configuration menus are still present but the UI for making SIP phone calls from the phonebook or by typing in the phone number and then selecting "Internet Call" from the menu have been removed.

But what about the much touted Skype integration Nokia announced during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year? Again, a blank, no Skype to be seen anywhere on the phone. It made for good publicity then but if no actions follow, that kind of undermines credibility.

While it was one thump up in the last post, this post definitely ends with two thumbs down, my expectations for VoIP integration (based on the N95) were greatly disappointed. I don't really feel that connected anymore with the N97 🙁

Carnival of the Mobilists #181 at London Calling

Cotm-button This week the Carnival of the Mobilists has stopped over at Andrew Grill's London Calling blog. Especially Andrew's own entry on what IBM has done for the Wimbledon Tennis tournament last week from Twitter feeds to augmented reality applications caught my attention. I've followed augmented reality applications for a while and it's good to see they are entering the real world now. So without further ado, head over and enjoy.

Nokia N97 Review Part 1 – Touch and Opera Mini

Nokia was nice enough to send me a N97 for testing and of course I couldn't resist. There are already lots of extensive reviews about it all over the net saying both good and bad things. I can't and don't want to rival those reviews so I decided to report a bit about the things I personally like and don't like that others haven't looked at.

One of the killer applications on my N95 is Opera Mini. I much prefer it over the built in browser as it is much quicker and bandwidth efficient. On previous non-touch phones I realyl enjoyed Opera Mini's sophisticated keyboard shortcut controls. Typing *3 brings me to my favourite news web page, *5 to my favourite tech web site, *7 to Twitter, #9 to the search engine page and so on. Typing 2 scrolls upwards exactly one screen length, 8 scrolls down exactly one screen length, etc. The learning curve is a bit tough but once the shortcuts are memorized the browsing experience is awesome and lightning fast. So how does Opera Mini work on a touch based phone without keyboard shortctuts?

Much better than I thought! The Opera Mini touch implementation works quite well, scrolling up and down the page can be done by dragging a finger over the screen. After a while, the already big screen of the N95 looks rather small compared to the 16:9 screen of the N97. A downside of "touch scrolling" is that it is not quite as precise as scrolling with the keyboard controls of the N95. On the N95, it's simple to scroll down exactly one screen by pressing a button as described above. On the N97, moving the page in any direction with a finger requires some skill and the eye has to follow the page in order not to loose the location of the page where one has stopped reading. It surely looks nicer sitting in a Café but it is not quite as practicable. Nevertheless is is usable and I can live with it well, so I won't complain too much.

Some things are not quite as fast as with keyboard shortcuts. To go to my favorite news web page I have to press the "menu" button, select "bookmarks" and then select the web page I want to go to. Not too much of a hassle but it definitely takes a lot more time than just pressing *3.

I wonder if Opera is working on improving this as I think touch gestures could replace some of the keyboard shortcuts. A gesture to enter the bookmarks instead of going through the menu would already speed things up quite a bit. Also, Opera should increase the size of the menus and bookmarks when it detects a bigger screen and touch screen capabilities as hitting the right menu entry or bookmark with a finger takes a bit of practice.

So while I can't maneuver through the web quite as fast as on the N95, I nevertheless like the "touch" experience Opera Mini provides and it's difficult to declare a winner here. So I declare it a tie.

So this was part one of the review series.
Clicking on the "N97 review" tag at the bottom of the post brings you to the
other entries once they are published.

Commoditization

A reader recently pointed me to a post by Joel Spolsky where he writes about 'Smart companies [should] try to commoditize their products' complements'. A very insightful article and he gives a number of examples for this business strategy:

  • IBM's goal before they became a services company was to commoditize the PC add-in market.
  • Microsoft's goal was to commoditize the PC market to drive their software sales.
  • IBM's goal later on was to commoditize hardware and software by jumping on the Linux bandwagon to drive services sales.
  • Companies supporting 'open source' in general are deriving value from selling services or hardware around it.

This got me thinking of what mobile network operators could commoditize to drive the revenue they can make from their product, the network!? A recent article by Dean Bubley might contain interesting insights into that. In his post 'Under-the-floor to Over-the-top', Dean writes about how Vodafone works on projects to become a service provider across networks and gives some examples such as a Vodafone branded Facebook plugin and an iPhone web-application. When looking at these moves from a 'Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complement' angle, these moves might be interpreted as "we try commoditizing services running on our network and thus we increase our revenue".

  • directly, because more people will over time use our network and thus pay for Internet access / phone calls / SMS
  • indirectly via branded over the top applications so next time people look for a new phone or a new pre-paid / post-paid subscription remember who's innovative in the space.

Comments, questions, insights?

P.S.: Maybe this is another way to get rid of the "dumb bit-pipe" thinking…

Netbook, eeeBuntu and Mobility – Part 2

In the previous post I've described my first experience with an Acer Aspire One D250 netbook together with eeeBuntu (based on Ubuntu 9.04 Jauntry). I was quite impressed of how easy it was for the most part to get going. In this part I will look at how to get eeeBuntu working witch a 3G USB dongle and a mobile phone.

Easy Installation and Use

Networkjpg EeeBuntu detected both my Huawei E220 3G dongle and my Nokia N95 as wireless modems straight away, no configuration necessary. The first time they are connected, a configuration menu automatically appears which contains a pretty extensive network operator and APN settings list. After selecting a country and network, a profile is automatically created and added to the network list in the taskbar. Strangely enough, the menu entry did not appear straight away in all cases, sometimes a reboot was necessary when adding an new profile. In case the operator is not in the database, it’s possible to just select one of the operators and then edit the configuration by hand.

PIN protection Issue

3g-connectivity-2 Most of my SIM cards are not PIN protected so clicking on the new network profile entry connects to the network very quickly. With some of my SIMs, however, the PIN can’t be deactivated so the 3G dongle requires the PIN before launching the connection. While this worked pretty well the first day, I started to get problems since then and the behavior became pretty erratic. In the end, I wrote a shell script to send the PIN to the modem before using one of the 3G profiles.

Disconnecting and Status Information Missing

Disconnecting from the network also worked well via the network menu during my experiments the first day. Since then, however, for reasons unknown, clicking on “disconnect” has no effect, not with the E220 and also not with the N95. Unplugging the dongle or the mobile cuts the connection but brings further trouble. In many cases plugging the E220 back into the USB port has no effect and eeeBuntu needs to be rebooted. In Windows on the same machine, unplugging and plugging the dongle back in works well, so it’s not a hardware issue. With the N95 unplugging and plugging in again works in most cases.

Another thing that bugs me is that I have no means of seeing signal strength or to lock the 3G dongle to a certain operator or network technology as I can easily do in the launcher program provided for Windows. Too bad as this is a very handy functionality in some situations!

Summary

While the basic implementation for 3G connectivity works well, it is unfortunately a bit unreliable in eeeBuntu version 3. While I can maneuver around the issues, a normal user is likely to get frustrated.

Digital Dividend for Rural Areas First Says German Regulator

Recently, German legislature has approved the reassignment of terrestrial television frequencies to wireless Internet services (the digital dividend). Heise news now reports that the German telecoms regulator (the Bundesnetzagentur) has started speculating about potential obligations for this frequency range.

As the 800 MHz band is useful in both rural and urban areas, the regulator wants to ensure that it is not only used for cheaply covering large cities while rural areas are forgotten. Therefore, they are thinking about mandating that the band may only be used in urban areas once 80% of rural cities with less than 5000 people or currently uncovered zones defined by the government are covered with a minimal speed of 1 MBit/s (user peak speed?). An interesting move to ensure the intent under which the frequencies were freed up will be met.

Now let's see how quickly the frequencies will be auctioned.

Bluetooth Stack Removed from the PC

A self observation today: Call it spring cleaning but today I felt like organizing the PC a bit and remove any unnecessary components and programs that just slow down the startup sequence and are no longer used anyway. One of the components that fell pray to this action is the Bluetooth protocol stack of my Bluetooth dongle as I noticed that I can't remember when I last used it.

In the past, I used Bluetooth for transferring files and pictures and every now and then also for connecting the notebook via a mobile phone to the Internet. I no longer do any of that:

For transferring files it takes pretty much the same time to find the Bluetooth dongle or finding a USB cable. In addition, file transfers are much faster and programs can work directly on the file system of the phone. Hence, no more Bluetooth. I wonder if it would be different if my notebook had Bluetooth built in? Probably, especially if the file system of the phone could be mounted as a virtual drive programs have access to.

As for the notebook tethering, a 3G USB dongle has taken over for two reasons. First, I am now usually using one SIM card for voice telephony and mobile phone Internet access and another SIM card in the 3G dongle. It has simply become affordable and it is much more practicable. And second, even while still using a phone for tethering I preferred a cable as the phone was charged over the cable automatically.

I still use Bluetooth for a number of other things like transferring contacts from the address book to another phone, transferring a picture I have taken to a friend's phone, for my mobile Bluetooth keyboard, and I can still imagine buying another Bluetooth headset with A2DP for high quality stereo transmission.

Nevertheless Bluetooth's usefullness for me is far lower than what it used to be. The cable has regained some territory. A bit odd.

LTE – A Dictionary of Wireless Acronyms

In case you every now and then come by an LTE acronym you don't
quite understand (e.g. while reading the standards…), here's a great
resource that might help you in the future: As an online addition to
their book on LTE (LTE – The UMTS Long Term Evolution: From Theory to Practice)
Stefania Sesia, Issam Toufik and Matthew Baker have published a
dictionary on LTE acronyms. It's around 100 pages and very useful.
Highly recommended! Have a look at the left of the page, it's a bit
hidden (PDF Download under supplementary material)

Via: LTE Watch