WirelessMoves

As a follow up to yesterday's post on touch I've been wondering if Java programs have any means today to make full use of a touch screen with existing JSRs available on mobile devices or if support of a new JSR is required for that? I've been browsing a bit trough the list of APIs of the Nokia 5800, but as a non-Java developer it doesn't tell me a lot. It would be good if programs such as OperaMini that are used on devices of a great number of different manufacturers would have the possibility of using a standardized API. Anyone out there aware of what is (already) available/possible?

Lately, I've had the opportunity to experiment a bit with a Samsung F480, also known as the Toco, one of Samsung's touch screen phones. At a price point of 300 euros without a contract one would expect it to be a smartphone, as devices such as the Nokia N78 are available for less these days. However, it is not. Instead, it's a classic mid-range phone with a touch screen, so a bit pricey for it's capabilities.

That said, however, I found the touch screen implementation to be very good, intuitive and easy to use. A well done device that will surely find it's customers. After having gotten used to the large screen and big icons, it takes a minute to adapting again to the comparatively small screen of the N78. Many people will feel the same when taking the decision in a shop for which phone to go so this is a big advantage for touch phones in general.

When I look around in the metro these days I see a lot of touch based phones and mobile devices in the hands of non-geeks. Quite a rapid adoption in less than a year. The F480's touch interface can be used with one hand only, something that I think is very useful in crowded places such as the metro.

I guess what many people find appealing about touch user interfaces apart from the bigger screen sizes is the missing indirection from what they see to what they press. You want to launch the calendar application, you simply click on it instead of using the D-pad at the other end of the phone to first scroll through the icon list to select it. It's straight forward.

So where is Nokia with touch phones these days? There is the Nokia 5800 but it is still not generally available in December 2008, so Samsung, LG and others have a considerable advantage for the moment. I guess it has something to do with Nokia implementing the touch interface in their high end S60 smart phone OS, i.e. the task takes considerably more time than for a mid-range phones with a limited amount of software on it. There's a good review by Rafe Blandford of the 5800 and he comes to a similar conclusion.

In addition, what makes a smartphone powerful is the number of third party applications. While most current applications will run on a touch enabled S60 device they can't take advantage of the touch based UI unless they are adapted. Take OperaMini for example which is strongly keypad/shortcut based. For efficient use on a touch device a separate touch version needs to be developed so zooming, scrolling and selecting commands and options works via the touch interface as well. Many software developers won't be too happy about developing yet one more version / input method. 

The first N-series touched based device, the N97, is still at least 6 to 9 months out. That's a long time to wait. But it seems there are not many alternatives for me at this time. The iPhone is too restrictive, Windows Mobile based touch devices only seem to have a touch layer for use with fingers in the front with most applications in the back still being stylus based. And also, OperaMini is not yet touch based… Still too many obstacles for the moment.

Recently, Vodafone Germany's boss is quoted (in Germany) saying that Vodafone Germany currently spends a middle three digit million sum a year on power for its mobile networks in Germany. Interesting, so let's break that number down a bit.

Let's assume that Vodafone's yearly power bill for their complete GSM and UMTS networks is 400 million euros and that their DSL assets are not included. I am not certain of the later one but there's no telling if that is the case or not and how much power their DSL lines use. Let's further speculate that around 25 million people in Germany are using their network today (not SIM cards!). 400 million euros / 12 months / 25 million people = 1.3 euros per person per month.

I'd say their revenue per person (i.e. not ARPU per SIM card) is around 15 euros, which is probably on the conservative side. So around 8-10% of that is spent on power.

At a rate of 0.2 euros per kW/h, that means I 'personally' use about 6.5 kWh of power a month for mobile telephony and mobile Internet access. An interesting number, that is a bit higher than the 1.4 kWh that resulted from a calculation in this previous post. In the previous post however, a global average was given which did not take into account that in most European countries, most network operators have both a GSM and a UMTS network, thus doubling power consumption compared to countries which only have GSM networks. Also, networks are much more heavily used per person in industrialized countries, which again increases the power consumption per person as more base stations are required. For the total power use for my mobile activities one has to of course also add the power for recharging the mobile phone and to a certain extent also the power consumption of my notebook.

It would be an interesting comparison how much power is required for my fixed line DSL and telephony connection at home and in the office. The DSL modem / Wifi access point / DECT phone setup (let's say this is my private fixed line mini base station) consumes at least 15 watts, which amounts to 15 watts * 24 hours * 30 days = 10 kWh a month. In this number, the power requirements of the network behind is not yet included.

While not directly comparable, each of those numbers give an interesting insight into how much power is required per person to drive our information society. Compared to the several hundreds of kwh of power per month consumed per person in Europe, however, the number is not negligible but still quite small.

Looks like I finally found a Google Application to which there is nothing comparable form my use on both notebook and mobile phone: Google Reader for blog reading.

In the past I’ve been using Thunderbird for the purpose but it hasn’t been very practical over time for me since I don’t have a lot of time to read my blog feed on the notebook. So I was falling more and more behind on the feed up to the point when I simply had so many messages that I had to erase the backlog every now and then and start afresh. So I decided to give Google Reader a try because it is both on the desktop and on the mobile. After using it a while I have to say that the experience is great.

Now I can read my feed while commuting and can manage my feed, i.e. insert and remove blogs on the notebook or do some follow up research if required. Perfect! The picture on the left shows how Google Reader looks with Opera Mini. Nokia’s built in browser renders Google Reader in the iPhone version, which is a lot nicer, but since the browser doesn’t have a full page scroll feature it’s not really usable. Too bad but people have been complaining about this missing feature for years now… On the other hand, however, the stripped down version is a lot better for commuting, as more often then not there’s only a 2.5G network available.

Anyway, if you have trouble keeping up with your feed and have some time during your daily commute, Google Reader is the solution for you.

I wonder what will happen next year, when tariffs for data roaming will be capped at 1 euro per megabyte
which at current national pricing levels of many prepaid and postpaid contracts means that it might become cheaper to access the Internet from the mobile phone while traveling abroad than while at home!?

Despite
many operators now having competitive packages for mobile Internet access for as low as 9
euros for 15GB per month (3 Austria), many standard contracts or prepaid SIMs
still have very high mobile Internet charges attached to them. I wonder if that will change before/if the European ruling goes into effect in mid-2009. It would be a nice side effect.

2008 was full of events, news, thoughts and new insights and part part 2 of "Things that 'Moved' Me" captures the blog posts which left a remaining impression on my in the second half of this year.

July

I've been in Paris a lot this year on a client location which is in a new office quarter. While there is good coverage outside, I often found it lacking inside and I was wondering when the three mobile operators would finally upgrade their networks to give good coverage also inside the buildings. In the meantime, at least some of them seem to have moved and coverage has markedly improved. Also, the month brought some more LTE voice gap thoughts and musings on why the small screen suddenly becomes big in places such as the metro. Earlier in the year, Nokia has released a sub 100 euro phone with a great screen and OperaMini pre-installed and in this post, I was looking at what is still missing for mobile Internet access for the mainstream. And finally, I noticed that Orange must have probably upgraded or changed the configuration of their EDGE and 3G networks in France, as my N95 suddenly stopped rebooting frequently when connected to the Internet.

August

While in Europe, 3G is uniformly used in the 2.1 GHz band, different parts of the world use different frequency ranges. The U.S. is especially difficult for 3G since there are at least 3 frequency bands actively used for 3G now. This post reveals that base band chips supporting several 3G bands are now available and appearing in phones coming to the market, such as the Nokia N79 and N85. Being 'really always-on' is when you have a PDP context (i.e. an IP address) on your mobile phone for over 4 days without the network dropping it for one reason or the other. The IMS continues to evolve in 3GPP and this post on IMS Centralized Services gives an introduction on how vendors want to unify the circuit switched and the packet switched world under the hood of IMS. Also in August, I've given up my mantra of 'one SIM card is enough for everything' and have since moved to a 2 SIM strategy. While LTE does little to distinguish itself in HSPA+ in terms of raw speed given the same carrier bandwidth, efficiency of assigning air interface resources could give LTE an edge in the future as described here. GSM has been with us for many years now and some are wondering when its days will be over. Not for a while, I think, and this post gives an overview of possible phaseout architectures.

September

In September, I was in Berlin a couple of days and used the opportunity to visit the Fraunhofer FOKUS research center to get some great insight into current IMS developments. Wideband Speech codecs have been defined for a couple of years now but haven't yet made it into wireless networks. With VoIP, however, things might change as discussed in this post on VoIP Wideband Codecs. Most people are just using Wi-Fi to transmit data. Trapeze and other companies, however, have developed many more interesting applications as described in 'Giving Wi-Fi and Edge'. For mobile e-mail use, GSM and EDGE are still the better alternative to 3G and this post gives an overview of the FACH power consumption problem. Speaking of GSM, MUROS aims at squeezing 4 voice calls in a single timeslot.

October

While heavily used in 3G networks, ATM has reached it's peak and is clearly on the decline. Also in October I did some research in Unified Communications and reviewed this excellent book on the topic. 3G network stability has considerably improved and this post on an 8h voice, data and desktop sharing session is testament to what's possible if a network operator takes his work seriously. Some phones I had over the past year had to retire in October due to old age and were replaced by a Nokia 5000, a sub 100 euro phone with an excellent screen and OperaMini pre-installed. This review shows of what works and what doesn't with this entry level device. With the amount of Internet traffic rising sharply these days, 3GPP one-tunnel technology is one way of saving money and this post reports of first networks having started to use it. Mobile networks are now also capable of supporting CS voice calls alongside HSPA simultaneously. Wi-Fi has spread like crazy in the past year and I can now see 25 networks in my appartment in Paris. And finally for this month, if you are looking for recent statistics on mobile Internet use, have a look at this post on Sweden.

November

With LTE on the horizon, some operators will have to run GSM, UMTS and LTE alongside each other in some areas. Multi Standard Radio base stations might be the answer to keep costs and management overhead down. Could we possibly see virtual GSM in the future with this technology? Another issue that has to be solved for LTE to become a success is how to support the many different frequency bands in a single chipset. Revelation of the month: 3G dongle docks.

December

The 3GSM Mobile World Congress 2009 is only in February next year but it doesn't hurt to start preparing early. I've re-opened the 3GSM Event Wiki for next year for people to find out and leave information about 3GSM parties, jobs and accommodation in Barcelona next February. Also noteworthy in December is this Ericsson article on next generation mobile backhaul architectures. Femto cells have been a hot topic in 2008, and here's a post what's going on in 3GPP. LTE is not LTE, especially in China, where TDD LTE is likely to be deployed which is not the same as FDD LTE deployed in the rest of the world. And finally, Nokia World opened its ports for two days and apart from interesting presentations, the Nokia N97 announced there will surely be the device to crave for in 2009.

Summary

There were lots and lots of other posts in 2009 and it was quite difficult for me to select and narrow them down to only two posts. Quite a proof that the industry has definitely not moved slowly this year. 2009 will be another interesting year to come and I am looking forward to it.

As it's the 24th of December today I'd like to wish you all a merry Christmas and I hope to meet up with some of you next year during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona or some other event I will attend.