WirelessMoves

Xen Dolev is hosting this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists. If you are interested in the mobile Internet, it is the
ressource to find out what people are thinking and in which direction
the technology is moving. Have fun!

Once upon a day, GSM authentication and encryption was quite easy. A key, a random number, a little algorithm and off you go. Seems that was too easy for some people so they came up with a new authentication and encryption system called Milenage. Very hard to find  information about this written for the ‘non cryptanalyst’. Fortunately, I’ve finally found an exception. Take a look here. Enjoy!

Every day, mobile phones and the Internet come closer together. Recently, Nokia R&D have announced that they’ve ported Apache and Python to the S60 OS. They envisage to use the mobile web server to create new services for people on the net depending on the location of the owner. Indeed, interesting thoughts. I say let’s turn the stick around for a moment and think about what a web server embedded in a mobile phone can do for the owner.

A web server in a mobile phone combined with Wifi can also be a powerful personal platform, i.e. serving mainly the owner of the device. We are not far away, Nokia has already announced Wifi support in the Nokia N80 which should be on the market very soon. Here are some applications for a combination of Apache, Python and Wifi in a mobile phone:

• While you are at home, the mobile phone is part of your network via Wifi. Instead of using the small phone keyboard for many things like writing text messages or to change settings, you can use a web browser which communicates with the personal web server on the mobile phone.
• Today I use Yahoo! Go for synchronizing my calendar and address book with the web. This way, I can edit my contacts and my calendar via a web browser while at home or at work and synchronize back and forth between the desktop and the mobile phone. With a personal web server in the phone, no synchronization is necessary anymore. Everything is always in the phone. Of course there should be a function in the phone that automatically sends a backup of all data to a server while I am at home.
• If you are away from home and in the office, you can still use the web browser instead of the mobile phone as the web server can also be accessed via the cellular network.

These are just a few example of what the combination of web server, programming language and Wifi will enable people to do with a mobile phone in the future. Not to speak of all the other things Wifi on it’s own will bring like Voice over IP in the Wifi network at home and in the office, storage of all your music and videos on the phone and distribution to devices like the TV and stereo set at home, personal file server.

Almost everything is in place, now a couple of people just have to take the next step.

So here it is, my brand new notebooks with all the bells and whistles I’ve been missing with ‘that other old notebook’ while traveling. The last area in which I expected problems during installation was the wireless LAN card, Centrino label on it and all.

Yes, I still do believe in the message of some advertisements 🙂 The WLAN card worked at first for simple web page downloads and other things but failed whenever I tried to do some more advanced stuff like Skype or video streaming. So o.k. maybe it doesn’t like my access point. No big deal, got a second one for testing purposes. With that one it was even worse, lost connection every couple of seconds. Next I looked at the driver version for the Intel 2200BG driver (802.11b/g) and saw that it was from 2004… No wonder it doesn’t work… Next, I went to the notebook manufacturer’s homepage. Surprise, surprise, they still offer that same driver for download. O.k., been there before, so I downloaded the original driver from Intel, it’s just 80 MB (no kidding…). That one is from 2005. After installation, the WLAN works just fine.

Intel, wake up! Manufacturers that put your Centrino logo on a notebook should be forced to put recent drivers on the device. Lucky me I knew what I was doing. What about all those ‘ordinary users’ out there that can’t fix such a problem? They should not even have it!

For some time now, Nokia has used the Symbian S60 OS for it’s smartphones / high end mobile phones. The guys over that S60.com are quite happy with recent sales figures and see their OS becoming more and more popular. Today, however, I got a call from a friend of mine telling me that he’s reconsidering his current plan to wait for the Nokia N80 and instead go for the Nokia 6280 which uses, according to the Nokia website, the S40 OS (see a Nokia video of the phone). Tough times ahead for S60?

The 6280 seems to be a nice, slick UMTS phone with a crisp QVGA screen (320×240 pixel), 2 Megapixel camera, active standby screen and very compact dimensions (99,9 x 46 x 21 mm, 91 cm³). It’s only 21 mm thick, quite impressive for a UMTS phone. Even more impressive after seeing the video was the fact that Nokia says on it’s web page that this is a S40 phone!? O.k., I said to my friend, but it doesn’t have a number of things which make it worthwhile to wait for the N80:

• Built in WLAN
• 3 Megapixel camera
• Direct File system support over USB without drivers
• All the cool S60 applications I use like Liveblog, Opera, Office programs, Custom MP-3 player, RSS Reader, etc.

True he said, but if the 6280 is on the market before the N80, he’ll go for it anyway, it’s just powerful enough for him… I guess that proves that S60 will have a hard time extending beyond the smartphone market down to lower ranks. S40 and others seem to be too strong already and already knock on the smartphone door. Together with new Java JSRs, such operating systems might even try to get a share of the smartphone market for themselves. Well, competition is good 🙂

P.S.: Looks like the movie above was made in the U.S. -> the phone however is only GSM/WCDMA 2100 so it will only work in Europen UMTS networks…