WirelessMoves

Day two of my conference was packed dawn to dusk with interesting stuff. After all the announcements of new S60 devices the day before, I was more than keen to take a closer look at them at the Nokia and S60 booth. Unlike the year before, S60 joined their mother company in the main hall but fortunately was still separated a bit so most people rather went to the hopelessly overcrowded Nokia booth to stand in line rather than to go to S60 to check things out without any hassle.

I very much liked the E90, aka the new Nokia Communicator. Great resolution screen on the inside, smaller screen on the outside which is however fully usable. You can start web browsing on the big screen, close the Communicator and continue browsing on the smaller screen on the outside. Very smart. The E90 does GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA and Wifi, so fast Internet access should be no problem anymore where ever you go.

As hoped, I met Jouni, aka Marketing Man of S60 on their booth and we had a long chat about the new S60 3rd edition feature pack two. Things which stood out for me were for example the enhanced animation when browsing through the menus. Also, the new memory paging feature, which is a bit less obvious for the user, but which will hopefully prevent applications from being closed once the device runs out of memory because two many applications are open should further enhance usability a bit. This is my main pain point with the N93 at the moment as the browser just takes monumental amounts of memory when browsing on normal web pages. Memory paging in feature pack 2 allows the OS to page out parts of the memory used by applications waiting in the background to the Flash memory thus making room for the memory requirements of other applications running in the foreground. I didn’t see the new paging feature running yet so it remains to be seen how fast memory is paged in and out in practice.

I also went away very impressed from the N95 mapping application demo. The mapping application is now available for download from smart2go.com for lots of other S60 devices and I can’t wait to try it out myself as soon as I have some time to install it one my phone. Stay tuned for my usability report which I will do shortly.

I was also happy to finally meet Ganesh in person, who is in charge of the S60 browser marketing. You should check out the podcast Phil Schwarzman made with him a couple of months ago, which is available on the Voice of S60 homepage. I very much liked the new floating menu in the browser and the offline RSS reader capabilities.

In the afternoon, I was kindly invited to the S60 press panel and I got to talk to Lee Epting, Vice President of Forum Nokia and Matti Vaenskae, Vice President of Mobile Software Sales and Marketing. Quite an interesting panel for me, it gave me a lot of insight how S60 works on integrating all people from the value chain including mobile operators. Some interesting statistics from the panel: 85 million S60 devices have been shipped to date and 25 3rd edition phones models are already on the market (Compare that to a single iPhone which is not even on the market yet…)

Before completing my Nokia day at the exhibition at the S60 party at the Palau de la Musica, I went to my publisher to see how sales of my book are doing at the exhibition and in general. As every year, Wiley is at the Congress to show their wide variety of telecom books at the exhibition and I was glad to see that people were eagerly buying books.

So much for the days events and news, pictures as always on Flickr.

The first highlight of my 3GSM experience yesterday were the MobileMonday Global Peer Awards. Lots of people showed up and it was very much a Web 2.0 / Conference 2.0 feeling. Many people knew many people from their blogs and other activities on the net.

Rudy de Waele of m-trends and founder of Momo Barcelona did a great job to bring everyone together: A first class jury for the awards with people like Carlo Longino of MobHappy, Russell Buckley of AdMob, and Daniel Applequist of Momo London just to name a few. Next to the jury there was a first class audience, first class networking during the breaks and first class sponsors like Telefonica and Reitek without whom something of this dimension with several hundred people attending would not have been possible.

To the hard facts now: 24 (!) Mobile Monday chapters have sent their best startup to Barcelona to present. I was quite impressed with the AsiaPac Region with India having had at least three cities presenting as well as several chapters from China. My personal favorites for the best startup idea were PartyStrands of Barcelona with their interactive party music system, the people from the chapter in Ukraine with their online game (sorry, I forgot your company name…), the people from MoMo Paris with their browser scrolling idea, the mobile payment solution from the Bangalore chapter and the S60 MMS and SMS encryption and security solution from the Bangkok chapter. I was also quite fascinated by the Wifi positioning presentation, of which I have heard before but never quite understood the concept until yesterday. Very cool stuff!

In the end, the jury award went to Plazes, quite known already in the blog sphere for their mobile social location service. Another award went to the guys from the MoMo Paris chapter with their innovative scrolling solution about which I have to find out more and about which I will write separately. Finally, Rudy de Waele got the award for the best Carnival of the Mobilist post of last year. All very deserved!

To close this post in Techdirt fashion, I have to note that I did not see a single Blackberry user at the event. Nokia Eseries and Nseries devices on the other hand were everywhere. I leave it to you to figure this one out 😉

For pictures, head over to Flickr.

So it is finally Monday morning and the exhibition has opened it’s doors. It’s still rather quiet here no queues and shoving scenes at the entrance and inside the halls yet. It’s not going to last. This morning is my free morning, no appointments to run to, just walking through the exhibition halls to discover new things.

Some people are saying that the most important thing about 3GSM is not the Congress itself but what happens around it. I tend to agree. Last night I went to the Mobile Sunday Barcelona, organized by Stuart Mudie and Rudy de Waele. Lot’s of people came who I knew, who knew me and lot’s of people I haven’t met before. William probably got the prize for coming from the most distant place, the Philippines. Rafe of AllAboutSymbian.com had difficulties making sure his N95 prototype didn’t get lost while wandering through many hands 😉

To make it a real mobile party, MyStrands was there with their PartyStrands (http://mystrands.com) music system which lets people influence the choice of music that is played via SMS, or via the Internet either via GPRS/UMTS or over the free Wifi which was in place last night. The system also allowed party goes to send text messages and pictures which were then displayed on the big screens.  A truly enjoyable evening. Thanks to the organizers and a hello to all people I met last night.

Zooming back to today: This is going to be a short exhibition day for me as the Mobile Monday Peer Awards will take place this afternoon starting at three. 700+ people have registered and it’s going to be a monumental event. Looking forward very much to it.

So, before I sign off for the moment, here’s a link to Flickr where you will find the images I take during the week: http://flickr.com/tags/mtrends

I am feverishly looking forward to my departure to Barcelona for the 3GSMWorldCongress. Day to day work will come to a halt and I can’t wait to meet a lot of people for interesting conversations. Web 2.0 has definitely transformed my 3GSM Congress experience and I hope I can help to transform the experience a bit for you as well if are not able to attend in person.

As you can see in this blog post from last year, I’ve upgraded my mobile kit to stay in touch and to blog from the congress from a Nokia 6680 to an N93 this year. Freddy and Montserrat now have a premium place on the phone’s memory card while the paper notebook and city guide are still with me. Again, I will use eMail and Lifeblog to post directly to this blog, so watch this space for the latest and greatest from the congress.

Shozu will help me to post pictures and short comments to flickr. Rudy over at m-trends.org and I will tag our pictures and short comments with ‘mtrends‘ and you can find them easily via this link.

Another thing you might want to watch closely are the Mobile Monday Global Peer Awards on Monday afternoon (12 February 2007). There will be a life webcast of the event via comvu. Should be a lot of fun!

A while back I ran a little mini-series on different 4G network technologies like LTE, EVDO Rev C. and WiMAX. I concluded that at least two of those technologies will establish themselves and that they will compete with each other fiercely. Unlike in the early days of the CDMA vs. GSM competition in the Americas, however, this competition will be quite fruitful.

To see why let’s go back for a second to the epic struggle of CDMA vs. GSM. Users and operators did not benefit greatly from this competition because networks and applications where both in the hands of the operators. This created a lot of incompatibility from the users point of view. An example is text messaging. While in Europe text messaging has been flourishing for a long time it has only recently become a bit more popular in the U.S. The main reason for this was that for a long time it was not possible for users of different networks to exchange text messages. Thus, the service did not take off until interoperability was finally introduced.

In 4G networks, however, it looks like things will go down a different path. Here, the network and applications running on it are separated and do not depend on each other. Applications are based on the Internet Protocol (IP) and just use whatever network there is available. IP applications don’t care if their data is sent back or forth via UMTS, HSDPA, LTE, EVDO, WiMAX, etc. This allows people to develop applications independently from the underlying network infrastructure. Some applications will still be developed by operators but the vast majority will come from talented people working directly in the internet crowd. For them and for the end users competing wireless technologies is very beneficial as it spurs network roll outs, offers possibility for new players in the market and creates competition between device manufacturers. Also, new applications will be introduced much easier and much more quickly as they are no longer forced into a tight framework that takes forever to develop and from which it never gets out again.

I
didn’t get much sleep last night because I stumbled over this post over at Symbian-Freak just before midnight which proclaimed that software updates are available again for the Nokia N93 on the Nokia software update site. As the software on my N93 was quite dated (V 10.0.025, 12.07.2006) and had a few irritating bugs, I was more than happy to update right away instead of sleeping it over first. As can be seen on the picture on the left, the software version to which my N93 is now upgraded is V 20.0.058.

The software update itself took about 30 minutes as the software first updated itself (20MB) and then downloaded the almost 80 MB image file for the phone. Quite amazing how much firmware fits into a small phone these days. I made a backup of my data before the the update and restored it after the update was complete. While calendar entries and most settings were properly restored I had to reinstall all 3rd party applications. This took quite some time as I use about a dozen of them. On the good side, most applications detected their previous settings which were stored on the memory card so I didn’t have to reconfigure Profimail, RescoNews, the Nokia Podcast catcher and Handysafe. Together with ensuring that all applications still run as desired the whole process took about one and a half hours. As I said, not much sleep last night 😉 But it was worth it because I immediately noticed a number of great improvements and new features:

• The camera application has been improved. Once you swivel the phone back into closed or phone position, the camera app closes instead of staying open and using the internal camera;

• There seems to be slightly more available program memory as the S60 browser and Profimail were able to co-exist simultaneously despite some serious web surfing;

• Browser stability seems to have improved. It didn’t crash since I made the update;

• The long awaited Wifi Overview on the idle screen is finally here (see picture);

• RescoNews and Handy Weather make use of big lists. With the old software version it took quite a long time (10-15 seconds) for these lists to be generated. With the new software version, these programs are a lot faster now;

• The new software version allows the user to lock to phone to the UMTS to prevent fall-backs to GSM. This is quite handy as there are still operators around who can’t set their network parameters correctly and make my Nokia mobiles switch to GSM while UMTS coverage is still good. While that doesn’t matter much for making phone calls it’s quite irritating when using the phone as a ‘modem’ for the notebook.

One thing I haven’t figured out quite yet is how to get rid of the message I get now every time I start the phone that untrusted applications have been found on the memory card and that I should go to the application manager to fix this. The application manager shows three applications with cryptic names and says they not installed but I can’t delete them or do anything else with them (see second picture)!? Time will tell. So all in all, I am quite happy about the improvements I got but still wished the update process would be a bit more seamless. No problem for me but I wouldn’t let my girlfriend perform this procedure on her own.