Mobile & Wireless Roundup - Innovation & Industry News

An article recently published by iSuppli has identified the growing need for content platform solutions.

A new report by research firm iSuppli said that as mobile phones
migrate from being simple communications devices to becoming computing
and music-playback platforms, consumer demand for content such as
music, video and applications is booming as well

Now this has always been the major focus in my industry, but many businesses have failed to realise the diversity of devices, and assumed that one content item will play on all, or one WAP site suits all.

The publicity of this report should highlight these issues to various companies looking to expand into the wireless industry, supplying a service to its customers that will always be available in their pocket.

The value of this industry is estimated to be at $4.2 billion in 2006 and is expected to rise to $7.1 billion by 2010.

Full article and review can be found here

http://www.telecomseurope.net/article.php?id_article=4044

Vodafone is now pushing their new mobile Internet service to the public in a radical way.

TV commercials are now being broadcast in the UK showing users that the Internet can be used wherever they are. Previously, the Internet on mobile has not gained many users. There are many reasons for this:

• Setup of WAP Gateways
• Limited Screen Size
• High Data Costs

Vodafone has realised that ARPU can seriously be increased through widespread adoption, and has attempted to resolve these issues with their new approach.

Previously, services such as WAP on mobiles were not pushed to the users, and many were unaware of the benefits of the service. But with the new TV ad, awareness should become more widespread.

Vodafone

Reports have been floating around on the Internet, that North Korea are stepping up their bans on mobile phones, and increasing the number of public executions for people found to have smuggled a phone into the country.

This a very extreme approach as you will agree, to communist country, which shares a border with South Korea, the leader in Mobile Phone development and innovation!
The phones are coming from the Chinese border, were the Chinese networks are able to broadcast their signals deep inside the North Korean mainland.

A novel concept has just been announced by the company Sonopia. You now
have the ability to create your own mobile network, charge for line
rental, and offer services.
The blurb….

Introducing the most innovative mobile carrier ever. Yours.

Now you can create your very own mobile carrier! In just a
few easy steps you can set up a Sonopia complete with calling plans,
mobile phones and exclusive content. Managing and marketing your
Sonopia is just as simple thanks to our easy-to-use online tools. We do
the rest—from billing and customer service to order fulfillment.
The benefits belong to you and your subscribers.

• EARN revenue with no up-front commitment—a percentage of your mobile
  subscribers’ monthly bill goes directly to you or your organization
• LAUNCH and maintain your service—quickly, easily and with few resources
• CONNECT with your supporters—expand your audience and generate interest in your organization
  in a new and innovative way
• UPLOAD and send exclusive content—deliver news, updates and mobile blogs to your subscribers
  both online and on the phone
• FREE online community—regardless of whether people subscribe to the mobile portion of your
  Sonopia, they can join your online web community for free
• CREATE professional marketing campaigns—send letters, graphic mailers and e-mails customized to your Sonopia

Your Sonopia provides subscribers with benefits they can’t get anywhere
else, at no additional cost. They will also be part of an integrated
mobile and online social networking community where they can access
news and information, create a profile, write mobile blogs, share
photos and so much more.

Plus, your subscribers will experience the best customer service available, with no transfers and no waiting.

So… anyone want to join OlafCom?

http://www.sonopia.com

Found this on the Microsoft developer site.

http://blogs.msdn.com/iemobile/archive/2007/02/06/update-to-ie-mobile-adobe-flash-support.aspx
Will be useful when we start dealing with Flash based wap sites for mobile.

The repository cannot deal with installable additions to the browsers functionality, other that that come pre-installed.

If a user installs Flash at a later stage, the following Java script
code can be used to determine which if and which version they have.

We recently found out that the Adobe Flash player 7 for Pocket PC
supports a direct call into the player by an activeX object via
JavaScript. This opens up a direct way for websites to verify if IE
Mobile browsers have Adobe Flash installed and even its version.

The activeX object only takes two lines of code. See example below.

<html>

<head>

<title>Flash Alert</title>

</head>

<body>

<script language=javascript>

axo = new ActiveXObject(”ShockwaveFlash.ShockwaveFlash”);

axo.GetVariable(”$version”);

alert(axo.GetVariable(”$version”));

</script>

</body>

</html>

With the imminent release of the Apple iPhone (Good or bad?, you decide!), a new product has emerged in the market.

MusicStation will be launched shortly across many European and Asian countries and provide direct access and playback to a music subscription service.

Priced at £1.99/week for unlimited music playback and no extra data charges, it is billed directly to your phone bill, causing the user hassle-free setup and instant access to millions of songs

The service has the support of major manufacturers including: Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Samsung and 30 mobile phone operators and all four music majors – Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, EMI Music and Warner Music International – as well as several independent labels.

Read more here http://www.omnifone.com/

A lot of hype has been surrounding Microsoft’s new anticipated Mobile Web browser called Deepfish. After registering on their site for preview access, I finally got a chance to trial the browser on the Orange SPV E650.
First Impressions
After installing the browser on the smartphone, and loading up MSN news bookmark, my initial impression is that it looks very similar in functionality to Nokia’s OSS Browser found on the latest series 60 devices. However, after using it for a few minutes, I found the browser to be really slow in rendering when zooming into the page for general reading.
Further Analysis
After questioning the rendering speed, and the style of rendering, I wondered how the application was working. After analysis of the User-Agent “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; Win64; x64; SV1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)” which bears no resemblance to a user agent from a Windows Mobile device, and more closely represents a PC. The way the page renders on the device also seems to render like a progressive JPG, slowly revealing the image at improved quality. So it appears that Deepfish is nothing but a thin client that communicates to a server which performs all the rendering and download tasks, and the
client acts as a remote window viewer.
Conclusion
Nokia’s OSS browser is nearly one year old, and in my opinion, provides a much better user experience. The scrolling, and rendering is smooth, and it does not take its time to display the page. When using GPRS and Deepfish together, it becomes unusable, taking an unexpected amount of time for the page to come into focus, however, switching to WiFi, the performance is excellent as expected. The navigation is still a bit clunky, and according to Microsoft, the Beta lacks features such as ActiveX controls, AJAX, cookies, Javascript, and HTTP POST. Aside from ActiveX, the other features are essential to any browser developed for devices these days. Come on Microsoft, what are you playing at?
I understand that cookies maybe an issue if using a server to perform the rendering of a page, unless the server stores user identification, and can retrieve profile information upon connection. In the Nokia OSS browser, all pages are downloaded to the device, this could mean long download times if the pages are content rich. The Deepfish browser will not suffer from this, as all that is transferred is an image representation of the web page, the server performs all the
heavy downloads.

In my opinion, Microsoft are trying to play catch up, as they have always seemed to be behind in mobile innovation, and it shows in this product

After months of speculation, the Meizu MiniOne has a full set of specifications on its website. Not wanting to be out done by the Apple iPhone, or LG Prada, the MiniOne features every technology to date in its slim and sexy package.
The top specifications are:

• 533MHZ processor, 128MB of DDR SDRAM !
• Touch Screen 720×480 resolution
• 3MP rear camera
• Wifi
• DMB Tuner
• GPS
• 4-16GB Internal Memory

Meizu announced their concept phone way back before Apple announced the iPhone, and now with a few cosmetic changes and final specification list, I can now confirm that this device will be an extremely strong contender in the Asian market, and will no doubt be imported on the grey market for European use.

Initial pricing seems to suggest that it will sell for between $330 (4GB) - $450 (16GB), BARGAIN!
Photos can be found here
Meizu MiniOne

While at the Orange Developer Centre opening event in Beijing, Orange UK R&D announced a project that they were working on called “igloo”.
The concept behind this product is to eliminate the risk of user failure in attempting to install new services to their device.
Making use of Widget style solution, igloo provides a environment on the device where the user can easily identify new services that Orange
have made available. The user can select the widget, and it is automatically downloaded, and installed, and setup on their device with minimum effort.
The example that was presented was a case on eBay for mobile.

Currently, the user would have to ensure that they have the correct APN settings on their phone to access the Internet, they would then have to navigate through Orange World portal (or have eBay mobile web address to hand) to the eBay link. The user would then have to provide log-in details and then navigate through to their destination (be it watched items, or bidding etc)

With igloo, the user just needs to select the widget, it is then downloaded and installed automatically. The user can then log-in first time, and remember their details if needed. The eBay widget will then provide all the details to the user, without them needing to navigate to the web. The widget can then be viewed on the active screen of the device, so a quick glance is all that is needed.

Services can also be pushed to the user by Orange without the user having to perform any actions.

I asked a few questions about this service:
Q. Will the user be able to opt out.
A. The plans are for a subscription based service, the user can decide which services he/she wants to receive automatically

Q. Will the active screen display reduce battery life, as connections to the server will be required on a frequent basis
A. Not significantly, as the users screen-saver will put the service to “sleep”, and will be woken again when the screen-saver has been disrupted.

Q. Will there be billing integration for premium services?
A. It will be up to the service provider, the platform is designed as a framework and so can be implemented how the service provider wishes

What do you think about this?
I personally think that this solution will provide an excellent source of innovative ideas which are hard to get adoption in the Web space.