Carnival of the Mobilists #187

This week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is up at Mobilestance with some excellent entries on mobile and wireless as always.

This week’s carnival also features my post Netbooks lead the way on how we’ll be using our mobile phones in the near future

Netbooks lead the way on how we’ll be using our mobile phones in the near future

Netbooks are set to revolutionize the mega-trend “Cloud computing” sweeping the technology landscape.

Based on some findings released by ThinkFree based on a survey they conducted, Netbooks are mainly being used for for business, entertainment and communication. Another survey noted that Netbooks will be used as secondary devices. Let’s analyze how they’re being used in each of these categories.

Business

Primarily used for reviewing documents, spreadsheets, presentations and making minor edits, but not generally treating netbooks the primary machine for these applications.

My Opinion: As they are treated as secondary devices, I don’t expect people to pay for Microsoft Office. Thunderbird, Open Office etc are sufficient for simple email management and some word processing.

Entertainment

Browsing the web, listening to music and viewing/editing photos.

My Opinion: As browser and media player are anyway free, Picasa can easily be used for viewing and quick image editing and posting photos to the net.

Communication

Sending email, IM, making VOIP calls and creating blog posts.

Next Step

Since it’s not replacing the laptop, I think what’s basically missing
is a phone added to the mix. I don’t see why users will want to carry
mobile, netbook and laptop at the same time. I foresee a Nokia communicator type device with decent screen size and usable keypad to overtake the Netbook just like Smarphones overtook the PDA. The software being used will need to be adopted for this new phone, that said, software to do all the above already exists for mobiles, it just needs to be made more easy to use.

With larger screen size and better keyboard I don’t see a reason why we’ll not see Netbooks being phased out to give way for the next generation of mobile phones.

Is this thought too outlandish? What do you think?

The Carnival of the mobilists #185

Head over to this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists at Mobileslate for some of the finest in mobile blogging.

This week’s carnival also features my post User Acceptance is the biggest challenge for LBS

User Acceptance is the biggest challenge for Location Based Services (LBS)

The promise of LBS is providing useful information and services at right place and right time using demographic, contextual and location awareness via the mobile. Primary applications are mostly in advertising, navigation and social networking. LBS applications have garnered the most hype since the beginning,  and yet, critical mass eludes them.

With the technical challenges more or less resolved, I believe user acceptance, owing primarily due to privacy and security concerns,  is the biggest challenge it needs to overcome. LBS apps face distrust by users owing to the loss of personal freedom and control over the technology e.g. intrusive advertising, commercial pressure, loss of autonomy, etc.

It is crucial for the service providers to maintain a level of trust with users by acting transparently with regards to personal privacy translating into strict application of a code of ethics on the service use combined with clear and simple information for consumers on the usages that could be made of their location data / ensure consumers have the means of controlling what they can and cannot do i.e. right not to be located, not to be disconnected, choose who will have access to his data, etc.

Convergence of Terrestrial and Satellite mobile communication systems

Mobile Satellite Services

Mobile Satellite Services like Iridium and GlobalStar have a long established reputation of being able to successfully deliver connectivity to the most remote regions of the planet. Unlike traditional mobile phone providers that utilize cell towers for signal strength, satellite phone providers connect to low earth orbiting satellites. These orbiting satellites enable satellite phone service to connect in seconds with a clear signal. So, if you are hiking, cruising or otherwise travelling in a remote area, and need to stay in touch, the satellite phone works best. Only about 14% of the whole world is out of cover.

However, to make a call, you may have to go outside, for you’ll often find they don’t work very well under a roof of any kind. And, the handsets are large and clunky with big ugly antennaes.

Terrestrial mobile networks

Using cell towers, terrestrial mobile networks provide very good coverage in focused locations, however we all despise the “out of coverage area” message we keep getting every now and then.

There has been no good solution for people who were working on the fringes of cellular networks, crossing in and out of coverage areas. Or, those who want to be able to use thier phones when sailing, on hiking trips or vacationing in remote locations.

Integrated satellite-terrestrial Mobile Service

Enter TerreStar. They have come up with an integrated satellite-terrestrial mobile satellite service to be lauched in June this year. This service will enable users across North America to be connected to TerreStar’s network through a “virtual handshake” between the next-generation mobile satellite and UMTS (3G, upgradeable to LTE) terrestrial network. It’s the only fully IP-based satellite phone using high-speed packet data.

Terrestar has come up with a cute and compact device. It sports an internal antenna, touch screen, a full QWERTY keyboard and runs Windows Mobile 6.5. It has satellite, quad-band GSM, tri-band WCDMA/HSPA connectivity along with Bluetooth and WiFi. The device will retail at about $800 USD. It’s the first satellite-terrestrial smartphone with planned service offerings, including: SMS, MMS, IM, Email, Push to Talk, Video services and Location Based Services (LBS).

How they do it

TerreStar will be using a geostationary satellite employing ground-based beam forming technology, a critical element in the system to deliver speed and performance to handheld devices with small, even internal, antennas. In the case of Iridium, a constellation of LEO (low earth orbiting) satellites are used to provide global, but much lower speed and signal strength, coverage.

Sam Churchill of Daily Wireless explains

L-band Mobile-Satellite Service (like that of Iridium and GlobalStar) uses 1525–1559 MHz (Space-to-Earth) and 1626.5–1660.5 MHz (Earth-to-space) while the 2 GHz Mobile-Satellite Service (used by some geosynchrous satellites) uses 2000–2020 MHz: (Earth-to-space) and 2180–2200 (Space-to-Earth).

The techniques developed and patented by Mobile Satellite Ventures (a sister operation of TerreStar) allow the same (MSS) frequency band to be used for both satellite and terrestrial communications seamlessly, yielding simplified single-band/single-mode transparent user devices 

Conclusion

I think it’s a great step forward which will have a profound impact in our lives.

Some of-the-top use cases

• Extention of cellular networks to rural, remote and maritime environments
• Provide mobile users at land, at sea and in the air with ubiquotous multimedia services (Internet, phone, entertainment)
• Always-on mode of communication in Crisis/Disaster areas

What makes a mobile phone tick?

Isn’t this the million dollar question… although there are no straight answers, here are two important factors to consider while designing phones (or any product for that matter)

• Ensure the phone’s features are integrated with each other while maintaining ease of use in a meaningful way. It’s not about cramming more features, it’s about making those features work together to support a lifestyle. The buying decision comes down to the buyer’s perceived expectation of how well the phone will fulfill certain tasks. In other words, how well does a phone fit into the life of a consumer?

• Buying decisions are mostly driven by emotions, and we then use our intellect to add reasons and defend our emotional decision. Finding out these emotions is very important.

Carnival of the Mobilists #162

Welcome to the 162th edition of the Carnival, hosted for the first time here at Technology, Mobility, Usability and other Musings.

This has been a busy week for mobilists thanks to Mobile World Congress that concluded recently. Surprisingly, not many posts covering MWC have come up, I guess we’ll see them next week after people have had some time to put their thoughts together.

This has been a varied week covering a range of topics. So, let us begin, shall we?

Market Watch

From Communities Dominate Brands, Tomi talks about 3G penetration statistics marking a trend that indicates 3G’s success in any region it’s launched in.

Thomas Menguy of Vision Mobile looks at three hardware related Nokia PR at MWC and shows how those announcements fits within the new Nokia strategy.

Barbara Ballard over at Little Springs Design looks at device developments at MWC indicating a strong focus on Touch. I completely agree with her insights about the Touch interface. Touch is sexy, she muses, provides some nice interaction possibilities. It also shuts down some interaction possibilities. And makes other stuff harder.

Challenges for new mobile technology

Steven from Little Springs Design talks about challenges for emerging mobile technology, biggest one being the delay between getting a new technology to market and getting it well-adopted. I nominate this as my Post of the Week.

Designing for Mobile

Bookmarking sites on mobile is a big issue. James Cooper of mjelly gives a couple of examples of sites using a new approach to encourage users to bookmark them.

Aaron Chua highlights three shortcomings of current mobile ebook applications and gives suggestions on how to overcome them.

Holly from mobienthusiast talks about Sonic Mobile as a good example of a well-designed mobile site.

m-learning

Mark Hooft at his Ubiquitous Thoughts gives a great roundup of Mobile Learning 2009 Conference.

Pics from MWC

Lastly, mtrends founder Rudy De Waele posts pics of events in Barcelona, check it out if you’d like to see the faces behind the many mobilists around.

On Rudy’s behalf, I would like invite all mobilists and participants who have pictures of the Mobile Peer Awards event to join the Flickr Group and upload their pictures too – http://www.flickr.com/groups/mobilepeerawards/ Anyone can join!

Next Week

That’s it for this week folks, hope you’ve enjoyed it. Head over to GoldenSwamp for next week’s roundup of the best in mobile blogging.

Carnival of the Mobilists #150

Head over to this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists at Mippin Blog for some of the finest in mobile blogging. Couple of the interesting topics covered this week: Femtocells, mobile broadband, mobile app stores and my own entry on the big shift to touchscreen and how it’ll impact the regular keypad.

Firefox brings its biggest strength to its mobile browser… Extensions

The great thing about extensions is that they allow you to customize your browsing experience to suit your particular needs. What it really brings to the table for the browser is an ecosystem of developers and users around it, giving it an edge which is extremely difficult to counter. This is what made it the biggest strength that Firefox had over Internet Explorer.

Fennec Logo

Now we’ve seen with the success of Firefox and iPhone App Store how important an ecosystem really is to a product. And now, Firefox brings it’s biggest strength to mobile with Fennec (mobile version of Firefox).

The first extension to be released for Fennec is URL Fixer, a handy tool that corrects typos in URLs typed in the address bar.

Just as in PC, extensions will be a killer feature for Fennec. This is bad news for current players in the market because you can counter Tabbed Browsing, Search Integration, Spell Checking, Session Restore, RSS Feeds blah, blah, blah etc; but it’s very difficult to counter an ecosystem. And that too a real big one, because Fennec will be leveraging an already flourishing ecosystem on the PC.

What extensions would you like to see in a mobile browser?

Touch screen on mobiles is the new black, but will it overshadow the keypad

 

iPhone’s success has sent all the handset manufacturer’s scurrying to come up with a touch screen device of their own. We have seen touch screen devices being launched by all major players, even RIM which is mostly in the enterprise segment has come up with one. This makes good short-term commercial sense, but I wonder if it points to a trend that’ll overshadow the keypad.

Touch screen definitely has it’s advantages, you save space for the keyboard (which takes up a large percentage of the device area), you can change the complete interface for each app and provide the necessary keys and buttons only, you can save weight and due to no keyboard there are no mechanical wear parts.

That said, let’s look at iPhone’s keypad for a second, it’s not really what we were hoping for. It is so harder and longer to develop a response from the iPhone.. you keep wanting “k” but it gives “i” or some key closer to the letter and this goes for any letter. Doing the same thing on the Blackberry, however, is a breeze.

As Dr Buxton puts it: “Everything is best for something, and worst for something else.” Touch screens are best suited to manipulating information, rather than inputting it in the first place—an area in which keypads remain unchallenged. Mobiles with keypads and touch screens could offer the most flexibility, letting users choose the appropriate input method for each task. Google designers have done a great job in this regard, the G1 is strictly touch screen and has a built in keyboard that slides out.

I think touch screens are here to stay, but it’ll be a while before they overshadow the keypads.

 

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