Stefan Constantinescu has loved technology since as far back as he can remember. It started with computers, but in the past few years his passion has turned to mobile devices.
He has been blogging since 2006 and joined IntoMobile in the summer of 2007, then got a job at Nokia in March of 2008, but has now rejoined the IntoMobile team as of June 2009. He is currently based out of Finland.
Stefan is a mobile phone enthusiast who lives and breathes devices that connect to the internet and he knows that there are others like him out there. He is strongly opinionated and enjoys a good debate so leave comments in his posts and he’ll get back to you!
Denmark. Beautiful country, filled with beautiful people, and one of the leaders in green thinking. Like many countries in Europe, Denmark’s public toilets are not free. This explains why no one goes out for a nice walk on Sunday morning, those are not rain puddles if you catch my drift. The capital of Denmark, Copenhagen, is looking to make paying to pee a bit easier by enabling SMS payments on several toilets in Gråbrødre Torv, Hans Knudsens Plads and Borgergade. This luxury will not cost you anything extra. The fee is still 2 Danish Krone ($0.40), plus whatever it is you pay your operator to send an SMS. UNWIRE and Låsepartner City are the two companies responsible for deploying these new fangled pieces of technology, and they’re going to collect some data over the next 6 months to decide whether or not they should deploy more text to piss public toilets. I’m a little ashamed of you Denmark. Urine has been proven to be a fantastic fertilizer. Why not simply put trees next to taxi queues, liquor stores, and night clubs?
Finland has just finished their auction for the 2600 MHz frequency spectrum that will be used in deploying future high speed LTE networks. Earlier this year Finland held an auction for the 1800 MHz frequency band to be used for LTE, since a lower frequency would do a better job at penetrating walls and give longer range. This move was viewed as strange, and elicited the same kind of WTF reactions people made when T-Mobile (NYSE: DT) announced that their 3G would be built on the 1700 MHz band.
Anyway, back to 2600 MHz, there were four winners. Three won the FDD (Frequency Division Duplex) spectrum, with all getting 50 MHz chunks, except DNA who got only 40 MHz. Elisa, my operator, also known as the operator with the most 3G coverage, paid 834,700 EUR. TeliaSonera, who is the equivalent of AT&T in Finland, and by that I mean they’re the only people who offer the iPhone in the country and they rape you with their monthly fees, paid 810,200. DNA, who is known as the new kid on the block, I literally know no one who uses them, paid 675,700 EUR. Pirkanmaan Verkko won 50 MHz of TDD (Time Division Duplex) spectrum for 1.47 million EUR.
Total purchase price: surprisingly only 3.8 million EUR (5.7 million USD)! The same frequency auction in Norway brought in 25 million EUR, and in Sweden they made 230 million EUR. Is this Finland’s way of making sure that they are the first to get LTE up and running, and are charging practically nothing so that operators have enough money left over to buy networking equipment? I certainly hope so.
Along with the Nokia 6700 Slide that was announced today, Nokia (NYSE: NOK) also unveiled the 7230. This 100 EUR ($150) dumb phone has a 2.4 inch screen with 240 x 320 pixels of resolution and 262,000 colours, a 3.2 megapixel camera, 860 mAh battery, quadband GSM/EDGE, and triband WCDMA. There will be a WCDMA 850/1900/2100 MHz version for North America, and a WCDMA 900/1900/2100 MHz version for the rest of the world. You also get a 3.5 mm headphone jack, perfect for listening to your music on the go. Other than that … nothing else is really exciting about this device. Expect it to hit the market in the first quarter of 2010.
Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has just announced the 6700 Slide, a Symbian powered smartphone coming to market in the first quarter of 2010 for 160 EUR ($240) before taxes and subsidies. For that amount of money you get a 5 megapixel camera, 2.2 inch screen with 240 x 320 pixels of resolution, 860 mAh (tiny!) battery, quadband GSM/EDGE support, and triband WCDMA (3.5G) support. There will be a WCDMA 900/1900/2100 MHz version, presumably for Europe, and a 850/1900/2100 MHz version, perfect for the USA. There is no GPS, nor is there WiFi. Let me repeat that: no GPS, no WiFi. It’s only 110 grams, 15.9 mm thick, 95.2 mm long (in the closed position), and 46 mm wide. It has support for FM radio, 16 GB microSD cards, Bluetooth 2.1, and microUSB (unspecified whether or not this can be used to charge the device). There is no 3.5 mm headphone jack so forget about using this thing to replace your MP3 player.
And speaking about MP3 players, let’s be honest, doesn’t this thing look like a Microsoft Zune?
Taptu has grown up quite a lot since I last played with their service. In my September 2007 review I said:
“If you’re adapt at Google (NSDQ: GOOG) (NSDQ: GOOG) than Taptu may or may not be useful to you. Simply adding words such as “wiki” or “lyrics” after a search query usually makes Google get an idea of what it is you’re trying to find.”
With the release of their Android application today, things are looking mighty different from the original, almost laughable, user interface. They’ve put a filter on web results so you only see content optimized for mobile devices. Whether or not that is a good thing is debatable. Would you prefer more search results or fewer search results optimized for your screen? They’ve also integrated the “OneRiot” service which aggregates what people are talking about at this very second on Twitter, Digg, and other social networking sites, and present those terms to you as queries you may want to plug into the Taptu service. Chances are you open a search application to find an answer to a question in your mind, not to see what the world is talking about. Then again, there may be a few of you out there who are concerned with appearing to be “in the loop” as Malcolm Tucker from “The Thick of It” would say. If you’re one of those people, then Taptu rocks.
Look, is it smart for a company like Taptu to compete with Google? Yes and No. Yes, it’s nice to see something different than the usual list of 10 links Google’s mobile optimized search engine provides. No, it’s stupid to pour resources into what is nothing more than a fancy front end, which Google can copy, to a search engine that crawls a very small subset of the internet.
Give the Taptu application a go on your Android device and let me know in the comments what you think about it.
Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM) is trying hard, really hard, to rid themselves of the reputation they have as a patent whore. When they reached an agreement with Nokia (NYSE: NOK) at the start of this year, and then patched things up with Samsung earlier this month to the tune of $1.3 billion, people began to notice that the tides are turning. This is a new Qualcomm. Well today their image just got a little bit shinier after the EU decided to drop a 4 year old investigation that started after Nokia, Broadcom (NSDQ: BRCM), Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN), Ericsson, and two other parties filed a complaint to the EU because of Qualcomm’s patent rates.
“All complainants have now withdrawn or indicated their intention to withdraw their complaints,” said the European Commission in a statement today. “In view of this, the commission doesn’t consider it appropriate to invest further resources in this case.”
The patents in question are mainly related to 3G standards. Getting these feuds over with help accelerate the deployment of 3G and 3.5G networks and help establish the relationships that will prove necessary once everyone sits down at the round table and start discussing 4G technology. In a recent report released by ABI Research, they say that Qualcomm owns roughly 1 in 4 patents relating to LTE technology. When those new high speed networks start going up at the end of next year, and en masse in 2011/2012, Qualcomm is going to see a lot of money.
Wondering whether you should pick up the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N97 Mini or the regular N97? Matthew Miller from Nokia Experts made a ~ 9 minute video demoing and comparing both devices; a must watch if you’re considering purchasing either of these puppies. The N97 Mini has a 3.2 inch screen versus the old brother who has a 3.5 inch screen. The camera lens on the Mini is not protected, the lens on the regular N97 is. The Mini has 1/4 the built in storage the N97 has. The N97 is made out of plastic, the Mini is made out of metal. All of these criteria, and more, should be taken into account before you drop a serious amount of money just to have the latest toys from Nokia. The Mini is only 50 pounds cheaper than the regular N97 on Expansys, so this isn’t going to be an easy choice to make.
While the United States is still struggling to roll out 3G, Japan’s number one mobile operator NTT DoCoMo (NYSE: DCM) has said that they’re accelerating their plans to turn off their 2G network. What was supposed to take place during December 2012 has now been pushed forward to March 2011. For those of you counting, that’s only 16 months away. Japan’s third largest operator, Softbank (OTCPK: SFTBF), is even more ambitious and plans on terminating their 2G network in 4 months. With Japanese consumers using 3G handsets exclusively, and the entire country of Japan being a little smaller than the state of California, it’s no surprise to see the nation with the most advanced wireless networks on the planet is eager to move forward and abandon legacy networks. What’s funny about all of this is what NTT DoCoMo and Softbank are calling “legacy”, AT&T is calling “the best network” America has to offer.
If you’re a network administrator then brace yourself for this video. What you’re about to see is the HTC HD2 running a modified version of the Remote Desktop application for Windows Mobile. This tweaked version takes advantage of the capacitive touch screen that the HD2 has to enable multi touch zooming. On the 4.3 inch, with 800 x 480 pixels of resolution, it looks absolutely stunning. Check out Will’s review of the Touch HD2 if you’re interested in more details about the device. It’s expected to launch in America during the first quarter of 2010.
For those of you unfamiliar with Remote Desktop, it allows you to take over another computer. On your display you see the screen of another machine, and whatever you type on your keyboard will be sent to that remote machine. As a former network administrator I can’t emphasize enough how important Remote Desktop is as a tool when troubleshooting computers and settings things up when deploying new machines.
Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Money, which was announced in August, and is expected to launch in Q1 2010, is being shown off in the video below by Waltteri Karhusari at the Nokia “Way We Live Next” conference in Finland. The UI is fairly basic, but that’s do to the demo being done on a fairly low end device. Nokia Money’s target audience is emerging economies after all. It’s safe to say that Visa’s stuff is much more impressive, but sadly their solutions are due to hit the market at an even later point in time. Mobile Payments will be the next killer application, much like GPS was the killer application for smartphones in 2007/2008, but the question on everyone’s mind is when will Mobile Payments take off? Juniper Research predicts that in 2012 there will be $30 billion worth of transactions taking place, while ABI Research predicts that by 2011, only 2 years from now, there will be 170 million people taking advantage of mobile payments.
![taptudroidcropp Taptu releases an Android application, makes mobile search touch friendly [Verdict: Who cares?]](http://images.intomobile.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/taptudroidcropp.jpg "Taptu releases an Android application, makes mobile search touch friendly [Verdict: Who cares?]")
