Yep, it’s rant time again – open rant generator v1.0, enable tantrum networking bus, and start redundant shout and stamp processes!

To rewind for just a second – I was in the process the other day of buying some new phones for our house – probably DECT ones, and at least 2 handsets. You’d have thought it would be easy (I did originally), and the primary requirement was that the COLOUR matched the other CE (consumer electronics) in my living room – aesthetics matter after all!

It was only when I started browsing the pages of a popular home catalogue in the UK, that I realised that landline phone technology is about 10 years behind mobiles! What’s lacking? Well howabout this:

•    colour screens*
•    decent UI
•    decent batteries
•    separate base stations from handset charging bays*
•    (network) sync for outlook or similar – contacts!!

(* to be fair, a couple of offerings did have these – but the majority did not!)

Mobiles evolved between 5-10 years ago to have all this sort of stuff as standard, or as a result of the type of  product – yet the demand is just as strong for a landline. Especially annoying from my perspective is the phone vendors’ amusing notion that I might (a) type all the numbers I want to store in to the phone or (b) put my SIM in the handset so it could read the numbers off – whatever happened to USB cables, or wired/wireless networking?!

I appreciate that landlines might be a depressed breed right now, since many are using mobiles and internet phones, but, I would love to see the research that says they are dead – they aren’t – most homes in the UK have a landline of some form, particularly because ADSL broadband lines mandate a twisted copper pair in to the home – good enough (and charged for by BT) for a landline.

In fact the mobile handset vendors are missing a trick here. All they need to is re-purpose their UI, change the radio (in fact, scratch that, just take out the GSM/3G radio and leave the WiFi one in), whack in a base station, and you can serve the home landline phone market!

I find it beyond depressing that the technology behind landline phones is SO far behind where we are with mobiles – and don’t even get me started on baby monitors again, that’s going to be the subject of my next rant!

The bottom line here is that with some simple tweaks, a landline phone could be created  that is (a) as functional as a mobile within the house/garden, (b) part of a home converged network, and (c) bringing on the evolution of technology in this area on by about 10 years!!! Arggggh!

The way things are going in the mobile world, it’s hard to imagine Motorola (NYSE: MOT) regaining its share in the mobile phone marketplace. They need some serious innovation and focusing on the Android platform may be just the thing to do. But is there something else the struggling handset maker could do?

Here’s an idea – Motorola should partner or acquire Modu. Those not familiar should know that Modu makes the “world’s lightest mobile phone” which supports jackets, allowing future Modu device owners (their product is still not available for purchase) to customize and use their handset in a number of ways. What Modu lacks is scale and I guess the global network. That’s definitely something Motorola could provide to the Israel-based company, and resulting partnership could end up as a win-win situation. If this happens — and please note that I’ve no any inside information — Modu handsets could be Moto’s next RAZR. If you additionally include Android into the mix and allow various applications to run on different Modu jackets, Motorola (and Modu, for that matter) may have a winner.

What do you think about the idea? Should Motorola pursue some partnership or even acquire Modu? Could that save the once proud American handset maker? Comments form is all yours…

It would seem of late that we might be moving toward a process of standarisation of certain things in the Mobile space – if not standardisation, then at least the distillation of a plethora of variants to a main few. Case in point – most charger manufacturers are committing to get to a universal connector within the next five or so years.

So this got me thinking – what else would I like to see standardised?

Well how about these:

(1)    headphone connector – an obvious one, but 3.5mm please. If you want to implement fancy extra data controls (or DRM) over the top of this as a superset that’s fine, but nominally, I want to be able to plug 3.5mmm headphones in to any mobile, and hear sound!!

(2)    screens – well, classes of screens anyway. I think we can recognise there are some key form factors for devices, and these need different shape screens – but there aren’t that many when it comes to it. Fixing things like resolutions, and a number of standard screen sizes would make life simpler and cheaper all-round, and would mean that visual content (images, video) wouldn’t have to be re-purposed/stretched for several different devices

(3)    DRM – standardise to off please, if it’s serving no actual purpose

But I bet there are some others, and this is where I’d like to hear from the readers – what say you??!

The X1 took a little while to come to market... but it was good when it got here!

Mobile Choice has an interesting blog piece about how long people have to wait after handsets are announced, to actually get them! And I say fairplay, they have a point!

In the blog, it’s noted that recent culprits have been the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N96, and Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE) Xperia X1, both of which took a good half-year after announcement to make it to sale. But I can think of a number of devices that have been announced with almost hysteria, to then see it’s taken a vendor up to 9 months to get the thing out!

And therein is the eternal worry of the vendor’s PR company – when to put the info out? Want to be ahead of the curve of course, especially if there is new feature or spec that can be played upon. Don’t want to leave it too late, or another vendor might match (or even worse trump) that feature/spec with one of their own! But also need to consider that making a consumer wait 6+ months might mean they go for something else…. hmm how to solve?

Well could I suggest possibly something toward Apple (NSDQ: AAPL)’s strategy of keeping schtum until you have something that you can sell shortly after! OK Apple is legendary at this, but one thing you’ll notice is that after announcing something, they can usually ship it a few days later – I find that amazing!

Maybe other vendors have to look at getting devices to a point where they can accurately predict it’s ready-date, before making announcements. If you have tens and tens of showstopper issues with your device, perhaps it’s too early to tell the world about it!

What say you, readers? Do ya like to wait, or would you rather have something soon after it’s announced! I know what the answer should be…..!

The original Mobile Choice blog piece is here.

[Via: Mobile Choice]

I’m sitting on a plane as I’m drafting this post. Tapping away, quite intently on my notebook Laptop, and reasonably content since I am just editing text. However, I do yearn for connectivity in the sky, and that is somewhat the point of this post.

I thought I would outline the services that would be useful to me, categorised from a high-level down to a more detailed fashion. However, before I do, I’ll just let you know about a plan that Ryanair (a budget airline in the UK) has for using the toilet on a plane – they want to charge £1 per use! Is that some kind of Pee-pay?!

Right, back to the topic at hand – what connectivity could I do with on a plane? Well, in simple terms:

·    voice
·    data

If I had then to split that out further:

·    proper mobile-network routed voice calls with a good QoS
·    SMS
·    Web browsing
·    VPN
·    Email

Now at the moment, save for a few trials with different Airline Operators, these services are not widely dispatched – isolated voice calls and texting have been tried, along with some data services. However, the overriding issue at the moment seems to be one of cost. We expect (when on the ground) that most InterWeb access is largely free, or at least if you are paying, then you get a very big bundle of data. Likewise voice calls, within your monthly charges, you can mostly get generous voice minutes on contract.

So in summary, voice and data in your home network are quite cheap. But even the previous bastion of high charges, International Roaming, has been subject to price compression in recent years. These days, you can get a call save package, pay for International texts from your monthly allowance (rather than being charged a premium), or even call at home network rates (well at least you can if you are on H3G!).

So right now I believe the final frontier for “cheap” voice and data access is on planes – and you could argue that within 5 or so years things might change radically. But I don’t think so. Right now there is incredible pressure on Airlines to improve their margins in the face of rising fuel costs, and declining passenger numbers. The Airline Operators’ overwhelming trend has been to outsource or componentize the costs, so in fact most things you would have expected bundled in your ticket cost, actually have to be bought on top.

The result? There is actually an opposite trend as regards price to the customer (it’s increasing!) from Airlines, compared to what the Mobile networks have been doing (which is decreasing costs and bundling).

So will I get my beloved connectivity on a plane? Probably not any time soon (since the CAPEX and OPEX for installing and running these services are high), and when I do, I can expect to be paying substantial charges. How am I ever going to update my Facebook status if I can’t connect?!

TechDigest has compiled a list of the top 10 things it would like to see in a Mobile device. I won’t spoil it and reproduce the whole list here, because (a) that would spoil it and (b) you should take a look at their site – really nicely re-designed recently.

What I will do is pick on a couple of things, and then direct via the wonders of hyperlinks to their site…

10) Battery – any old Li-ion
Yes, that’s right. I don’t care about batteries. I’m sorry Gary but it’s true. To hang with the lot of them. I’ve never owned a handset that ran out of juice without it being entirely my fault.
I don’t expect them to last forever, just till I make it to bed each day will do. That’s when I recharge and it seems only fair to expect no more of my handset than I do of myself, with all that Bluetooth stuff aside.

Yep that’s a fair one – we demand more from our devices these days, but they should be able to go one day at least!

5) GPS – nowhere without it
Come on, it’s all about mobile services now, isn’t it? What can your phone do for you or, more to the point, what can you do with your phone.
You’re nowhere without GPS and there’s hatfulls of location based services already out and heading our way soon. They seem slightly pointless to begin with but they’re the kind of thing that you only realise you can’t do without until you’ve got used to them.
Whether you want know where your friends are, where the nearest USB cable can be bought or simply how to get from A to B, it’s all about GPS. Give it to me and while you’re at it, make sure the handset can support it quickly and properly. Come on, let’s make it turn by turn.

That’s kind of fair enough, though I’d argue it’s a combination of the services that make use of GPS and the tech here, rather than just the tech itself.

So what else be in that Top 10 then? Well click here to find out!

[Via: Tech Digest]

I wrote an article a week ago about trends that are going to be seen at MWC, but which in isolation don’t matter – essentially I was saying technology for the sake of technology does not a good Mobile make!

I touched up touchscreens, memory, and camera megapixels as three “measures” of devices these days, that when maxed out, should propel (according to much tech bumpf) the handset to super-stardom.

Well now the dust of MWC has settled, and I’ve had time to digest the handsets that appeared – it’s pretty much the same story, only perhaps with addition of:

• Screen size - yep, that diagonal measurement in inches (!) seems to matter a lot to device vendors. Sure, stuff lots of pixels in there too, but make the screen MASSIVE. Hell, make it so big you can block out the sun when you hold the device to your ear!
• Video handling – again comes the year that video playback could be the “big thing” – well with Mobile devices that can record in “HD” (I’ll believe that when I see it [the quality]), it apparently is a very important thing…

But again, all of this is for nought if the User Experience is shocking. I’ve watched a stack of handset demo videos that various people have shot over the last few days, and my overriding feeling was one of half-baked Ux, compounded in some cases by a series of really juddery GFX on things like screen transitions.

But what say you, readership? Were you enthused by the Mobile Tech on offer? Do you care that one handset has got a really fast chipset, or that another has got more than 10 Megapixels in it’s camera?

Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. My MacBook Pro has TWO graphics cards, and a multi-touch trackpad – but they’d be nothing without the User Experience that comes with using it. Methinks some vendors at least have lost sight of Ux, in search of more silicon in their devices…

Whilst watching a video on the InterWeb the other day I came across the hugely amusing phrase “Time Vampire” – in case it’s not obvious, it’s a person or thing that literally seems to suck your (free/spare) time away!

The video I was watching referred to a configuration screen for a piece of CE (consumer equipment) – the point being that the config screen was overly-complex, and like many of us have experienced, sucks the time away you spend setting it up!

It got me thinking actually as to what have been the top Time Vampires from an IT/Mobile perspective for me over the last few years:

• Configuring early WAP handsets with their settings
• Setting up Windows to do pretty much anything – networking, for example!
• Getting some peripherals to work properly – printers and scanners!
• Configuring email settings in devices 
• Backing up Hard disks 

These have been just a few of the things that have literally eaten away at my time over the past few years, to the point of utter frustration. Having worked in the Mobile industry since before the inception of WAP, I remember the pain that setting up devices used to cause – notably I remember the Motorola (NYSE: MOT) Timeport as one of THE most-difficult-to-consider devices for data!

Windows has been a key player in vacuuming my time, in many situations – quite often because of it’s refusing to accept any config changes without a reboot – despite being IT supports teams’ favourite phrase, it’s an incredibly time-zapping process. But even simple config changes can sometimes result in locking-up of the O/S…

And let’s not forget the age-old favourite of putting your own email settings in to a mobile device – it did used to be incredibly difficult to do, since vendors seemed to consider email apps something that needed to be there, but would not really be used!

So what are your top time vampires – either now, or in the recent past? It could be something like the start-up times of PCs, or sync times between your mobile device and computer – let us know, we’d all like to share your pain

I want one. A new one. Not the current one (well OK, I do want that too), but a new upgraded one!

Apple have been notoriously quiet on the Apple TV for more than a year, instead focusing on the phenomenal success that is the iPhone 3G, and iPod/MacBook refreshes. But is it possible, in the near or medium-term future, that we might get a long-overdue refresh on the device that Apple could use to tie together their converged home strategy?

Well let’s look at what the device could probably now do with:

• A bigger HD
• Full 1080p support
• More codec support
• Restyling of the hardware – the aluminium unibody…..?
• UI tweaks
• iPhone integration

For me, a user that doesn’t mind paying money for good quality content, the Apple TV is currently something that could be great purchase, yet I have the nagging doubt that (a) there is in fact a refresh round the corner, and (b) there are some key things missing (listed above) that I would need to make me a (very) happy user of it.

Key amongst these is 1080p support, and also better codec support. At the end of the day, whilst iTunes is a great conduit for some content, you are invariably going to have stuff at home that you want to load on the Apple TV. Right now, that has to be in specific formats, and can’t exceed 720p. In my opinion, all “HD” devices have to be 1080p capable – because they can always scale down from this spec to meet the needs of less capable displays, and then display at native resolution on those “Full HD” displays.

But are Apple missing a trick with iPhone integration too? The obvious (and in fact deployed) feature is to use the iPhone as a remote to control iTunes, but knowing the cross-application integration that Apple are usually very good at, are there some more innovative features that could be deployed on the TV device? Probably!

If Apple want to tie together their computing product lines with their Mobile devices lines more completely, then Apple TV does seem a very logical place to keep on building momentum (however slow it might be) – like it or not, the converged home is slowly gathering pace, and in the next 24 months, you can expect to see most consumer CE getting USB and Ethernet ports – even if the firmware in the device isn’t initially activated to use it – fully in the knowledge that devices will need to become “network-aware” .

Apple’s legendary secretiveness about devices means we may well not know anything about a successor to the Apple TV current generation devices, until it actually hits us – what a shame, as I’d love to be placing an online order for the next-gen, integrated, upgraded, and converged Apple TV box right now!

Readers, how do you feel? Would you buy an Apple TV with new (perhaps mobile-integrated) features? Which features matter to you?

You can check out the current Apple TV here.

[Image via: Apple]

I’ve been reading quite a bit recently in the UK newspapers (typically of a weekend), and I would estimate that on 75% of weekends in the year so far, mention has been made in the paper (or supplemental magazines) of netbooks.

Netbooks are that class of laptops that are typically:

• very small
• 10” or less screen
• No optical drive
• Limited memory, some cases no HDD
• (sometimes) simplified O/S
• Optimised for web browsing, email
• Embedded WiFi, plus 1-2 USB ports
• Battery (mostly) last for a good while

 … you know the ones – a number of manufacturers (such as Samsung, ASUS, MSI, etc) have been punting them for some time now. But would you actually buy one? It’s fair enough to assume that you could do some web browsing or email on the device, but they are too large for a pocket – and that means some kind of bag. Which predisposes that it’s not completely casual usage they are designed for…

Some of the lower-end devices are using a GUI-front end on a Linux O/S, others are using Windows XP – but on the devices I have seen, there is an Achilles Heel, which is that the processors are not up to the job – meaning pretty poor performance.

Add to that the fact that most public WiFi is paid-for, and you remove the casual “whip it out” and check your email / the Web style of usage that probably vendors would have us believe is what you need one for – at least which the promo pics suggest…

So I’m throwing it out there – readers, do you have a netbook? If you do, is it Linux/WinXP/other? What do you use it for? Are you happy with it? I’d love to know if anyone actually uses these things!