This is a video from September last year (is it only me that missed it?) and its a really good one. T.J. Kang, CEO, ThinkFree; Jerry Kurtze, Ecosystem Enabling Manager, Intel; Arthur Lin, chief technology officer, Nokia; and Dennis Moore, CEO OQO. all get together and talk about what they think about the ideal mobile device, its form factor and the software that run’s on it. There’s also, as is normal these days, the discussion about what the iPhone has done to the market. If you’re like me and can’t stop wondering where these devices are going to end up and you’ve get 50 minites to spare, this is a good video to watch. (50 Mins) There’s no conclusive decision but still, some interesting thoughts.
Hopefully we’ll have some good conversations like this going at the UMPC meet-up at CeBIT.
Like I said last week, the CPU is out of the power equation now for mobile Internet devices and I think I’ve just proved it. Smartphone manufacturers have a serious problem on their hands with battery life and no amount of CPU jiggery pokery is going to help.
As you might have seen in my last post. I had set out on a little hike with my Everun and my N82. 45-minutes into the hike the battery warning sounded and the end effect was that I lost my live GPS tracking, my instant messenger, my music, my digital camera and my navigation device. Oh, and my mobile phone too! The test, while theoretically possible was, in practice, a complete failure due to pathetic battery life. a 4Wh battery is nowhere near enough for decent mobile Internet action. Always-on, high-speed Internet evices will require, luckily enough for Intel, a much bigger battery that would seriously compromise the pocketable designs that we are seeing in Barcelona this week. It’s no surprise that Apple didnt release a 3G iPhone and that Robert Scoble has to carry multiple batteries and devices when he’s livecasting with the N95.
In my little hiking ‘test’ the N82 drained a whopping 3W of power while it was in action. For all-day battery life doing a similar set of activities you would need a battery the size of the one you find on a Fujitsu U810. The N82 certainly wouldnt be the attractive candybar that it is with that great lump of Lithium attached to it! In these sort of scenarios, low power MIDS will win every time purely because the readable screen sizes of 4-5″ result in more space for batteries.
Yes, my test is an extreme case but its not unreasonable to expect this scenario to happen a lot as people start getting used to the idea of mobile Internet.
I’m very very glad I’ve got my 30Wh Everun HSDPA with me right now!
I’ve decided that I’ll work away frm the desk today so I’ve packed some sandwiches, the N82 and Everun and I’m going for a hike. The plan is to kill the battery on the N82!
I’ll be taking pics and uploading to Flickr (as is the law when you have a cameraphone) and i’ll also be testing out the Nokia Sports Tracker app with live tracking. My username is Chippy if you want to follow me on the Sports Tracker website. Ill be running IM via gizmo and probably throwng in a few twitters and maybe a YouTube vid for god measure.
Hopefuly I can create some map mashups on the way. Follow my working day at UMPC-Moblog.
Update: Show over. Nothing to se here due to the pathetic battery life of mobile phones under load. I’ll have more to say about this in the post i’m about to write as I sit here in the park. Update: Article is now available.
Post written using ScribeFire on the Raon Digital Everun.
Intel have announced today that T-Mobile, a daughter company of Deutsche Telekom, will collaborate on the roll-out of 3G/3.5G-enabled MIDs across Europe. Watch out for big announcements a CeBIT that relate to this. I bet T-Mobile join Intel on stage at some point.
What this means for the end user is the ability to buy a UMPC or MID at subsidised prices based on the Internet services they take from the carrier. It means something very significant for ARM too though. Intel are getting into the carrier channels and that’s a huge huge distribution and marketing capability.
Over the next 18 months there will be a big push aimed at getting people signed up for 24-month data contracts before the price for mobile data goes through the floor and if T-Mobile can sign someone up with two devices and two data contracts, they will. I expect MIDs to enable some very creative packages from the likes of T-Mobile, Vodafone, 3UK and Orange in Europe. “A free mobile Internet and video device with that iPhone sir? Just sign up for this 20 Euro per month contract and you’ll get high-fidelity TV over IP services along with a real PC-in-your-hand experience.”
In the same press release: ‘Intel enables the best Internet experience in your pocket.’ JKK picked up on that‘best’ bit. It’s so funny to hear Intel say that because from where I’m standing it looks like a retaliatory comment in ARMs direction for what they said last week.
Let’s re-cap…We have MiniMo, Opera Mini 4.0, Silverlight, Skyfire, S60 browser, Opera 9.5, Safari and now the Iris Browser, all gunning for position on your mobile device. Do you think this could get confusing for consumers? Probably not – most of them won’t give a hoot what’s under the hood as long as they get to the content they want.
The Iris browser falls into the ‘pure’ category as it’s based on WebKit (as are the S60, Android and iPhone browsers) and doesn’t rely on proxies or remote servers to modify the content.
The Iris Browser is an advanced, high-performance and versatile application that is specifically designed to function in resource-constrained environments. It brings the full Web experience to mobile phones, set-top boxes, mobile Internet devices, portable media players, Ultra-Mobile PCs and other embedded devices – in a fast and user-friendly manner.
The press announcement that brought this browser to my attention is all about Trolltech who will be distributing the browser as part of Qtopia. Trolltech are being acquired by Nokia as I write so I guess there’s some advantages in putting the S60 browser team in contact with the Iris Browser team to enhance the products in both S60 and Iris directions and strengthening it against attack from Intel’s Moblin which is using the Mozilla (Firefox) engine. Oh, one other thing – Trolltech are part of the LiMo Foundation, the organisation that has been working on a unified, open, linux-based mobile phone platform and who have also just made a few interesting press releases. They’ve picked up a lot of new members and they’ve announced a set of new phones. Phew! It’s a highly interconnected connected world of mobile business out there!
As I mentioned the other day when I speed-tested OperaMini, I’m enjoying these proxied, optimised services for their speed and low data rates but a pure browser is an absolute necessity if I need to get work done and its fantastic to see so much effort going into this area.
Of all the highly-converged smartphones, productivity devices, the HTC Advantage is probably the most business-focused one out there and I say that mainly because of the large screen size, big storage capacity and keyboard. I imagine that it’s been a fairly successful device too as it regularly gets positive reviews with some even going as far as to call it the ultimate UMPC! Changing the mechanical keyboard for a membrane type with haptic feedback is going to raise some eyebrows though. Yes, it increases ruggedness and it will probably be just as good but I’m sure people will be sceptical. Maybe the 16GB flash (upgraded from 8GB rotating disk) and operating system upgrade (assumed Windows Mobile 6.1) will placate potential customers. If not, and if the X7501 gets discontinued, I can see some unhappy comments surfacing, especially if it comes with the usual flash-disk pricing premium.
I’ve put the details in the database so keep an eye on the product page for updates as they come in.
I’ve just installed Maps 2.0 on my Nokia N82. This is mobile Internet at its best and its a big upgrade from the previous version. Apart from some nice UI changes, there’s some nice new features. Firstly, the very important live search facility has been added. Its easy and it picked up my local restaurants first go. It seems to be puling info from Nokia and not from partner search engines. This is good and bad. Good because it allows them to keep the quality of POI’s high. Bad because […]
I’ve decided that I’ll work away frm the desk today so I’ve packed some sandwiches, the N82 and Everun and I’m going for a hike. The plan is to kill the battery on the N82!
