Headphone madness

I like smart design. One reason I liked the iPOD form the very start was its single firewire cable that was used both for charging and music download. And the iPOD's cable was elegantly thin. And its power supply was very small and nice, with its folding prongs. By the way power supplies are worth the story of their own. Thankfully they are passing away thanks to USB that morphed from Universal Serial Bus to Universal Supply Bus, as more and more mobile electronics gadgets can be powered and charged by a single mini-usb cable that plugs into either a notebook computer or a standalone USB power supply. But I still wonder why notebook manufacturers or the aftermarket power supply guys like Kensington or Targus do not provide USB sockets in their power supply units. Just to charge my phone or an iPOD I have to keep my notebook running at night....
One area the smart design is gone (or has never been there) is headphones. Many modern gadgets have sound output. To name a few: an iPOD, a Sony PSP, a cell phone, a PDA and a notebook. Most of them are standardized and use 3,5mm stereo audio jack. Most of them share a common weakness, however. The headphones that come with them have very poor sound quality. What came with my Sony PSP was a shame. Not to mention my Musicphone or the Teleputer. I was even surprised my original iPOD headphones were not that of that good sound quality (that is the reason why Griffin Technology, one of my favorite "Smart Design" companies makes the EarJams, simple clip-ons for the original Apple ear buds that deliver the difference you have got to hear). So the solution seems really simple - buy yourself a pair of really good headphones (personally I prefer the Sony Fontopia MDR-EX71 SL, as they are not as expensive as sound isolating Shures and deliver really good bass).
Things start getting tricky once you try to use your carefully selected headphones with your Musicphone. My i-Mate SP5m has 2,5mm jack so the Fontopias will not plug in and the things that came with the SP5m are the prime example of how badly you can damage your product with the lack of smart design. The original i-Mate headphones simply sound like they were made of a recycled cardboard. Fortunately soon enough the new Treo 700W was launched and carried this adapter as an accessory and I am glad this piece of smart design works with my SP5m.
But what to do if you want not only to listen but to talk as well? I mean use one of the so-called headsets, that are headphones combined with a microphone? Personally I have three devices I want to talk to. The first one is my Musicphone (it is a phone, so talking should be natural). The second is the JasJar teleputer (it is also a phone and I want to use it for Skype conversations as well). And the third is my IBM notebook (for Skype and Google Talk). And is having one good quality stereo headset, that connects to all three of them, such an impossible requirement? Well... it seems so.
First, I needed Sony Fontopias equipped with a microphone. I could not find them, so I spent one Saturday morning cutting off the earpieces from my old SonyEricsson P800 headset and soldering on the Fontopias. This way I ended up with a set that lets me listen to a high quality music from my smartphone and at the same time lets me have a conversation. Now to use the same set (equipped with an 2,5mm plug) with my iPOD, I found the Proporta 3,5mm - to - 2,5mm adapter very helpful. But I still cannot us the microphone with my JasJar, since the smart people at HTC designed yet another jack standard - 3,5mm with mic. For the same reason I cannot use this set with my IBM notebook, as most PC devices have a separate jack for input and a separate for output. This is just hopeless!!!
Looking into the future, I expect one of smart design companies to come up with a solution. My bet here is Apple. The new iPOD will probably have A2DP Bluetooth headphones (A2DP is a new Bluetooth profile that uses on the fly compression to stream high quality stereo). Hopefully the 6th generation Apple headphones will have a microphone as well. And hopefully you will be able to pair them with more than one device (namely your phone and your notebook). And hopefully they will be charged by a mini-USB cable. If not, I hope the people from Griffin Technology will hear my cry... GIVE ME A HEADSET THAT WORKS WITH ALL MY GADGETS!!! (am I asking too much?)

Peer To Peer Future

Sharing files is what we very often want and need to do. Sharing started all the idea of computer networks. I remember back in the early 90's when I set up my first company, we were just a couple of people in two small rooms, everybody having their own, standalone PC. Floppy disks were the only way to share files. No recordable CDs (I remember our CEO had a CD ROM drive using a special caddy to house a CD, but nobody dreamed at that time of being able to record a CD at home...). No USB flash keys. And no network between us. So we used floppy disks, 1,44MB capacity to write and carry and read files among our machines. There were networks, but they were expensive. Novell had their Netware 2,20 and later 3,12, with servers written in assembly language, because the guy who wrote them could not remember if you placed a star on the left or the right in C++. But Netware was too expensive for a small startup like us. Fortunately for us Novell introduced Netware Lite, 99$ per PC and what was important - the Lite did not require dedicated server. Everybody could be a "server", sharing own resources (files and printers) with others on a peer-to-peer basis. Netware Lite was neither fast nor reliable, but it helped us a lot. Instead of dealing with floppy disks, we could just "map" somebody else's drive as own and read/write to it over Ethernet cable.

The "sharing problem" is still with us in the Internet era. We snap pictures with our electronic cameras. We record videos. We use various applications to compose our work documents, our art and 9 out of 10 times we want to share them with our friends and family. So what do we do? Of course email. But remember, not so long ago (actually before Gmail), the usual mailbox limit was around 4 megabytes. Not that much larger than a floppy disk in dark ages. Google has come to the rescue with their infinite mailbox storage. Yes, I say infinite, because I seriously doubt it will ever be a limit for a typical user (you have probably noticed your Gmail account grows as you keep adding new emails to it, mine after 2 years is 11% full, and believe me, Google will add storage when you are approaching the limit). But is Gmail really a rescue tothe third millennium file sharing problem? While it's 2,5 GB in size, it does not accept an email bigger than 10MB. What is 10MB? Two JPEG pictures from your digital camera? When I come back from holidays, I have something like 2GB of pictures, I would like to share. Of course I can email a couple of recordable CDs to my family. But shouldn't it be possible just to point them to a link to a folder on my computer? And what happens when I want to share a video with them? 60 minutes of DV quality is something like 30GB. Can you burn that on CDs? No.... Of course you can use the Moviemaker to compress to whatever format you like, but it will take you two days and still you will end up with 3GB, so the only method is to burn that on DVD and go to the post office. You see how much the Internet has to grow, it is still so immature for things like sending a just recorded movie of a newborn child to grandmothers and grandfathers... Shouldn't it be simpler?

There comes the idea of peer-to-peer file sharing over the internet. You have a PC with a set of folders on a disk. My Pictures, My Videos and so on... Share them with your family and friends... But how? There are of course many applications that are doing this. But all of them have two common problems. One is they very often require a complicated setup on your routers and firewalls. Second is, there is virtually no security. The Internet is not a secure place to be. So all your data should be well guarded while it travels. It is your data and you do not want anybody else to play with it. There have been several peer-to-peer solutions showing up recently. At least two of them attracted me and I think they are harbingers of things to come.

AllPeers (http://www.allpeers.com/) is the first one. There is not much I can say about it, since it is in the "coming soon" phase. But it seems to address the issue very well with the "share exactly what you want with who you want" statement. If it is as easy as the demo promises, AllPeers may be the story of 2006.

hamachi (http://www.hamachi.cc/) is the second and seems to have potentially bigger impact. It is the first secure peer-to-peer technology with widespread acceptance. They say it is "fast, secure and simple". Isn't it exactly what we need?

2006 may be really the year of peer-to-peer ascendance. And I do not mean scenarios like illegal music swapping services. I mean secure virtual private networks, that are easy to set up between you and your friends, family, and even coworkers in simple and needed collaboration scenarios. How long will the post office take money for using postman to deliver bits on CDs?

Good and accepted peer-to-peer software may generate mountains of cash for Internet providers. If you think you have a fast Internet connection, try to send 100 high - quality pictures to a photo lab. That is it - most of us have ADSL broadband, where "A" stands for asymmetric, so while the data from the Net down to you travels fairly fast, it is painfully slow from you up to the Net. And this will be critical once we develop our Net sharing habits. With peer-to-peer applications we will be willing to upgrade from ADSLs to fiber optic connections more eagerly than we used to be on the way from 56kbps analog modems to ADSL lines. Operators - remodel your strategy, investors - prepare your picks. Peer-to-peer is coming from behind, even if the big boys from Redmond and Mountain View don't see it (yet).

Radio Google

In my October 2005 post I discussed the possibility of Google entering voice ads market. And so it has just happenned today. Google has yet to go after voice phone calls, but they are closing in - by taking over the radio ads first with the acquisition of dMarc Broadcasting Inc., a company that connects advertisers with radio stations. The core asset of dMarc is an automated system for scheduling and ads delivery over the radio.

This move clearly confirms the direction Google is heading. They want to be The Place where you advertise. You no longer have to worry about media and channel, they will be picked up for you automatically, depending on the content and your target audience. Internet, TV, Newspapers, Radio, Telephones... Why should you decide? Let them pick the best for you. As I wrote in the Google: Life After Television.

"Google is becoming a one stop shop for advertisers. You have a product or a service. You want to sell it. Let the world learn about it. So you go to Google, bet for some AdWords and wait for orders. It is that simple. Regardless where you are, with a few clicks you start selling to The World."

Opera On Your TV

Opera Software is one of the companies I admire the most. Back in the nineties, when the web browser titans were battling for dominance of Internet Explorer versus Netscape Navigator, hardly anyone could notice the alternative from Norway. Experts were saying there was no place for a third, small player on the internet browser market. How times have changed! Now we have Google - backed FireFox that has taken the Microsoft market share by storm, riding the wave of Redmond's fatal mistakes. FireFox has taken hearts of Microsoft community, promising good security and good features (like tabs, convenient zooming and RSS). In the meantime Opera has been working hard, below many of the big boy's radars, developing extremely polished web browser and extremely successful strategy.

Opera has been the first to notice and understand the mobile phenomenon. While Microsoft has had troubles delivering a decent browser on their own Windows Mobile platform, Opera offers us a galaxy of choices for almost every mobile device. I used to use Opera on my previous smartphones (SonyEricsson P800 and P900). I have it installed on my 3G Nokia 6680. I'm waiting impatiently for the Windows Mobile 5 version of Opera to put on my i-mate SP5m music phone and on the JasJar Teleputer.

And now it looks like the smart Norwegians have been first to catch the IPTV wave. What draw my attention recently was the press release dated January 5th, 2006 "The Full Web and AJAX on a Chip for TV: The Opera browser is now pre-ported to Sigma's SMP8630 chipsets". The title itself says it all, but let me explain what the statement means.

I' wont explain here what the Full Web means. You should know TV as well :). The important words, however are AJAX and Sigma SMP8630.

AJAX means Asynchronous JavaScript And XML and is the state of the art technology being used to build and deliver Internet applications. The first full AJAX application has been Microsoft Outlook Web Access 2003, however somehow Microsoft has not been able to replicate the technology in other mainstream applications. The second, and extremely successful has been Gmail - Google's approach to email. Gmail has become extremely popular - as easy as the Web, but fast and responsive as any local application. After its success, Gmail has been followed by a galaxy of other applications, like Google Local and even Microsoft's Live.COM

Sigma SMP8630 is a chipset. A media processor, a building block for the next generation home entertainment devices. SMP8630 is considered being 6 to 12 months ahead of its competitors. That means most of the next generation set-top-boxes or Blue-Ray DVD players or HDTV (High Definition Television) receivers are built using this chipset. The Opera announcement means these devices will be internet ready. Isn't it natural being able to use your 50-inch LCD or plasma TV to browse the news or play Google Video On Demand? I just cannot wait to get one of these gadgets and hook to my VDSL line and enjoy the AJAX applications delivered in clarity and style on the Opera browser on the TV. In the meantime, go and download the Opera for your PC. You will feel the difference, I promise!

PS. Glenn - thank you for bringing Sigma to the table, and Piotr, thanks for reminding me about the Opera.

Global IP Sound

To end the current Skype saga, I wanted to tell you about the company that stands behind Skype. It's the Global IP Sound (GIPS), a small company from Sweden. They provide voice engines for both Skype and Google Talk. There must be something unusual about GIPS codecs, as the most successful VoIP company and the most successful Internet company, both use the GIPS technology in their products.

Interesting developments can be revealed when you look at the Newsroom section on the GIPS web site. On December 13th, 2005, they released the latest versions of the Voice Engine for both Pocket PC and Symbian 9 platforms. A couple of days later Skype released a new beta for Pocket PC (I believe the latest Skype is based on the latest GIPS engine). What is even more intriguing, GIPS claims they have Symbian version as well. Does that mean we should expect Skype on Nokia phones soon? That would be something, especially when there are plenty of Nokia models for UMTS, and it has already been proved, UMTS is a great match for Skype.

By the way, I wonder who will be the first with a Symbian VoIP product - Skype or Google? And you probably know my bet :)...

Skype on Treo 700W?

The long awaited Treo 700W has been released. Looks like it's a perfect match for the Skype for Pocket PC. The CPU in Treo is 312MHz (meets the minimum for the low_cpu version). The radio is CDMA EV-DO, so neither latency nor throughput should be a problem. Unless Verizon deliberately blocks Skype packets on their firewalls, everything should work. Treo also has a touchscreen, so the Pocket Controller hack, I described a week ago will no longer be necessary.

Unfortunately Treo 700w is not available in Europe, and even if it was, there are not that many EV-DO networks (Eurotel in Czech Republic and Zapp in Romania, but both operate in the 450MHz band). So, hey my American friends, who will be the first to report if it works? Looking forward to your reports....

Mobile VoIP Is Coming

Two weeks ago I posted some tests of Skype running on a UMTS Teleputer (i-mate JasJar). While the JasJar is definitely one of the smallest all-in-one computer equipped with 3G voice/data/video connectivity, it is a little too big and fragile to carry as a mobile phone replacement. Some of you will argue with that, but I just cannot imagine skiing or dancing with the JasJar in my pocket. And as I'm sure all the future voice communications will be carried in VoIP (Voice-over-IP) fashion (that means voice is converted to internet packets on the phone and is transmitted to the other party as ordinary data packets - like email or instant messenger conversations), I kept on searching for ways to do VoIP calls straight from my cell phone. If you are a faithful reader of mine, you probably know my primary phone is an HTC i-mate SP5m. SP5m is a wonderful device and the more I use it the more I like it. There are several features that make this phone stand apart from the competition, notably fast processor (200MHz ARM-based OMAP), WiFi radio and plenty of memory (up to 2GB with mini-SD flash card). And it runs Windows Mobile 5 operating system, the same OS that powers the JasJar teleputer.

So if Skype works on the JasJar, it should - at least - give some signs of life on the SP5m. Unfortunately the Skype downloads do not have a version for a phone, and the "Pocket PC" version does not install on the phone, claiming it is incompatible with the device. So I decided to experiment a bit and copied Skype.EXE from my JasJar to the phone. Then fired it up and - it worked! Well... almost worked. Skype presented me with a nice welcome screen and a large button "tap here to connect". Unfortunately there is no way to tap on the Windows Mobile phone, since the screen is not touch - sensitive. So I was stuck. After trying this and that, I finally succeeded with the help of Soti Pocket Controller. Soti is a nice application that lets you "remote control" your phone from the desktop PC (it also displays the phone's screen on the PC screen). So I "clicked" the Sign-In button with my desktop mouse and Skype asked for my credentials. And then it signed in successfully. All subsequent sign-ins are now automatic, since Skype kindly remembers your credentials.

Then I called the echo123 Skype test service. To my surprise I heard something. Well, the quality was not that great, the sound was interrupted for brief moments, but I could clearly hear the test service announcements and was able to record and play my test message back. Clearly the application needs more horsepower. Skype claims minimum CPU requirements of 312MHz, while my phone is only 200MHz. But the test proves it works and you are able to conduct a conversation.

It looks like we are about to approach the stage when next wave of mobile devices will be powerful enough to act as VoIP terminals. It is not a far stretch to say the next generation phones will be 50% faster. And for the entire solution to work we will need 3G data connectivity on board. Forget EDGE (it is just too slow with too much latency). Forget WiFi. It drains your batteries too fast to keep it on all the time, and be online to the ones wanting to reach you. Only 3G CDMA (in form of UMTS/WCDMA or EV-DO) will do the job. Thanks to special signaling protocol, 3G can keep your connection alive all the time without draining the battery (WiFi cannot do this) and its transmission characteristics (latency and throughput) are enough to carry voice VoIP packets.

I think in 2006 we will see the first cellular devices capable of running always-on, always-connected VoIP in our pockets. If Skype fine - tunes their phone edition version, they may be the application of choice. On the other hand I would not rule out Google. They target more and more mobile phones with their platform (mobile Gmail, excellent GLM), so probably Windows or Symbian version of Google Talk is already in the works. Once that happens, voice may become the killer application for 3G data :)