Headphone madness part 2

I thought the story of picking the most appropriate headphones for the mobile gear was one of the least interesting. But it looks like it is generating above than average number of responses. Last week I came across an article describing the missing link in my search for the universal headphones. Shure is getting close with their I-series sound isolating ones, but they still do not solve the double-jack notebook problem. The truth is notebook manufacturers should finally equip new models with a cell phone-compatible 4-conductor 2.5mm socket to let us use cell phone sets for notebook VoIP conversations. On the other hand SonyEricsson is pretty close to a perfect solution with the HBH-DS970 set. They are in-ear, sound isolating, have integrated microphone and support a multipoint A2DP Bluetooth interface.

I mentioned A2DP her several times before, so let us explain what it is about. A2DP stands for Advanced Audio Distribution Profile and is designed to stream high fidelity stereo music over Bluetooth interface. This approach, once widely adopted will change the way we use our music phones and MP3 players forever. Since you will no longer need wires to stream music from the source where it is stored (a player) to a destination, which can be your stereo headphones, but can also be your car stereo or your home amplifier. No cables, no plugs, (hopefully) no incompatibilities. Freedom at last. I'm waiting for Apple to release the new A2DP equipped iPod, since it will be a central streaming source of my music (until music phones catch up with storage capacity of 30GB or more). Bluetooth iPod is certain, PortalPlayer, the manufacturer of iPod SoC (System-on-Chip) has a wireless version in the works, so Apple will definitely use it. The question, as always, is when...? And of course we will need other devices to provide A2DP support as well. Windows Mobile music phones seemed to be already there, as the A2DP had been promised for the AKU2 update, but is not showing up, and the word is, it did not performed well enough to be included in the gold releases. Windows XP lacks A2DP as well. Yes, Windows XP even lacks the ordinary Headset profile, but at least some notebook vendors (as IBM emmm Lenovo) provide Widcom emmm Broadcom stack with both Audio Gateway and Headset profiles. So hopefully Broadcom will release A2DP Windows XP stack as well...

A2DP very often comes in tandem with AVRCP profile. This profile is designed to provide a standard interface to control TVs, Hi-fi equipment, etc. to allow a single remote control (or other device) to control all of the A/V equipment that a user has access to. This combined with a multipoint capability, which essentially means headphones can be simultaneously connected to several sources, such as an MP3 player and a mobile phone. So a simple scenario when you listen to a music that gets paused when a call comes in may finally realize.

News on the gadget front this week center around the AKU2 update for the i-Mate SP5m phone. Shame no A2DP Bluetooth there, but at least Microsoft DirectPush rocks. It is really really great to have email notifications delivered instantaneously to your mobile. And of course (as you can see on the right) this feature can be turned off with a push of a button for those lazy weekends :) DirectPush is really a killer feature. Who will buy Blackberries now?

PS> Thanks to Mike Temporale from the SmartphoneThoughts team for pointing me to a blog entry that describes how to install a root certificate on the SP5m (you need that for the DirectPush to work).

HSDPA Tsunami

I have just returned from CeBIT, where HSDPA along with HDTV were the hot (and real!) trends. OK, first let's explain these acronyms. HDTV stands for High Definition TeleVision and means better than cinema picture quality - I'll probably write some more on HDTV later, but for today let's focus on HSDPA. High-Speed Downlink Packet Access is the full name of the technology that is rolling like tsunami over mobile telecom networks. You've probably already heard of UMTS - the 3rd generation mobile telephony that was heralded in 2000 and for five years existed as a pure vaporware. Now UMTS is here, and we use it for high-speed (sort of...) wireless Internet access and video calls among other things. But probably not many of you are aware UMTS that took so many years and billions of $$$'s to become real is about to be replaced by HSDPA. OK, it does not look that bad as it sounds. HSDPA is an evolution of an UMTS standard, namely Release 5, defined in March 2002. Its main feature is enhancement of the connection speed by an order of magnitude. 3,6Mbps in current implementation, with theoretical limit at 14Mbps. That is 100 times faster than current GPRS data links, most of you use for email and Web browsing when on the move. The implications of this technology are endless. It will bring you the joy of fast Web access via your mobile phone. It will allow to download a high quality MP3 song in a matter of seconds. And it will make other mobile data technologies, notably the hyped WiMax, obsolete.

From the technology standpoint, HSDPA is a series of very logical optimizations to the UMTS (W-CDMA) technology.

• Fast Scheduling. Most of the speed limitations in over-the-air transmissions come from the noise and corrupted data packets being received by the handset. When a corrupt packet arrives, it has to be retransmitted again. In traditional UMTS architecture the decision to retransmit is taken by the RNC (Radio Network Controller) and takes time. In HSDPA the retransmission decisions are taken by the Base Station (the tower with antennas, your mobile talks to), that sits much closer to the handset, and are much faster.
• Incremental Redundancy. It may happen the second (retransmitted) packet arrives corrupted again. But it may be corrupted differently than the previous one. And by combining two such corrupted packets the handset may reconstruct a good one, without a need of further retransmissions.
• Channel Quality Feedback. The base station listens to the handsets that report the channel quality. Statistically the conditions vary as users move, and it is very reasonable to transmit packets to the users who have the best reception quality at the moment (the chance of having to retransmit is low). This is done 500 times a second, so any of the 2ms packets can go to a different user, depending on the momentary channel quality.

There are some other technical details into HSDPA, but two things should be stressed here. First, HSDPA is just a software upgrade for any UMTS network. No need for new base stations. No need for new towers. Just apply the HSDPA patch and go! Second, overall throughput of HSDPA network is several times higher than UMTS network, so this means more users can be served at a time, and ultimately the cost per minute/megabyte goes down. Tha simply means HSDPA, if not already here, will be deployed sooner than you expect. The upgrade is realtively simple and the business benefits are here.

And now comes the real fun... Are you aware there is only one company on the Planet that makes commercial HSDPA chipsets for handsets? Yes, that is true, only Qualcomm has shipping chips. All the competition is about a year behind. That means if you come across a HSDPA handset or a smartphone, it is Qualcomm-based. Qualcomm's MSM6275 has been available since Q4-2004. Freescale (former division of Motorola) promises something for Q1-2006, but we already know its mother - Motorola - rejected the chipset for its size (does not fit in the thin RAZR enclosure) and turned to Qualcomm. Texas Instruments (probably in cooperation with Nokia) says "wait until 2007". Probably the closest competitor is Ericsson Mobile Platform V350 scheduled for 2H-2006. Are you invested in Qualcomm? It has just hit its multi-year high of $51. But HSDPA, among other things will drive it to the new highs.

Microsoft DirectPush

Well, I think I may count myself as one of the first pioneers who have installed AKU2 upgrade on their teleputers. Now what is that "AKU2", you will ask.... From the formal standpoint AKU2 (Adaptation Kit Update 2) is a second, updated release of the Windows Mobile 5 operating system, that powers rapidly growing number of devices from smartphones to teleputers.

It's main feature, however, is the DirectPush email delivery technology, or simply, push email. Push email is a set o technologies, delivering your emails instantly, as they arrive. From the customer's perspective it is working more or less like SMS service. Once an email message arrives on your server, the server "pushes" the message to your device. For those of you interested in the very details, there is Ewan Dalton's PowerPoint presentation from IT Forum 2005. So far email used to be a "pull" service - you had to connect to retrieve it. Push changes a lot here and you should not wonder why I kept on monitoring the i-mate's FTP Site for the update. Yes, it is not yet reflected on their web page yet, but can be downloaded and installed ;)

DirectPush is very easy to set up. Assuming you already have Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 at your office, what you need is Service Pack 2 installed on the server (our Admin is perfect with things like that :), a Windows Mobile device (i-mate JasJar in my case) with AKU2 upgrade and a working packet data connection (like GPRS or UMTS). One thing to remember is to install on the mobile device a root certificate, that secures the communication channel. Once you have everything in place, it just works. As practically this is my first personal experience with push email, I really must say the jaws drop...

I did a series of tests. Like sending an email message from my private Gmail account to my corporate Exchange account. Within 20 seconds from pressing the "Send" button on the Gmail page, the teleputer beeped and a notification message popped up. 20 seconds is very fast. I did some SMS tests to compare, and SMSes (within the same network) were typically delivered within 12 seconds. Now if you imagine that the email from Google account had to travel across the Atlantic over SMTP to my Exchange server, that in turn notifies the teleputer over a mobile packet data connection to pull the message and the device retrieves the message over the air, 20 seconds is really impressive. Bad, really bad news for the Blackberry... The push email monopoly is broken. In my opinion this feature alone may be a big driver for the adoption of Exchange servers within corporations. Microsoft DirectPush is working, working fast, over standard protocols and is secure. Both the connection is secure and, what is even more important, you are able to send/receive signed/encrypted email (S-MIME) messages very easily (to do that you have to install your personal *.PFX certificate on the device, I did this with the help of a very nice utility - PFXimprt by Jacco de Leeuw).

Unfortunately, as it happens in the industry, not all the originally planned AKU2 features found their way into the i-mate JasJar update. The feature I will be missing is the A2DP (Advanced Audio Distribution Profile) Bluetooth profile. The word on the Net was A2DP implementation in AKU2 was too unstable to be officially released to the consumers. So we will have to wait at least for several months to get it. In the meantime let's push some emails ;)

Google: Infinite Storage

I have not posted about Google for a while, so it's time to look again at what is brewing in Mountain View. At the moment I'm browsing through the slides from the Google Analyst Day (last Thursday, March 2nd, 2006). There has been a long debate whether Google will finally offer infinite storage space for every user. Gmail is an area where it has already happened. If you use Gmail, you have probably noticed your mailbox grows faster than the space you use. So for one application we may already consider the infinity is reached. It does not matter, if it is theoretically 2GB or 3GB or something. As long as it is more than you are able to fill, it is infinite.

My long time dream has been to move my entire Windows profile to some server storage. Windows profile is a directory structure below [C:\Documents and Settings\], holding things like local settings (links and cookies), your Desktop and most importantly [My Documents] folder where you store all documents, pictures, songs and videos. When you purchase a new machine, first thing you want to do (after installing all the applications you use) is to transfer the Windows profile to a new one, so that all your documents, songs, etc are present. The profile is what should be backed up and taken care of.

Due to PC-centric thinking at Microsoft (they assume you have one PC for your lifetime), it is very difficult to maintain synchronized profiles, when you use more than one machine. You change a file on one PC, and the change is not reflected on the other. BTW this is one of the things that keeps me from being enthusiastic about the new Origami gadget - just another profile to maintain. The ideal solution to the Windows problem (something that Google just loves to give) is to store a master copy of the profile somewhere on the Web and have the local copy of the profile set as a cache, that synchronizes in the background with the master. You loose your laptop? You loose nothing - get a new one and refill the cache. Upgrading to a new PC? Easy - get a new one and refill the cache with YOUR data. Having more than one PC and troubles keeping things in sync? Set up your master profile on the Net and replicate the changes. Is a service like that in the works? Surely is.

The slides from the last Analyst Day carry some hints. Page 19 - "Store 100%", "the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache". Of course there will be a long debate about privacy, but in the end people will understand where they should keep the data - in the bank, not at home. "An important implication of this theme is that we can make your online copy more secure than it would be on your own machine.". So from now on, I'm in the waiting mode for the inifinite Gdrive.

Dissappointing Origami

Another week is passing by, and thousands of new Origami stories have emerged on the Web. Unfortunately they all point to a failure. I mean, may be not a spectacular failure, since people (myself included) may consider buying the device, but we really should not expect a breakthrough. It looks like Origami devices will be just a little scaled - down Tablet PCs, with standard Tablet PC (Windows XP) operating system and stylus - operated induction - based touch screens. This design results in several drawbacks:

1. The battery life will be far well below mass market expectations. My bet is typical 3 hours, may be up to five, which is still not enough. To carry a device like that with me, I would expect 10 hours minimum. This just ain't gonna happen...

2. Origami will not replace your iPod or a music phone. Probably it is going to be too complicated to operate and have too short battery life.

3. Stylus required. Induction based touch screen requires a special stylus to operate it. I still hope Apple's upcoming video iPod will be operated simply by a finger. What is more - there is a chance the Origami will be just another handheld device without a scroll wheel. This just drives me nuts. Every, every computer mouse has a scroll wheel. And almost none of the notebooks and tablets and pocket PCs (with a notable exception of Sony Ericsson P800/P900 series smartphones) have scroll wheels. Why? Because the most often we scroll the pages, that have difficulties fitting on smaller screens, and the device designers just want to make our lives difficult and annoying. I WANT A SCROLL WHEEL WITH A CLICK (probably nobody will listen anyway...).

4. Startup time. This will be the most important factor. Will it be instant? (using Intel Robson Cache technology?) Will my calendar alarms wake the device (yes please!)? And will they drain the batteries when not cleared, as it STILL happens with Pocket PCs with 5 versions of the operating system behind (please do something about it!) ?

Is there a place for a device like that? May be as an electronic reader, but for that the specs are simply not there - too much weight and too short battery life. For road warriors a two - piece setup will prevail. A typical, fast and comfortable notebook machine plus a converged smartphone for playing music, taking pictures, email/instant messaging and simple web browsing. And the Origami will be just what the name implies - an artistic, sophisticated, detailed and useless gadget.