So Who Really Needs a 3G Phone ?

The title is controversial. And so is the subject of 3G mobile. Anyway, after eight years of 3G I should never ask... But the reality is different and sometimes it is good to ask. What prompted me to post on this subject was my decision last Friday to change my mobile service provider from T-Mobile (Era in Poland) to Orange. No no, the switch is not over yet. There will be more episodes in The Switch saga. Today I am still with T-Mobile, but the decision has already been made.

So yes, I am dropping my fantastic Blackberry Bold 9000... The phenomenal, the best piece of hardware I have ever had. And believe me there is absolutely nothing wrong with the Bold itself. It is the service provider to blame. The reasons are described in details in The Episode 4, so I will not be repeating them here. My next gadget will be the Blackberry Curve 8900 provisioned by Orange. A big unknown. Absolutely no guarantee, it will work as intended. I tried to push Orange to check all the details of the setup. I failed. All they could say was the 8900 was a new model and they did not have much experience with it. It is available on reorder only, so no try-and-buy either. Pay-and-pray instead. That is exactly what I do now. I will share my experience with you here, probably in two weeks time. Until then let us focus on today's subject.

The curve 8900 is not a 3G phone. It has 2G GSM (including 2,5G EDGE) and Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi on the 8900 and Orange are the magnetic part of the proposition, as they offer UMA, or Unlicensed Mobile Access, allowing the UMA-compliant handset to connect to the GSM core network over Wi-Fi tunnel. I live in a place where any GSM reception is marginal in Winter and non-existent in Summer when there are leaves on the surrounding trees. So UMA is potentially a good alternative for me. Up to this day there were not too many UMA - compliant handsets, but the Curve 8900 can handle UMA and I have a feeling it will be a subject of several new posts here :). UMA works fine on DSL connections that are not saturated, otherwise it suffers in quality and the only cure is a good QOS setup. I hope I can handle that on my DFL-800. Will tell you how to do it when I master the subject...

UMA has been attractive for me. And I have been glad to know BlackBerries support UMA. At least some of them. What I noticed was UMA and 3G exclude each other, at least when it comes to BlackBerry. Theoretically there should be no issue, as 3G runs in a different band than Wi-Fi. But probably the phone's software cannot handle multiple handovers from GSM to 3G to UMA and back. So when I decided to get a UMA-capable BlackBerry, all the 3G models were automatically excluded. It took me a while to think about the lack of 3G in a brand new phone I am buying in 2009. I went through all the scenarios I would need it:

• Video Calls. I used to believe strongly video calls would pick up. Unfortunately this has not happened and proably will not happen, at least based on the current 3G-324M 64kb cuircit channel standard. Video over 64kb is simply too bad for today's standards and it rips people off their privacy - video calls have to be speakerphone calls and everybody else around you hears the conversation. Nobody likes it. I don't.
• Data connectivity. I have a separate 3G USB modem I use as a mobile data transceiver for my laptop. I used to use my phone as a data modem sometime ago, but found this drained phone's battery too fast. Today it is a challenge to run the phone alone all day without recharging, so no need to drain it even faster with a laptop data connection. So I do not need 3G data in my phone. From my experience EDGE is just enough for the amounts of data the phone itself is able to consume (small screen, asynchronous email). Laptops are high speed data drainers, but they are not an issue since most of use use separate data modems.
• Call quality. Well the call quality theoretically should be better with 3G (more bandwidth, more modern codecs), but in practice it very rarely is. European 3G due to its 2100MHz frequency that has troubles penetrating building walls and due to the extremely complicated inter-system handoff to 2G/GSM very often drops active calls. This has been a big issue with the iPhone 3G and still is an issue with most other hardware, as the reason is not only in the terminals. It is... by design... (more details here: http://headworx.slupik.com/2008/08/iphone-3g-cell-breathing-and.html). Two weeks ago a friend of mine purchased the Google G1 @ T-Mobile. It is being advertised as the phone designed for the mobile Internet, what may be true. It is definitely not designed for voice conversations, as over ten minutes we talked, he dropped six times, promising he was returning the phone back to the shop... as the dropped calls were a huge issue. I advised him turning 3G off and it helped. A lot.
  

So who really needs a 3G phone? Not a 3G modem but a phone? Probably only the MNOs who are tight on capacity of their 2G towers in highly populated urban areas. Subscribers usually do not care. They do not use video calls, they have separate dongles for laptop data, they do not swallow data in torrents on their handsets. But they do want longer battery life and stable voice conversations and smaller and less expensive handsets. That is what 2G gives them. They are probably ready to sacrifice a few occasional "network busy" or "congestion" messages in exchange of the other benefits above. So is 3G a wasted investment? Surely not. It lets us move the high volume data traffic away from 2G channels, freeing them for ordinary cellphone users. Even myself, being a high tech geek, I can envision living in 2G-only world. I will report soon how such a life is...

Apical

Dynamic range has been a problem ever since any attempt to record a piece of reality was done. What we see and hear live is still beyond what most capturing methods are capable of. I remember the years of analog compact cassette tape and my old analog tape recorder being able to achieve signal to noise ratio of 53 decibels. When I adjusted the recording level to reach maximum with the loudest parts of a song, the silent passages were disappearing in random noise. There was a circuitry called DNS, or dynamic noise reduction system, essentially compressing the input signal to fit in the 50-something decibels range. Then came CDs with digital audio delivering dynamic range of 90 decibels. While great on paper specs and fantastic to listen in an isolated quiet room, 90 decibels is very difficult to replay when riding a train in a headset or watching a movie at home. Many recent audio systems offer dynamic range compression, so the silent parts are amplified and the louder parts are attenuated.

Same thing applies to images. Before digital photography we had analog negative film (producing prints) and chrome film (producing slides). Chrome had much wider dynamic range, and was preferred by professional photographers. The shift to digital photography improved almost all aspects of image recording, compared to analog film. All but the dynamic range. Digital cameras, chasing each other in the stupid megapixel race, fall short in capturing dynamic range. Shadows are uniformly black, while highlights are just white. This is the reason I am sooo happy with the FujiFilm S5 Pro I posted here a number of times about.

But even if we are able to capture a high dynamic range, the problem hits us when playing back the captured material. Most LCDs simply cannot play back the entire range. Take a home cinema projector as an example. It projects picture on a white screen. Yes, the screen is white. And the white screen, when not directly lit by the projector, is considered the black color of the projected content. While the same white screen, while lit, represents the white color. So the actual dynamic range is between non-lit white and lit-white... The screen itself presents a challenge to replay the captured reality...

Similar problems apply to mobile devices with LCD screens. These screens are backlit, a number of LEDs sitting behind the LCD screen generates light that either passes through (white) or is blocked (black). Fine in a dark room. But in sunshine? Black is no longer black and we lose visibility and contrast. One approach here is to increase the output of the LED light source. Brighter display is more visible in sunlight. But as you anticipate, consumes much more energy and one of today's scarcities is battery life.

Another approach is to intelligently alter the dynamic range of displayed content. Apical is an "algorithm" company specializing in such clever image transformations. They have the IRIDIX engine responsible just for that - optimizing the picture to be viewable in conditions limited by ambient light and display properties. I am not going to dive into the details, there is more on their web site. What is important in the end, is we get better picture, actually much better, without the need to stretch the limits of our eyes and the device power consumption. Apical's iridix can be found in many well known photography equipment. Being a sophisticated algorithm itself, it can be relatively easily applied to still images. The problem is much more complicated when we have a video stream to be adjusted by iridix. The algorithm has to be applied to every frame and looking at the power balance, what we gain on lowering backlight, we lose on keeping the application processor fully utilized (and this requires a lot of processing power).

But since recently we have a solution to this very problem. The problem of playing high dynamic range video on portable LCD screen in extreme lighting conditions. Apical algorithms can handle that. And we have a company called Quicklogic, mentioned here a number of times. Quicklogic has signed an exclusive agreement with Apical to implement the image enhancing algorithms on the low power gate arrays they provide. The resulting solution is called VEE (Visual Enhancement Engine) and occupies a tiny chip sitting between the graphic controller and the display driver. The VEE chip tweaks the video stream real time, frame by frame, and optimizes it to match the current lighting environment, making the output much more visible. Actually the difference between VEE and non-VEE screens is dramatic. The more difficult the conditions are (outdoor viewing, sunshine), the more of a difference VEE gives. And at the same time we have lower overall power consumption, due to reduced backlight. A rare win - win combination. Potentially a winner for Quicklogic. So next time you shop for a cell phone or a smart phone or a personal media player, check if it has an Apical logo... It will certainly have a VEE chip inside.

The Devil In The Details

Last week I realized my Lenovo X200s was capable of full day, zero stress computing on a single battery charge. Now that is a difference. A light (under 3 lbs) and sufficiently powerful (high resolution screen, 200GB drive, dual core 2GHz CPU) machine able to silently run for ten hours is a difference. Last Tuesday I was on a train with a friend of mine on our frequent 200 miles almost daily route form Krakow to Warsaw. The journey is enough boring that even if it was 7am, both of us took out our laptops and started some business activities. When his Dell died, my lenovo was showing 7 hours remaining battery life. So the next day when I went to the office, for the first time in my life I decided to leave the power supply at home. And I was able to continously work for almost nine hours and the battery was still not drained.

Not taking the power supply with me had another reason behind it. It is the most hated piece of equipment Lenovo has ever produced. They spend millions of dollars on their research budgets to come out with acarbon fibre frame to make the machine stiffer and lighter. They work for years to have a LED - backlit gorgeous and ultra- thin, ultra - energy efficient screen. They make a power supply even smaller than before. And then they throw in an ultra - thick, ultra - stiff, ultra - heavy three - prong power cord adding a lot of weight and volume to the overall package. Horrible. That is the area where Apple always shines.

The details. Mac OS X has never been truly superior compared to Windows. But is has always been better configured, with sensible defaults, and contained no OEM - bundled crapware with it. iPods form the very beginning have had the thinnest FireWire cords ever made. Power supplies have never had bulky cords and they even designed this clever connector based on magnets... The ultimate design for me for years has been the Airport Express wifi access point / router. Typical industry design used to be a router brick and a power brick. Apple combined both into a power brick. Very clever attention to details. And guess what? People have appreciated that and have been paying premium for Apple's attention to details for years.

While Lenovo power supplies are first coming to my mind when I think of careless rpoduct design, they are not the only ones. Sony is not that far off... With very poor WiFi in their otherwise gorgeous PS3, with bulky power spplies (take PSP as an example). Logitech usually shines with their excellent products but I coiuld never understand why they omitted the [Favorites] button both on the Boom and on the Transporter, making changing preprogrammed stations unneccessary difficult. LG lets you name inputs on their TVs, but when you display a list of them, it still ahows AV1, Av2, AV3... instead of XBOX, PS3, DVD Player. Despite iPhones and Blackberries paving a unified 3,5mm headset / microphone plug, none of the laptop manufactures cares to adopt it, sticking with dual green / pink plugs. The remote controlled, computerized stand heater in my car requires me to remember to manually set the fan to maximum the day before, otherwise it would not defrost the windshield even though it has all the other gadgets sensing inner / outer temperature and can calculate the time needed to do the job. I could go on and on...

As Daniel Pink points out in The Whole New Mind, consumers are happy to pay for good designs. We need more right brainers, with empathy and synthetic thinking. Even if the job is as simple as designing a power supply for a laptop...

Unify4Life

Being a BlackBerry addict, from time to time i scan the Internet looking for some interesting applications or devices bringing the new use cases to the original phone / messenger setup. And the other day I came across this site: http://www.unify4life.com. They seem to be quite fresh, as the site itself has gone a number of transformations during the last couple of weeks. Anyway the approach and addressed market segment seems interesting: hardware + software solutions extending the BlackBerry phones beyond what they were designed for.

Unify4life has two products so far, and only one (the AV|Shadow) can be purchased now and only in the US and Canada). The AV|Shadow falls in the remote control category and I fully agree a good remote control solution for a mobile phone has the potential power to replace a number of conventional remotes. The key to its success, as is the case with almost all gadgets recently, is how easy to use the software is. The second product seems to be something the World has been missing since the beginning. Garage|Shadow - a garage door opener working with a mobile phone over Bluetooth. The idea is simple - if you can pair a headset with a phone over Bluetooth, why not pair a garage door with the same phone over Bluetooth? This one I would buy immediately, but it seems they are not selling yet... I really enjoy getting rid of extra redundant devices like garage door remotes...

Eating MNOs' Lunch

A service. Something absolutely central being offered by MNOs (Mobile Network Operators) for years. A handset - delivered by a hardware vendor was nothing without the wireless service. A SIM card - the soul being put in the body of a handset wakes it up and connects to the network, offering services - voice calls, text messaging and data transmission. Possibly more. many more, but these three are essential and cover probably more than 99% of use scenarios. It was like that fifteen years ago. Or even ten years ago. But times are changing. Advances in hardware platforms, like faster processors, larger screens with much higher resolution, lots of storage memory enable new use scenarios. We use our mobile phones to snap photos, listen to music, play games. Our address books are hundreds entries long. We want social networking, content sharing, shopping and other services. yes, they are available from third parties. Some ecosystems (read: Apple / iPhone) deliver all in the box. What would an iPhone be without iTunes? Other vendors are following: look at the avalanche of application stores announced recently at the Mobile World Congress by handset vendors. Where are the MNO's? Asleep?

Phone backup and configuration is one of the killer apps MNO's should provide in the first place. I put a lot of effort entering all that data and metadata into the phone. The first thing I want to be sure is this effort is not lost when my phone is lost or when it falls into the toilet (yes, it happens...). So first there was ZYB, and it stood out there for years until Vodafone realized it's real value and potential of "stickiness". Then was Apple, with iTunes being central to their strategy of keeping users tied to the platform. It is not that easy to give up iPod or iPhone and switch to another platform without losing the content (data - purchased songs, and metadata - playlists etc.). Retention. This was the idea behind the original concept of a SIM card. SIM belongs to the MNO and holds all user's data. A subscriber is free to switch / upgrade the phone, data is retained on a card. The upgrade process is seamless and the subscriber stays with the MNO. Should she prefer to switch to another MNO, she gets a new EMPTY SIM card. Quite a barrier...

But what a SIM card holds now? Almost nothing... Just a few configuration details, the rest is stored in the handset's memory. So an upgrade usually requires retyping everything or implementing some sort of data transfer mechanism on your own (like using a PC to temporarily store the data - contacts, calendars, photos, songs...). MNO's lost the opportunity, while handset vendors (or more precisely: handset OS vendors) are taking advantage of. Apple was the first mover. Microsoft has just recently announced the My Phone service. Blackberry have had it for years. They all increase platform stickiness... Upgrade from a 2G iPhone to the 3G iPhone. From one Windows Mobile device to the new one. Easy. But do not even think of switching to another platform. This is what MNO's should have mastered. But they lost the game.