Headworx

Last week's announcement of the Snapdragon platform by Qualcomm went barely noticed. Looks like the majority of QCOM audience is focused on the royalty tension with Nokia. This is as expected. News is always driven by emotions, and emotions in turn, are driven by the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) factor. Often it is difficult to spot the real gems, and the Snapdragon seems to be the real gem. We have talked about convergence here many times. You probably can feel it coming. Even the cheapest mobile phones offer games and music playback. The more advanced ones have email readers and cameras, while the top of the line models can be used as personal navigation devices, either with built in GPS receiver or with an external "Bluetooth GPS Antenna". But at the same time when phones become converged teleputers, there are plenty of other devices screaming for connectivity. iPods, Zunes, PSPs, GameBoys, Nuvis, digital cameras... Just show me any electronic gizmo that is not buil...

Hutchinson , one of the leading mobile network providers, known as "3" across Europe, and mostly in the United Kingdom announced officially unlimited Skype calls for a flat fee. Skype is just a piece of a broader package named X-Series. This is kind of a breakthrough. Hutchinson probably sees Skype invading mobile phones inevitable, so they decided to jump in as soon as possible to be the leader of that trend. Initially there will be two top of the line handsets supporting X-Series services, Nokia N73 and SonyEricsson W950i. It will be very interesting to watch it work (or fail). People ( myself included ) have already been talking for years about Skype on mobiles. But it has not happened so far. Why? There are several very fundamental technical issues giving Skype very hard time. Let us go through them. Latency . This is the killer number one. People have been dreaming of Skype over GPRS or EDGE. I even happened to use such setup once. I mean I uninten...

UMTS is probably the most common form of a so called 3G (third generation) mobile network. The 3G buzz has been aloud for almost six years now. The outrageous money spent by the operators on the spectrum licenses in early 2000's still weighs on the operator's balance sheets. The promise of lightning fast mobile networks is still around. But how is reality? I mean the average mobile phone user. Does she/he care? There are three advantages promised to be delivered with the ascent of UMTS. First and the most spoken about has been the fast packet data transmission. Has it happened? It surely has. Last week I was stuck in a traffic jam in rainy Warsaw (btw Warsaw just stands still when it rains... I don't know why, but this is 100% reproducible). So sitting in a car I was checking mail on my Teleputer. One of my important customers asked me to forward him a product presentation. So I turned on my notebook, found the 4MB PowerPoint file, hooked the notebook to the UMTS Teleputer...

Like a thousand years ago, we are still in search of The Holy Grail. Regardless of the industry sector, we keep on dreaming about the killer application that will make all the customers happy and all the suppliers rich. Of course in mobile communications sector everybody is doing the same, since the conception of the first mobile network. We are not talking here about client applications running on smartphones, focusing rather on the applications running on the network, available to all mobile subscribers, regardless of the type of the handset they use. I think the first one has been the voice mail. Before mobile, we used to have answering machines at home. Especially in the US , everybody used to have one. But then you could not attach it to the mobile phone, so it had to be hosted on the network, and this way started to be available to all subscribes in form of a service (VAS or Value Added Service). Up to this day voice mail has been the most profitable VAS hosted by mobile operato...