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...

You have to back up your files. Only my Mom does not have to. She is new to the computers world, and the only things she has been using are online applications (all from Google), namely Gmail, Documents and Spreadsheets. So Google admins take care of her data. But you have to back up. I doubt you have everything already moved to an online service. So... what do you use for backup? Windows backup? Ok, this was a joke. What if you plan to migrate to MacOS or Linux some day? Do you want your data to be left in some proprietary format? If you think, you probably back up individual files and directories, in their native format. Like pictures in *.jpg and music in *.mp3 and so on... So how do you track what has already been backed up and what hasn't? My "MyDocuments" folder contains some 50 thousand files. Far too many to keep track of them manually. For several years I have been using a very nice utility, called SyncToy from Microsoft . Some of you may not be eager to put a j...

I have already talked about Google Office . Just two months later we have a brilliant integration of spreadsheets and documents (formerly Writely, redirecting now to http://docs.google.com ). The suite may not be enterprise ready yet, but it surely does almost everything a typical consumer may want to do with document editor or a spreadsheet. We used to use an Open Office at home, but are migrating towards the Google Documents and Spreadsheets. The starting point for the service is a list of recently edited documents, sharing with family members and others is a no brainier (just enter an email address and that is it). And we are moving our picture library to http://picasaweb.google.com , although the sharing model within Picasa should be improved to match the overall security of the documents service. Google Calendar has made some significant improvements in the meantime as well. What is especially important (and has been reflected in the recent blowout earnings report) are the inte...

The recent IPTV buzz brings to my mind another convergence story. Television and Web applications together. The match seems natural. Assuming the screen you will be using for IPTV is going to be a HD (High Definition, where minimum resolution is defined as 1280x720 with 1366x768 being more common), makes it quite reasonable to display a Web page on. Web on TV was approached several times in the past, but the ordinary (non-HD) TV sets used to give us just a fraction of what was needed ( 544x372 , which was about 5 times less than HD). And the IPTV screen is connected to the Internet, where it streams the content (movies, news, shows) from. OK, so we have two important components of an Internet-enabled PC already in place. A screen and a connection. What else is needed? Input controller. I hate remote controls. I have dozens of them scattered around. I use just 1% of the functionality they provide. Volume up / volume down (that refers to the TV set), channel up / channel down (that re...