Headworx

I am looking for a fresh replacement for my faithful Samsung i600 . Or may be not... The i600 somehow never made it to the front page, but it is really hard to beat. I know there are a number of people who just cannot imagine "Windows on a mobile phone". But the i600 is one of the best Windows Mobile implementation ever. Of course it can hardly be considered as a great success, as it took Microsoft ten years or so to arrive at this point, while the system still has its shortcomings. But it does work and delivers what is important for me: QWERTY keyboard in a small package plus basic Web browsing and excellent implementation of an email client, together with push capability. The Windows Mobile email application has been finally sorted out in version 6. The 6 has brought the forever - awaited HTML email support. Plus it can natively import personal certificates, necessary to read secure / encrypted email messages. So what is the i600 lacking and why I consider upgrading it? Wel...

I was traveling a little bit last week. A number of destinations across Europe. Waiting at the gate at one of the airports I contemplated various business models of airline industry. On short intra - continental routes the 2.0 airlines are taking over the traditional 1.0 business. Simplicity. Boarding an Easyjet flight at my hometown Krakow airport takes 15 minutes. No check - in (done online at home). Just pass the security and you are on board. No registered luggage (they cleverly have the carry - on limit twice as high as their 1.0 competition) means getting out at the destination airport is even faster. But they gladly sell various options and addons. Like seat preselection or priority boarding or flexible reservations. Seems like Value Added Services? You bet... On the other hand the 1.0 model on inter - continental flights holds well. Especially first / business class idea of selling 50% more legroom at 300% the price. OK, you get extra glass of sparkling wine with that but real...

Very, very mixed feelings related to the second generation iPhone. It is dubbed "3G" but in fact this is the 2nd generation device. 3G means it can use WCDMA/UMTS/HSDPA networks in 850MHz(US)/1900MHz(US)/2100MHz(EU) bands. 3G has been a hype for a long time... essentially since 1999 when the first deployments took place and Qualcomm (the pioneer of the underlying CDMA technology went "over the rainbow" after the World realized everybody is going to license Qualcomm's technology). Now, as we have some perspective of almost ten years, we may try to evaluate some pros and cons of 3G (technology and networks) in context of the 2G (meaning second generation) iPhone: 3G delivers fast mobile data transmission. This is what we have been all waiting for. With HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) and HSUPA (Uplink) the current real world speeds come close to the speed of 802.11b WiFi. Most operators advertise 7,2Mb downlink speed, but this is usually true only for t...

I have discussed voice (as a channel and application) a number of times here. Particularly voice, and the quality of voice communications in today's telephony, as we are almost at the same (hint: poor) level as we were hundred years ago. We have Web, movies, video calling applications on our handsets, yet our voice is still transmitted using narrow band codecs sounding similar to the rotary wired phones our ancestors used over the past century. Yes, there is light in that tunnel... 3G mobile networks introduce a number of enhancements here, especially the TrFO (Transcoder Free Operation), where transcoders are eliminated from the communication path, improving the overall quality a lot. But there is more to voice than just person - to - person conversations. Voice is the most natural "interface" we use everyday. At least communicating with people. For person - to - machine conversations most of the time we use a keyboard (person - to - machine) and a display (machine - to...

Four months ago I commented on the victory of Blue-Ray over HD-DVD, coming to the conclusion the actual winner might be an on-line, on-demand movie delivery system. Last week there were two important events worth mentioning here, both clearly favor the Sony PlayStation 3 as the heart of the next generation living room entertainment center. The first event was the presentation of Sony strategy by CEO, Howard Stinger, on June 26th, 2008 . On slide 22 you can see the Video Service rollout strategy. Video Service will launch this summer and will deliver online premium video content do PS3's. Later on (2010) the service will be extended to cover other Sony products like Vaio laptops, Bravia TV sets and even SonyEricsson mobiles. The choice of PS3 as the delivery platform is very clear and obvious. It has all the attributes needed now. High definition (HDMI) output, WiFi Internet connection and a local hard disk, necessary today, as usually the "broadband" speed is not enough f...

Last week I put some food for thoughts related to discovery services (or to be precise - the actual scarcity of them...). Yes, in the post - Pareto, long - tail world we need a new ways to discover products and services. I think I need to sidetrack a little bit here and explain a few shortcuts: Pareto - or The Pareto Principle - to quote Wikipedia: "The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule , Haddad's Theorem , the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity ) states that, for many events, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Business management thinker Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto , who observed that 80% of income in Italy went to 20% of the population. It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., "80% of your sales comes from 20% of your clients."" The Pareto Economy, as referred here, or the economy of hits, means 20% of all goods available (hits) satisf...

All the statistics show we watch less and less television, spending more and more time with various Internet activities instead. The same is true comparing radio stations and MP3 players. That is the trend we cannot argue, more choice, more personalization. But to be honest sometimes I miss the old days when radio and television were stars. Why? Because they have been great discovery services. I used to learn about new music from my favorite radio station (and imagine 20 years ago it was both free and ad-free). Millions of people have learned new things and have shaped their tastes watching TV. Behind the scenes there have been millions of professionals selecting the content for us. Sure it has not been the long tail ... the selection has had to be according to the Pareto rule (20% of hits to please the 80% of the audience). And now what? We have the Internet, we have the Long Tail, we have everything personalized... and we are completely on our own to search and discover. Sure there a...