Headworx

There was a rumor recently about Apple trying to force a concept of a software SIM card in the new iPhone design. This concept was reportedly rejected by the GSMA, the organization representing carriers, or mobile network operators (MNOs) worldwide. SIM card is considered the central asset of every MNO. Technically it contains some cryptographic information that allows a GSM phone to identify itself and register on the network. No SIM equals no access. And of course SIM determines the associated account, whether it is prepaid or postpaid and how much credit it has and what services it can use and so on. But after 20 or more years the SIM becomes more and more obsolete. Take a look at just about any Web service you pay for. Like Skype for example. The email address and password usually determine the associated account. How much credit it has and what services it can use and so on. Like SIM, but nothing physical. SIM cards used to be associated with phone numbers. But the phone numbers ...

Three years ago I posed a note criticizing the practices by hardware PC vendors of installing a lot of unwanted software on their brand new computers . These practices peaked - I think - with Windows Vista and are now declining. Or at least this is my impression. Most of my new computers, with the exception of the Nokia Booklet 3G laptop , happen to be iMacs. The iMacs come very clean, with no third party trial versions at all (may be too many MacOS applications installed). As I am not very productive with the MacOS, I install Windows 7 on all of them. And Because I use genuine install distributions from Microsoft, I do not get any third party glut either. But even with the Nokia laptop, things have not been bad. It came preloaded with Windows 7 Starter, later on I was upgrading it to SSD storage and I upgraded the OS to a higher version. But it definitely was not populated with unwanted applications, bogging down the machine. What was even more striking with the Nokia, was the absenc...

Why the phone networks, and especially the MNOs (Mobile Network Operators), are losing the battle with Internet rivals, who did not even exist a few years ago? Look at your own MNO. What does it provide? Voice. SMS. Data. The same services that were available 10 years ago. And there are hundreds of MNOs worldwide. They all provide the same three services. And practically nothing more. Ah yes. There are so called VASes (Value Added Services). Voice mail (who uses that nowadays?), ringback tones, and a bunch of other services difficult to explain to an average subscriber. But VASes are really marginal. I do not know the exact numbers, but percentage - wise, they probably account for some low single digits of revenue. Now look at Google. Or Facebook. Or Twitter. Or Yahoo. And try to count the services majority of us are using. The number is high. And growing. This is an interesting phenomena. MNOs, who were displacing the fixed line operators, used to be the richest companies. They genera...

I really cannot remember how many devices accessing the Web I have had over the years. Many of them could have been classified as "mobile" or "tablet". I think I first accessed the Web on a mobile device sometime in 1994... Using the HP 200LX palmtop equipped with an analog cellular modem hooked to an analog NMT-450 Nokia phone. The 200LX - as far as I remember - was running Lynx - a text mode Web browser. There was not much I could do with this setup at that time, but still it was an interesting experiment. Moving forward I have very warm memories of the SimPad . It must have been some ten years ago. The SimPad was a Windows CE - powered touch tablet, with resistive touch screen and 800x600 display, quite capable machine. I used it equipped with a WiFi card to wirelessly browse the Internet at home. After some software upgrades it was running the Internet Explorer 4 - the state of the art browser at that time. Unfortunately The IE4 was quickly becoming not too li...

Over the years, probably many of you have experienced failures of consumer electronic devices. Power supplies, internet routers, game consoles and personal computers. During the last 12 months I have had an unusual number of such failures. Two satellite receivers ( Kathrein UFS-910 ). Three plug computers ( Sheeva Plug Development Kits ). Three wireless routers ( ZyXel Ethernet-Over-Powerline ). That is eight devices in one year. Pretty unusual statistics. Enough to trigger my curiosity to conduct a forensic investigation. All those failures obviously had an number of things in common. Firstly, all failures were at power supplies circuits. Bam, and all of the sudden the electronics were not receiving the regulated supply voltage. I quickly recalled the failed devices were running quite hot prior to the failures. After opening the cases I found burst electrolytic capacitors. And replacing the capacitors fixed the problems. First - I thought - bad design. Electrolytic capacitors are quit...

My old and faithful BlackBerry Curve 8900 gave up the ghost a week ago. My fault. I have been dropping it on a concrete floor too many times. It was in a really poor physical condition. But such is a life of gadgets being used on continuous basis. So time for a new one. Two years since I last shopped for a mobile phone. I have build a checklist of must - haves. Ended up with a short one - just two items: Support for UMA (connecting to the mobile network via WiFi). It is a must have for me, as where I live, there is no coverage. So I can either sit on top of the roof (which is difficult and not an option in Winter), use a femtocell (none of the MNOs in Poland offers them yet) or use UMA to tunnel my cellphone calls via my private WiFi and DSL line. More on UMA for techies on my tech.slupik.com blog . WebKit - based Web Browser. WebKit is the best Web rendering technology on the market. It is a foundation for many top - performing browsers, including the Chrome, Safari, Android and oth...

Qualcomm is one of my top favorite companies. I got infected by it more than ten years ago by George Gilder. Today I tried to check what I have written about Qualcomm over the five years this blog is active. The search returns four pages of results. For years Qualcomm has been "all mobile". It obviously started with CDMA, the wireless data transmission technology used today in various incarnations (including HSPA) by all MNOs (Mobile Network Operators) across the Globe. Qualcomm pioneered the technology and has always been the largest supplier of baseband chips used both in base stations and mobile handsets. Over time mobile phones evolved to be more computers than just phones. A need for mobile application processors was born. Qualcomm answered the trend launching the most successful mobile application processor to date - the Snapdragon. Snapdragon today powers the entire line of the latest Windows Phone 7 handsets. It is also in the heart of virtually every phone manufactu...