The short-lived Nokia N9

While long suspected, the reasons for ex-CTO Rich Green’s departure from Nokia have this week become clear. The Finnish firm’s first and last Meego-based handset was released Tuesday, while the OS itself was formally decomissioned with a view to what’s left being assimilated by the LiMo and Linux Foundations.

Meego was the Linux-based mobile software platform Nokia developed in conjunction with Intel, designed to go toe to toe with Android and iOS on top end smartphones. However, development of the platform moved too slowly for Nokia to benefit and when the firm offloaded Symbian to Accenture in favour of Windows Phone, Meego’s days were always numbered.

Former CTO Rich Green, who walked out over the summer, revealed last week he won’t be returning to work. Instead, he is immediately replaced by Henry Tirri, who previously headed up Nokia’s research facility. Green, who was seen as a champion of Meego, was only appointed CTO in May 2010, but took an extended leave of absence one year later after falling out with new president and CEO Stephen Elop over the Finnish firm’s tech strategy.

Then on Wednesday this week, Meego announced its intention to transition to something called Tizen – a Linux-based open source OS shaped by the LiMo and Linux Foundations and supported by Intel.

According to the blurb, Tizen is a standards-based, cross-architecture software platform, which supports multiple device categories including smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, netbooks and in-vehicle infotainment systems. The initial release of Tizen is targeted for the first quarter of 2012, with the first devices expected to come to market in mid-2012.

Tizen combines technologies from LiMo and the Linux Foundation and adds a standards-based HTML5 and WAC web development environment, which fits neatly with Meego’s HTML5-centric vision of the future.

It sounds like a noble proposition but it’s just a shame that Tizen seems to suffer from the “too many cooks” problem that dogs many open source initiatives, from the get-go. And all the time iOS, Android, which is a more tightly controlled Linux project, and soon Windows will be steaming ahead before Tizen is even off the blocks.

Somewhat ironically, Nokia’s long awaited N9 – the company’s first (and only) commercial Meego device – has just hit stores. It’s got all the hallmarks of a sleek and glossy smartphone: no hard buttons; three desktops; 3.9-inch AMOLED screen; NFC; 8-megapixel Carl Zeiss camera; Nokia Music; free turn-by-turn drive and walk navigation; 16GB and 64GB storage options; and a price tag of €480 or €560.

In terms of apps, Angry Birds and WiFi Hotspot are pre-installed and there is also integrated support for Facebook, Twitter, Mail for Exchange, Gmail, Skype, Picasa and Flickr. The rest of the N9 apps can be found in Ovi Store and Nokia assures us that Symbian applications written in Qt are relatively easy to port to the Nokia N9. The problem is with Symbian on a back burner and the Ovi store looking like its days are numbered, the future for the N9 looks bleak at best.

China Unicom says the launch of its new cellular OS is "imminent"

China Unicom has announced the development of its own smartphone operating system built on a Linux core. The ‘Wophone’ OS, which reports claim will not be based on Android, will run on a new brand of devices which, it is hoped, will help China Unicom expand its handset offering in order to grow demand for its 3G services.

Samsung, Motorola, HTC, Huawei and ZTE are among the manufacturers said to be set to offer devices based on the new platform. Unicom, which described the launch of the new device as “imminent”, said the operating system is aimed at “smart terminals” and will help to shorten product development cycles for mobile phone manufacturers.

Research undertaken by Analysys reveals that Nokia’s Symbian platform continues to dominate the Chinese market, with just over 60 percent of market share, despite the growth of interest in iPhone and Android offerings. In 2009, Unicom rival China Mobile launched its own mobile platform, “OPhone”, which failed to garner much interest.

Unicom said it had the backing of Chinese government agencies including the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology but declined to comment on speculation that the attempt to sidestep Android was motivated by the Chinese government’s high-profile dispute with Google last year. Google moved its Chinese search operations to Hong Kong because of censorship and hacking concerns.

The only reason this gets a mention today is that it ought to be the name of a song about the iPhone 4 which, it turns out, has a rather frustrating idiosyncrasy. Were this to be summed up in a lyric written by Ms Avery, it might run as follows (in the smooth jazz style):

With your warm embrace so light, and your gentle touch so deft

Promise me you’ll never let me fall.

Just hold me on the right, don’t hold me on the left,

‘cause if you do I’ll drop the bloody call.

The problem, it seems, is the location of the antenna on the new model (queued for this week by a substantial number of devotees) is located on the bottom left hand side of the phone. When held in the left hand for a call, the antenna is covered and the call drops. This should be a pretty serious problem for Apple, whose response is simply to advise the people who queued all day to get their hands on the new phone just not to hold it in that way. Even by Apple’s standards this is breathtakingly dismissive.

The firm also said this week that it has discovered that: “White models of Apple’s new iPhone 4 have proven more challenging to manufacture than expected, and as a result they will not be available until the second half of July.” They’re a funny bunch.

Meanwhile, in the midst of all the Apple hubbub, Motorola kept the Android flag flying with the launch of the Droid X. The phone will be available through Verizon Wireless from July 15^th, with the Blockbuster on Demand video platform integrated as part of the V-Cast Video service. Andy Rubin, vice president of engineering for Google was on hand to point out that there are now 160,000 new Android devices being activated daily.

And Google’s march into the telco space continued uninterrupted this week with the news that, after a year of invite-only beta trials, the internet omnipresence has made its Google Voice service available to anyone from the United States who wants to sign up for it.

The service is Google’s latest bid to shake up the establishment, and offers a single number that can be applied to existing accounts, be they home, work or mobile, as well as a number of other web-based features. It also offers free national calls and text messages. In a post on the Google Voice blog by product managers Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet, the firm revealed that it has racked up over one million users of its service in the US since it started inviting consumers to test it.

Moving on to Nokia now and the Finnish handset vendor finally seems to have got a clue. In the wake of much criticism over its uninspiring handset portfolio, especially in the upper tier, the Finn has decided to its Linux homebrew OS, MeeGo, on high end N-series devices going forward. It’s hardly a vote of confidence in the Symbian Foundation.

The flagship N8 will be the last device to run Symbian, with the forthcoming N9 bringing MeeGo to market in late 2010 or early 2011. Nokia has undertaken a number of organisational reshuffles lately in a bid to rediscover a sense of direction and on July 1st Mary McDowell – one of the Leading Ladies profiled recently by telecoms.com — takes up her position as head of the new Mobile Phones unit, while responsibility for Nokia’s top tier smartphone strategy is now shouldered by Anssi Vanjoki, head of the new Mobile Solutions unit, which comprises all of Nokia’s MeeGo and Symbian activities. There is glory to be had for Vanjoki in this role if the company rediscovers high-end success, but there will be nowhere to hide if it doesn’t.

The MeeGo platform is Linux-based  and effectively combines Intel’s Moblin platform (aimed squarely at netbook devices) with Nokia’s cross-platform application environment, Qt, and the cellular integration work Nokia has done in Maemo.

That’s not stopping Intel sticking its fingers into other pies, however. The US chip shop is currently rumoured to be porting the Android platform to x86-based architecture. To date, Android has been popular on ARM-based chips, which are more energy efficient, but it sounds like Intel is gearing up to introduce an x86 compatible version of Android later this summer, perhaps paving the way for bigger than netbook or tablet type devices?

Fighting the threat from the likes of Apple and Android on a second front, Nokia has also moved to make its Ovi app platform more attractive to developers by dropping the price of a developer licence to €50, down from the old charge of $200 for a developers ID, and waiving the submission fee for Symbian applications to be signed. The idea is to lower the barrier to entry for application developers and it is one that is much needed.

Whether or not another mobile television initiative is much needed, meanwhile, is something that will probably divide opinion. Firmly in the yes camp are O2, Orange and Vodafone, the UK operations of which announced this week a joint pilot of a 3GPP broadcast system called Integrated Mobile Broadcast (IMB). The solution is delivered by Ericsson, IP Wireless and Streamezzo and the trial will run for three months from October this year.

Plenty of operators have turned their back on Europe’s ‘official’ mobile TV technology, DVB-H, giving it up as a bad job. But IMB, a standardised 3GPP technology recently endorsed by the GSM Association, holds promise as it makes use of the TDD spectrum most operators with 3G licenses already have.

According to the three operators, the pilot will demonstrate the capabilities of IMB in delivering both live streaming video and offloading traffic from existing 3G networks by broadcasting and storing content on the device. IPWireless will supply the core 3GPP broadcast technology, Ericsson will provide integration services and a media platform and Streamezzo, recently acquired by Amdocs, will provide the user interface.

O2’s parent company Telefónica was busy trying to solve its Brazilian conundrum this week, by selling off eight per cent of Portugal Telecom to unnamed buyers believed to be existing PT shareholders. The Spanish incumbent was motivated by an expectation that it would not be allowed to vote as a shareholder in PT on its own proposal to buy PT out of the Brazilian venture they jointly own, which controls local carrier Vivo. So it sold eight per cent (it will retain two per cent) in the hope that the recipients would vote in its favour.

Telefónica’s bid to assume control of Vivo is born out of frustration at its inability to execute its favoured multiplay strategy in the Brazilian market. The Spanish firm already has a fixed presence through Telesp, and is keen to merge the two Brazilian operations and take a converged offering to the lucrative enterprise market. Portugal telecom thinks the idea’s a proper stinker and won’t play ball.

In happier news along similar lines, Russia’s largest wireless carrier, Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) is to merge with fixed line operation Comstar, in which it owns a majority stake. MTS currently owns 64 per cent of Comstar and already consolidates the company’s earnings in its financial results, but the merger facilitate the full integration of MTS’s and Comstar’s subscriber bases and enable the cross-selling and bundling of broadband and television services to MTS customers.

As a result, the move would create additional cost savings, beyond the $200m of cost synergies MTS already benefits from since it purchased majority control of Comstar in October 2009.

Mikhail Shamolin, president and CEO of MTS, said: “We believe that the merger of MTS and Comstar is attractive for our shareholders because it will accelerate the delivery of our “3i” strategic goal of realising growth through increasing customer value, by providing our customers with a broad, innovative and integrated offering of mobile and fixed line telephony, high-speed internet access and pay-TV services.”

It was the Femto World Summit this week in London and, on Monday, the Informer met with what felt like the entire sector ahead of the event. Positioned front and centre as the latest convert to the cause was US rural carrier and AWIW debutante Mosaic Telecom.

On Monday, Mosaic, which operates in Wisconsin, contracted Nokia Siemens Networks to roll out a standards compliant 3G femtocell solution using kit from Airvana. “Femtocells ensure subscribers enjoy the best indoor mobile voice, video and data services, and help offload traffic from the broader 3G network,” said Rick Vergin, chief executive officer of Mosaic Telecom, blinking in the limelight.

The Informer also met with Vodafone, which finds itself in the interesting marketing dilemma of claiming to have a superior 3G network but also trying to sell femtos to users to boost poor coverage.

“This is all part of our best network strategy,” said Lee McDougal, senior manager for network, messaging and call completion at Vodafone UK. “We know that this [lack of coverage in buildings] is a problem that all operators around the world suffer from. We don’t want to deny it exists. So we’re being upfront in saying we can’t give you coverage absolutely everywhere and nobody can, so we’ve spent the time and effort developing a product that can solve this problem.” McDougal said the strategy has given Vodafone something of a first mover advantage in admitting the problem and getting existing and potential customers accustomed to the solution.

Which isn’t a million miles away from Apple’s response to the connective shortcomings of its new iPhone.

Take care

The Informer

Orange backs the Intel, Nokia, Linux platform, MeeGo

Mobile operator Orange got behind the Nokia-Intel founded Linux initiative MeeGo on Wednesday, anticipating the creation of a new channel for the delivery of consumer multimedia services.

MeeGo was unveiled at Barcelona in February as a merger of Intel and Nokia’s respective Linux initiatives, to create a software platform spanning a range of consumer electronics from mobile phones to netbooks.

Intel is contributing its Moblin platform, which will be merged with Nokia’s Maemo platform and the Nokia-owned cross platform application environment, Qt.

With the operator’s backing, Intel and Orange will work to increase the availability of Orange Signature Services, such as Orange TV and Orange Maps, to be supported by the MeeGo and Intel Atom environment.

“Seventy-five per cent of our customer base has yet to embrace the mobile internet. With the increasing number of phones and operating systems for customers to choose from, it is our role to make sure our customer’s journey into this richer mobile multimedia environment is simple and easy,” said Yves Maitre, SVP of devices at Orange. “Our collaboration with Intel on the MeeGo software platform will not only ensure a broader choice in terms of screens and devices, but that customers continue to benefit from a consistent user experience delivered through Orange Signature services, including a customized home-screen they trust and recognize, the highest quality network and secure and simplified billing.”

The companies aim to establish a common software framework across multiple devices, ranging from smartphones and tablets to netbooks. An ambitious initiative, but as Ovum analyst Tony Cripps at Barcelona, the real win is in tying developers to the MeeGo platform.

“Turning MeeGo into a mainstream platform for CE will be no mean achievement in its own right. However, it will ultimately be largely meaningless how many devices it is deployed on if the consistency provided by the underlying OS is not matched by its ability to provide a true multi-screen application platform for developers.

“For that to happen, several things need to occur. First, Nokia needs to prove that Qt development really can scale across different categories of device. Second, it needs to prove the benefits of that scalability to developers. Third, it needs to persuade developers that Qt is a better cross-platform, cross-device application and UX platform than alternatives such as Adobe Flash/AIR, Microsoft Silverlight and HTML5,” Cripps said.

But given that Qt’s rivals – like Microsoft Foundation Class and wxWidgets – are either already widely deployed or likely to become more so and already have sizable developer communities, MeeGo may have its work cut out for it.

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LiMo Foundation builds bridges to Wholesale Applications Community

Keen to increase its relevancy across all industry areas, mobile Linux evangelist group the LiMo Foundation is looking to build bridges with the recently formed Wholesale Applications Community.

At Barcelona in February, 24 operators accounting for over three billion subscribers formed the Wholesale Applications Community, an alliance designed to build an open platform for delivering applications to all mobile phone users.

The alliance plans to initially use both the JIL and OMTP BONDI requirements, evolving these separate standards into a common standard within the next 12 months.

LiMo sees itself as a perfect fit here, having already produced standardized white-label SDKs for the LiMo platform in both native and OMTP BONDI-compliant forms, while a number of LiMo’s key stakeholders also hold leadership roles within the JIL initiative.

Since LiMo’s launch in 2007, three major releases of the LiMo Platform have been delivered, with 52 LiMo devices brought to market including the Vodafone 360 H1 M1 devices from Samsung and a wide range of devices for NTT DoCoMo from Panasonic and NEC. Altogether ten operators representing approximately one billion subscribers participate within the LiMo group.

In an open letter to the Wholesale Apps Community, Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMo Foundation, offered “full support, committed participation, and immediate practical assistance” to the strategy.

“It is clear to us that the highly complementary areas of focus, shared belief in true openness and common industry vision create an exceptional opportunity for deep and long-term collaboration between LiMo Foundation and the Wholesale Applications Community to release unfettered innovation across the industry and fully ignite the mobile internet in a way that is compelling and life-enhancing to consumers everywhere,” Gillis said.

Vodafone cheers on developers with 360 vision

Vodafone 360, the UK operator’s social media interface and aggregation platform is making some headway. The UK firm said Tuesday that more than 7,000 apps have been made available to customers across eight European markets in the three months since the service launched.

By March 2010 the operator also expects to have shipped two million Vodafone 360 capable handsets, with the platform featured on some 50 different handsets.

Vodafone 360 features a specially designed user interface using Vodafone’s ‘proximity algorithm’ (it brings the most frequently contacted to the front of the list), which was built and designed on the LiMo Foundation’s Linux platform. The native functionality of 360 will focus on content aggregation – bringing together all contacts and content in one place and allowing customers access to different networking sites including Facebook, Windows Live Messenger and Google Talk. Users can also create different contact groups across social networks, so as to share different information with different groups of people.

To keep up momentum with the developer community, Vodafone will hold its first 360 Developer Conference at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on February 15, 2010. The conference will feature interactive discussions on developer topics, providing tips on how to create and publish apps across Vodafone 360 devices, with developers given the opportunity to audition their apps and be rewarded with prizes.

With its 360 strategy, the carrier is looking to avoid becoming a bit pipe provider by tapping into what it hopes will prove a lucrative value added service and application revenue stream by acting as the gatekeeper. But it has been questioned as to how this strategy, first pioneered by former CEO Arun Sarin around own-branded handsets, will sit with those giving the power to third parties, such as Vodafone UK’s recent launch of the iPhone.

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John Forsyth, leadership team, Symbian Foundation

At the recent Symbian Exchange and Expo (SEE) held in London, telecoms.com talked to John Forsyth, leadership team, Symbian Foundation, about the organisation’s new direction and the threat from Linux and Android.

Symbian is already the dominant mobile operating system, where do you see future growth potential?

We had a visit in September from a big delegation of top brass from China Mobile who came to visit Symbian and signed an MOU on collaboration. We have an enormous amount of alignment and obviously TD-SCDMA is high on their agenda – the recently launched 6788 is Nokia’s first Symbian TD-SCDMA handset.

The potential numbers in China are absolutely enormous and this gives China Mobile a degree of influence over what happens in their market, and they would like an open independent platform that is royalty free, open source and not controlled by anyone. And that’s what we are in the process of trying to create.

Symbian’s shift from a commercial entity to an open source organisation is about as radical as can be. How do you adjust to the different mindset?

I used to be VP for strategy at Symbian software when it was a software licensing company. Back then I had a dual outlook on things: Figure out how to maximise the effectiveness of a royalty harvesting machine; but at same time it was clear to me that it wouldn’t be possible to charge a licensing fee for an OS in the future, and that includes the desktop. Value is moving up the stack. People are spending more money on computing but they’re spending it on different things, different experiences, that are delivered at the service level as internet applications.

The change for Symbian was a radical step but look at how we approached it. We could have spun it out, had a dual licensing model, a halfway house, but we didn’t. And as for the association with Nokia and how good and how bad is that for business, well in the mobile world you dream of having Nokia as customer, but if the perception propagates that you are unduly influenced by one customer that can be uncomfortable.

One important thing we have done is make the governance, the whole way we are influenced, totally transparent and equitable. It’s the opposite end of the spectrum from the old Symbian governance model. No matter how big you are you get one vote, so Nokia has the same degree of influence as everyone else.

So has everyone in Symbian accepted the new strategy?

People are individuals with interests and passions and if they’re lucky they end up working or a company that allows them to pursue that. These [Symbian employees] are just software guys, we’re geeks, and most geeks are passionate about open source regardless of the company hat they have to wear during the day. The whole exercise of turning Symbian into an open source platform was the best thing that could happen, because it’s what people are passionate about. And that’s not unusual if you look across the entire software business. Most software guys would rather give their stuff away.

There are a lot of different ways of doing open source and I think the way were doing it hasn’t been done before. It’s hard to say things don’t get done or happen slowly, just look at Apache. They have 50- 100 projects ongoing at any one time and they are still running 90 per cent of the world’s web servers, and nobody’s ever paid a dime for Apache software. Whereas look at Microsoft, which can’t even get five per cent of the server market despite years of developing the IIS webserver. So you have to ask yourself why isn’t Microsoft being adopted? It’s not competitive in terms of features or robustness.

So does open source result in better products? A more agile platform? A more effective ecosystem?

Mostly open source is more productive and efficient than most large software development organisations that do it in a closed fashion. But at the same time there is a complexity to managing it in a way that makes it easy for commercial customers to adopt. And there aren’t the same commitments in open source, such as timelines for products. And that is the problem we’re trying to solve by learning as much as possible from other open source foundations. But what they have not all excelled at is the provision of a clear roadmap, that gives you really clear levels of quality that are going to be reached by certain points in time and how.

So if open source in mobile didn’t have problems we would be sitting round making loads of money from Linux phones. But Motorola practically destroyed itself trying to make Linux phones because it ended up with massive branches of operating systems that tied their resources up.

Isn’t this what Linux players like the LiMo Foundation and Android are trying to sort out?

The thing with the Limo Foundation is that it’s a document factory, they don’t have anyone that produces kits. We have a whole bunch of guys that look at all the code coming in from all different places, integrating it into kits that are validated against reference hardware, so they definitely build and run and there’s one place on the web where you can download something and guarantee it will run on your hardware. Limo hopes one or other of its members will do that stuff. But that puts you back in the world of commercial software because you need guys like Access to integrate different parts of the build and make it work, but they will charge money for that. Then you end up with a commercial software federation.

Android is disruptive but it will be damaging to everyone, including Google if it’s as fragmentary as it seems to be. I don’t think android is in Google’s best interests – Nokia puts out almost half a billion handsets a year and each one of those devices has a home screen, and the potential for a search bar. What are you doing building a mobile platform that Nokia is never going to use? They should be trying to get their search onto Nokia’s handsets.

My first reaction when I saw the Android architecture was  – although there are some interesting things in there, it’s a late 90′s architecture in the sense that they didn’t go for a web programming model but instead went for Java on top of Linux. Personally I think Java is neither here nor there, it’s nicer than programming in native C or C++ language but it’s nowhere near as nice as programming in JavaScript or Flash.

But Symbian has taken some flak as an application development platform…

Application development has not been great for Symbian, there’s no sense in hiding this, and that’s due to a mixture of tools that have been good but not best in class and an environment that’s brilliant for making phones, but too complex for making applications. If you’re a handset manufacturer it gives you a lot of depth and power, but if you’re looking to build a mapping application, then you’re asking a developer to do too much work. So in the roadmap we have a couple of big thrusts: Getting Qt into the platform – there are already 300,000 developers that love Qt, and it’s a fun productive environment; and there’s also the web runtime, so you will be able to program just in JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and write an application that uses all the underlying native services.

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The future’s bright, the future’s open

Open source specialist, consultant and Harvard fellow David “Doc” Searls writes about why he believes openness has to be the future for mobile.

We have to take the long view. Things are changing so fast that there’s not much choice—not if we want to get a useful perspective. Of course the long view is also an uncertain one. It’s easier to be clear about what’s going on now, even if it’s wild and crazy.  Fortunately, it’s not hard to connect the dots and see where they point. Start with this one: Less than a year and a half ago, the iPhone application market didn’t exist. Nor did the Android app market. (Nor did an Android phone.) Now add some stats from CommScore, all for a period ending October last year (figures are for the “EU5”—France, Germany Italy, Spain and the UK):

• Data plans are growing at 31.1 per cent per year.
• 3G plans are growing at 40.9 per cent.
• Mobile media users are growing at 44.7 per cent.
• The average length of handset ownership is 18.7 months.
• The percentage of mobile media users with a device six months old or less is 37 per cent.
• One third of social networking users access social media exclusively on mobile devices.

Says CommScore: “The internet took off when people moved from dial-up to broadband. A similar change is happening to mobile.” That change is beyond profound, because it requires a shift in supporting infrastructure.  Broadband is internet, and internet is data—not telephony. The wild frontier for smartphones is all in the first syllable. Handhelds will become data devices that do telephony, not telephony devices that do data.

At this moment in history, the iPhone points the way. It does this not by being a better phone (at that it’s unexceptional), but by being a handheld data device that also does telephony. At last count, telephony was one among 70,000+ other applications on the iPhone.

Just as significant is Apple’s unlimited data deal with AT&T in the US. By taking fear of data over-use out of the customer’s mind, Apple and AT&T opened the development gates to thousands of new data-intensive applications. (In fact I helped with one of them: a player app that streams radio stations and programs on demand. I’m not sure that app would have been developed in the absence of an unlimited data usage plan.)

Apple, however, has taken a closed approach to market development. One developer I know describes Apple’s basic strategy as, “finding a market where progress is log-jammed, and building a whole new vertical stovepipe around a piece of gotta-have-it hardware. They did this in the MP3 market with the iPod, and did it again in the cell phone market with the iPhone.”

The problem with this strategy is that the internet is horizontal. So are all the open development methods that produced the net and the million-plus open source development projects that have grown there. To maximise development in mobile’s broadband future, open platforms and development environments are required.

Linux has had these for the duration, but Linux has also suffered from “plethorisation”—forking and branching its way to countless different versions and implementations. Google brought a degree of order to the OEM side of that market with Android. The LiMo Foundation brought together the operator side of that market with a core suite of middleware. And now Symbian is on its way to becoming a fully open platform as well. Once that happens (it’s on track for early next year, along with Qt—a cross-platform application and UI framework), the frontier opens to include Symbian’s enormous standing market share. (Android’s is still small, but is bound to grow as well.)

What happens next is outlined in Paul Budde’s Global Mobile Broadband Statistics and Trends report, from April of this year. Some take-aways:

• Expect to see LTE (Long Term Evolution, or 4G) develop into a mass market between 2012 and 2015. The LTE spec calls for downstream peak rates of 100 Mbps or more, uplink peak rates 50 Mbps or more, and local wireless round trip times of under 10ms. This is faster than most existing FttH (fiber to the home) deployments.
• LBS (Location Based Search) is set to explode as GPS capabilities grow.
• 3G mobile broadband is rapidly outgrowing DSL and other wireless broadband services in Africa.
• Mobile games will be cheap, and revenue from them will grow. Worldwide revenues are estimated at  $4.9bn (US) in 2009 and 7.0bn (US) in 2013.

It is essential not to see this market as one that exists in the zone of partnerships between OEMs and operators. The internet (read: the PC market) doesn’t work that way and neither will the mobile market, in the long run. In the past OEM-operator arrangements limited what could be done on mobile devices. For example, Nokia’s E62 in the US was nearly identical to the E61 sold in Europe and elsewhere in the world, but without wi-fi and 3G—obviously because Nokia’s US operators didn’t want those features.

There are several ways out of this old and obsolete logjam in the middle of the mobile marketplace. One is for the operators to wake up and smell the opportunity. (The handset OEMs are already there.) Another is for new non-mass open handset marketplaces to open up (possibly starting with verticals such as college students, retirees and law enforcement groups). Yet another is for wireless data access to bypass mobile phone networks. Name your strategy; it has to be done.

There is plenty of money to be made in the open mobile future. Less of it, however, will be made the old way (by charging for minutes, and roaming, for example); and more of it will be made in new ways (by charging for apps and updates, charging for services, and advertising that goes both ways—with demand advertising its needs, rather than just supply advertising its goods).

In the long run, freedom wins. Openness wins. And the internet wins; because it was built with both, and supports both.

Doc Searls is a fellow with both the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and the Center for Information Technology and Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC) is dedicated to open source development

They’re all at it. US chip shop Qualcomm has caught the open source bug as well, on Monday announcing a separate wholly-owned subsidiary focused on mobile open source platforms.

The Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC) is formed of a dedicated group of engineers, headed up by Rob Chandhok, senior vice president of software strategy for Qualcomm CDMA Technologies.

QuIC’s mandate is to use open software to spur the development of advanced services for traditional handsets as well as sophisticated smartphones and mobile computing devices. “Open source and community-driven software development is becoming increasingly important to the wireless industry,” said Chandhok. “These engineers will focus on such important open source initiatives as Linux and Webkit, and on open source operating systems such as Symbian, Android and Chrome.”

Chandhok will address the Symbian open source community in London on October 28 at the Symbian Exchange and Exposition (SEE) taking place at Earls Court.

These are the droids you are looking for

The driving forces behind Google’s foray into the mobile platform space  -  The Open Handset Alliance and the Android Open Source Project – have shown off developments for the operating system which will allow handset builders to deploy the platform on yet more devices, even as it is gaining some significant traction in the market.

The latest flavour of the Android SDK version 1.6 also known as ‘donut’, introduces a number of new features including support for CDMA and additional screen sizes like QVGA and WVG; gesture APIs to support finger gestures in apps; a text-to-speech engine; and a quick search box that developers can use to integrate Google Search services within any application.

An experimental Android feature out of Google Labs also promises users a new browsing experience in the shape of Fast Flip that claims to “combine the best elements of print and online articles.” Fast Flip allows users to ‘flip’ left and right through news headlines and feeds, while tapping the screen brings up a short summary of the page and zooming allows users to see the content in greater detail. Google said the offering is designed to speed up the web browsing experience by making the flow ‘seamless’ and delivering more personalized content.

Devices running Android 1.6 are expected as early as October, 2009, and handset vendors are falling over themselves at present to get their own Android-based devices onto shelves before the lucrative holiday period starts.

Among those joining the throng are South Korea’s LG Electronics with the announcement of its first Android-based device. The company said that the LG-GW620 features a three-inch, full touchscreen and slide out QWERTY hardware keypad, with a focus on email and social networking services, although finer details were scant. More details on the device will be revealed closer to its launch in Europe in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Meanwhile struggling US vendor Motorola has started its fight back, with the unveiling of its first Android powered smartphone known as the Cliq in the US and the Dext elsewhere. With a somewhat similar form factor to LG’s offering, the Cliq/Dext features a 3.1 inch HVGA touchscreen, with a full size, slide out QWERTY keyboard nestled underneath, a five megapixel camera, 3.5mm headset jack, wifi, GPS, and support for up to 32GB of removable memory.

As is the trend among most vendors that have adopted the Android platform, Motorola has skinned the OS in its own style and developed an interface known as MotoBlur. The Cliq will be available exclusively via Android fan T-Mobile USA in the US in time for Christmas. Under the name of Dext, the device will also be available with Orange in the UK and France, Telefonica in Spain and America Movil in Latin America. None of the operators have yet revealed pricing or tariffs for the device.

The forthcoming Cliq is expected to be the first of many Android-powered devices from Motorola. The beleaguered US manufacturer has been ratcheting up its Android strategy over the summer, hiring developers and sinking yet more resources into the platform. Christy Wyatt, vice president of software platforms and ecosystem at Motorola recently said: “We believe Android and open software has the freedom and flexibility to foster innovation, accelerate time to market, and deliver the most personal and customized mobile experiences for consumers.”

But if the rumours are correct, the Cliq might not be the first Motorola Android handset to hit the shelves in 2009. In an advertisement that started broadcasting mid-October, Verizon Wireless turned Apple’s marketing on itself with a video that proclaims, “IDon’t have a real keyboard, run simultaneous apps, take five megapixel pictures, customise, run widgets, allow open development, or have interchangeable batteries. Everything iDon’t, Droid does.”

While it’s entirely possible that ‘Droid’ will just be the name given to Verizon’s forthcoming portfolio of Android-based devices, it is thought that the an Android-based handset to emerge from Motorola’s labs will be officially named the Droid, and is none other than the device code named the Sholes. The word on the web is that the handset will hit shelves in the first week of November, which ties in nicely with the recent advertising pitch.

Late in 2008, Moto announced plans to slim down its handset platforms portfolio, from over 20 different combinations of operating system, silicon and user interface (UI), to just three handset platforms—Android, Windows Mobile, and its own proprietary OS, P2K, which is used on devices such as the RAZR. As a result, Motorola’s portfolio will shift to the higher end of the handset tier, although the company is gambling that over the next few years, the Android and Windows Mobile platforms will filter down through the mid-level so it can still address the mass market.

And finally, Android has won further support from its biggest cheerleader to date   Taiwan’s HTC – which recently unveiled what it is pitching as a mass market device   the Tattoo. The handset, which owes its moniker to the fact that it is highly customisable, was available in Europe first at the beginning of October, and will roll out in markets around the world in the following months.

The Tattoo is the second phone to use HTC’s in house designed Sense interface, the first being the Hero. Speaking at the recent launch of the Sense UI, HTC CEO Peter Chou said: “Our strategy with HTC Sense is to allow us to differentiate ourselves, and also to build a closer relationship with people.” Chou revealed that HTC has spent the last three years covertly developing a ’specialist software team’ to sit alongside its hardware unit. This has brought hundreds of software engineers to the company, which specialises in Windows Mobile and now Android handsets, he said.

“Today we probably have the most Android and Windows Mobile developers outside of Google and Microsoft,” Chou said. “HTC has spent millions of man-hours developing a better HTC-branded software experience that makes all of this simple and engaging to customers.” Buyers of the Tattoo will also be able to design and purchase their own unique handset covers to alter the physical look of the phone as well. The device includes Google Maps, search, Google Mail, and Android market. It also features a 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera, 3.5mm stereo headset jack and expandable microSD memory.

Nokia sees future in Windows, Linux

Meanwhile, handset king Nokia is looking further afield. In August, the Finnish handset giant gave its clearest indication yet that it is looking to reduce its reliance on the Symbian platform by announcing a collaboration with Microsoft and making another foray into the mobile Linux space.

Nokia clearly feels the need to make some changes. The firm is feeling the pressure from its rivals and has seen its market share shrink in recent quarters. Second quarter 2009 handset market data from Gartner revealed that while Nokia leads the market overall—and is still number one in the crucial, high-growth smartphone sector—it is losing points across the board. The Finnish vendor’s handset portfolio is skewed towards the low end, where the market is contracting, and Gartner said that Nokia’s flagship smartphone—the long-awaited N97, which it was hoped would cement Nokia’s position in the high end—“met with little enthusiasm at its launch” earlier this year.

As a result, the vendor is reaching beyond its Symbian heritage in a bid to plug gaps in its line-up. One such move is an expansion into the burgeoning ultra-portable computer market, in partnership with Microsoft. In what is one of the most significant developments in the firm’s recent history, Nokia unveiled its first mini-laptop product, the Booklet 3G, in late August and revealed that the device will run a version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

Analysts said that Nokia’s decision to go with Windows, rather than a Linux-based OS, which had been anticipated, was the most surprising element of the announcement. But there was identifiable logic in the decision. “There has been some disappointment with Linux netbooks so far,” said Carolina Milanesi, research director at Gartner. “Nokia’s brand is big in the mobile phone space but not in the PC space. Having Microsoft on board will give Nokia a little more strength in that market.”

Powered by Intel’s Atom processor and weighing in at 1.25kg, the Booklet features HSPA and wifi connectivity as well as A-GPS and integrated Bluetooth. But while the Booklet represents Nokia’s bid to get a foothold in a new hardware sector, it was also designed to showcase the firm’s Ovi service portfolio. The launch, Nokia said, was “another important ingredient in the move towards becoming a mobile solutions company.”

Milanesi conceded that the provision of a device and service ecosystem will be a key differentiator in the netbook space and will help Nokia to distinguish itself from the likes of Asus and Acer. But she stressed that Nokia is floundering at the top end of the mobile handset market, having not done enough to compete with the slick new wave of user interfaces led by Apple’s iPhone. “Usability issues have made it difficult for Nokia to exploit the potential of its phones,” she said.

The introduction of the Booklet came shortly after Nokia and Microsoft announced an alliance that will see the two companies collaborate on the design, development and marketing of mobile enterprise platforms, including Microsoft Office Mobile and other business communications software for Symbian devices. The initiative will look to introduce software for a broad range of Nokia smartphones, starting with the business-focused E-series range.

The two companies will also jointly market these offerings to enterprises, carriers and end users. New business products are expected to appear in 2010 and dedicated teams will be established in both companies to work on the new initiative. Microsoft business division president Stephen Elop said the deal would focus on email, collaboration, Web 2.0, SharePoint, instant messaging, presence and other rich Office mobile applications, including the ability to view, edit, create and share Office documents with mobile-optimised versions of Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft OneNote.

Less than a week later, the Finnish company announced plans to introduce more high end devices on the Linux-based Maemo platform. The first of these is the N900, which follows on from Nokia’s previous generation of internet tablets such as the N810, and uses the latest Maemo 5 software, which supports multitasking and allows users to have dozens of application windows open and running simultaneously.

The N900 improves on Nokia’s previous tablet devices by actually giving it cellular connectivity and phone features. However, the device still boasts a touch screen and full QWERTY keyboard, supported by an ARM Cortex-A8 processor, up to 1GB of application memory and OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics acceleration, a five megapixel camera and Carl Zeiss optics, with 32GB of storage, which is expandable up to 48GB via a microSD card.

“With Linux software, Mozilla-based browser technology and now also with cellular connectivity, the Nokia N900 delivers a powerful mobile experience,” said Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice president, markets, at Nokia. “The Nokia N900 shows where we are going with Maemo and we’ll continue to work with the community to push the software forward. What we have with Maemo is something that is fusing the power of the computer, the internet and the mobile phone, and it is great to see that it is evolving in exciting ways.” The Nokia N900 will be available from October with an estimated retail price of €500 excluding sales taxes and subsidies.

Back in June Nokia hooked up with Intel to “define a new mobile platform beyond today’s smartphones, notebooks and netbooks” using Linux and open source technologies such as oFono, ConnMan, Mozilla, X.Org, BlueZ, D-BUS, Tracker, GStreamer, and PulseAudio, sparking rumours that the company was preparing to branch out beyond Symbian. When MCI recently quizzed Nokia on its commitment to Symbian, the company would only say that it “remains strongly committed to its current open OS software strategy for smartphones, which is based on the world leading Symbian software.”