Recently in Wireless Category
Even though Near Field Communications (NFC) has been around for 15 years, it could become mainstream in the U.S. smartphone market this year. NFC operates at 13.56Mhz and at speeds from 106 kbits/s to 848 kbits/s all within a 4 cm range. We are finally catching up with Japan (e.g., Osaifu-Keitai system) and other areas of the world where NFC is used for mobile commerce and payments. With better software integration, you now have the intersection of context, proximity and event handlers that blend the physical and virtual worlds. It would make sense if Google announced a mobile payment platform since NFC is natively supported in Android 2.3. You have to consider other players with a little more "trust" than Google such as Apple iTunes or even Paypal. Merchant players like First Data or GPN are reluctant to adopt an offering that is not industry standard. MasterCard and Visa have made progress raising consumer awareness for NFC but financial institutions are not good catalysts for ecosystems. Even though NFC silicon can be standardized, individual competitors that bring their own implementation of payment systems can stall adoption and create payment silos. The battle will be which model will prevail - operator-centric, bank-centric, collaboration-centric or peer-to-peer-centric. Perhaps it doesn't matter since once a user has selected a smartphone platform, they automatically get the mobile payment system. Otherwise we would need a system like "payment roaming" similar to what evolved during the early expansion of cellular networks and billing systems.
I've been following some recent discussion about mobile virtualization. One article by Alex Williams at ReadWriteWeb caught my attention. I agree that many people carry two smartphones today, one for business and one for personal use. It's true that mobile processors lack virtualization support at the hardware level and manufacturers would have to pre-load this type of functionality. I don't agree that virtualization will drive more downloads of apps onto a single device with dual partitions however. It has more to do with the change in application frameworks rather than optimizing bare metal VMWare hosts in mobile devices. You wouldn't be able to run Android and iOS4 on the same device anyway. You might want RIM Blackberry for business and Windows Mobile 7 or WebOS for personal apps, for example. Developers are getting tired of the multi-platform treadmill for keeping various versions of mobile apps up to date. You create a "rich" web experience app using the latest HTML5 standards first and then wrap native code around it for the downloadable version. More advancement in local cache storage will alleviate the bandwidth demands too. This way your users to get the same look and feel and predictable UI behavior, no matter if it's downloaded from an app store or running in the mobile browser.
Kevin Kelleher of GigaOM posits in his article that Apple
will eventually give up control of the iPhone & iPad environment, the application
process, and limiting content to what is "appropriate" for its customers. While I agree with his analogy of
comparing Apple to WalMart in terms of being a retailer, I do not believe their
walled garden limits innovation. The reason is during the early phases of
technology adoption, it is better to have this type of control to preserve the
brand experience. Apple could not afford to have sloppy applications or serve
up what their customers might deem inappropriate. Very soon, customers will be
able to experience unrestricted HMTL5 applications accessible over the web that
will approach the current UI experience from fat client apps on iTunes. The same
goes for iPad. Apple is not only a
"platform," it is a Brand and above all, that is what the company will
preserve. Gadgets will change but the brand remains the same.
There's a lot of commotion lately about Twitter launching
its own client applications of what I would call "house apps" for platforms
like the iPhone, Blackberry and today the Android. While many developers have
outstanding Twitter clients, the better ones come with a price. Now that
Twitter has introduced more of its own client apps free of charge, those early
third-party apps quickly lose their value proposition. Some believe the trend
could hurt companies like Seesmic or Twitterific. Developers will need to come
up with ways to structure their applications to offer other benefits besides
just connecting APIs. This is no different than what Microsoft did in the early
days. Microsoft grew to domination in the desktop market on the backs of third
party developers. Old applications like Harvard Graphics, WordStar, VisiCalc
and dBASE were the early pioneers before we had MS Office. No one should be
surprised with Twitter's actions, it's part of the software growth lifecycle. Developers
will adapt and Twitter will do what fuels its own business growth. I see no
problem with that.
Most industry observers credit HP's acquisition of Palm as a
good move to get back in the mobile business. I see it as potentially bending
the Android developer growth curve. Programmers have to write
Objective C for the iPhone, JavaME for Blackberry, Java for Android and Symbian
for Nokia. That didn't leave much room for Palm webOS development, until now. Even
though they already knew what they needed for webOS: HTML(5), CSS and JavaScript, there just wasn't enough
critical mass because developers couldn't get to it. This acquisition is about
software and I believe the Pre and the Pixie will become collector items. The
webOS is much lighter than HP's Touch Smart for Windows so I expect to see it
powering the new HP Slate. In fact, webOS is better suited for places where
Android doesn't work well like e-readers and web tablets. The issue is the open
source Android device orphan. Remember, the Nexus One had new features not
available to the Motorola Droid via a software download. When you get an
Android, you are tied to the device, not the OS. With webOS, your phone
improves when the OS is upgraded, just like the iPhone. I wished RIM had been bold
enough to consider buying Palm. They certainly needed it. Now HP can come after
RIM in the enterprise. HP can offer a mix of Android and Windows Mobile 7 for
consumers or corporate users. Palm webOS gives them something of their own and
a developer community waiting in the wings.
The first draft of the HTML5 spec appeared in early 2008. Its
design purpose is to eliminate the need for plug-ins such as Adobe Flash,
Microsoft Silverlight or Sun JavaFX, especially when playing videos. Adobe
Tools such as Creative Suite have enabled thousands of developers to make Flash
the standard for 75% of video on the web today. But let's look at whose driving
the standard. Ian Hickson is from Google and David Hyatt is from Apple, so it
should come as no surprise why Adobe is odd man out. Refined standards take a
long time to materialize; the Candidate Recommendation stage for HTML5 starts
in 2012 and could end as late as 2022, but we're talking software, not hardware.
Meanwhile, we are starting to see more useful implementations of the standard
as it sits today. The recent iTunes Preview iPhone App is a good example of
HTML5. The new Google Voice iPhone browser also uses HTML5 and leverages local
caching of data. It supports voice tags that allow you to play audio voicemails
in the browser. Is HTML5 advancing fast enough to overtake Flash on the web? If
the CODEC debate of H.264 vs. Ogg Theora doesn't get resolved soon (H.264 has
IP licensing and potential patent infringement issues), we will see a
splintering of web browser support for HTML5 in the short term. For now, I'd
keep some Flash developers around.
The Cortex A4 Core that is. I was interested to see the first production use of technology from Apple's acquisition of PA Semiconductor. While most analysts believe Apple should have used off-the-shelf ARM CPU silicon from Qualcomm or Freescale, I believe the benefits of controlling your own hardware outweigh the potential cost saving curve over the long run. Here's why. First, chip design today is very modular and you can choose ready-to-integrate LSI gate arrays in a mix and match fashion. Second, given the size criteria, Apple chose an optimal layout by only putting the necessary logic it needs on-board the A4 rather than taking an entire system-on-a-chip (SOC) from a commodity supplier. Third, they have more control over system enhancements and fixes by being able to flash hardware without waiting on chip manufacturer release cycles. And lastly, they get to keep the intellectual property created by engineering the highest performance per cubic-millimeter and lowest power per dollar and not allowing that learning to accrue to the commercial silicon provider - where it could find itself in non-Apple devices. Just getting the In-Plane-Switching (IPS) display to work right without the power budget hit was amazing. IPS requires two transistors per pixel instead of one, which usually requires more backlight (and hence more power). Somehow Apple got around that. Who's to say they couldn't get Intel to manufacturer the chip for them?
With a four-way price war going on between AT&T, Verizon,
Sprint and T-Mobile, we have seemed to lost track of VoIP over 3G. Software
from companies such as Fring or Truphone allow you to make VoIP calls on your
iPhone, but only over WiFi. There are hacks (crash-x) that allow you to trick
the iPhone into thinking you're connected to WiFi and make VoIP calls over 3G
(or downspeed to EDGE/GPRS). I'm still wondering ... why bother? If the idea was
to save minutes or money, the carriers have already responded by driving cheap
voice with price reductions. Besides, VoIP over 3G needs massive data compression
and low latency to battle quality of service issues that make the user experience
poor. Skype claims they only need
a small amount of bandwidth - between 6 kbps and 40 kbps, but I don't think
they can overcome latency issues. Many users were disappointed Skype 1.3 did
not include push notifications or support VoIP over 3G. They still have
usability issues using Skype when "real" phone calls come in (it logs you off). Eventually data
plans will race for the bottom too so Skype could become irrelevant on 3G/4G
handsets.
I believe there will be a continued demand for unlimited service rate plans in the $40-$60 per month range such as those being offered by providers like MetroPCS, Tracfone and Boost Mobile. The low-end market of pre-paid plans as grown to over 22% of the total market vs. 16% three years ago, according to Sanford Bernstein. Martin Peers from the WSJ picked up on my idea that we could see the Google Nexus show up heavily discounted to compete in this prepaid space. Meanwhile the major carriers struggle to grow ARPU in spite of increased costs due to bandwidth "hogs." Even Verizon's CTO, Dick Lynch says metered billing would benefit most consumers because they would not be subsidizing others. With plans to move to LTE by AT&T and Verizon, I see that exacerbating the problem. You provide faster water through the spigot; the users want to drink more water. Carriers and handset makers have created an addiction for what will become an expensive habit. The question is will users trade down-market for cheaper service instead of staying top-shelf at pure 4G.
About Paul Lopez
Paul Lopez is a 20+ year technology veteran whose career has spanned multiple disciplines such as product management, software development, engineering, marketing, business development and operations... read more
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