Category Archives: Mobile phones

Mobile office, release 2.0

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Meet my new mobile office. Because I move around a lot, I’ve been using a (supposedly) 3G dongle from the 3 network, which is the only device I’ve used in years which makes me long for the good ol’days of 300 baud acoustic couplers. The other day it occurred to me that my cheapo T-mobile Android Pulse phone might make a good modem, and — lo! — thanks to PDAnet, it does. It’s a very elegant solution which doesn’t require any root hacking on the phone. Just download the App from the Android market and install it. Download the client from here and install on your Mac (and, in my case, also on my Dell Hackintosh). There are clients for BlackBerry, Palm, iPhone and Windows Mobile too. Hook up the phone via the USB cable, launch the App on both machines, click ‘Connect’ and away you go. The interesting thing for me is how quick and efficient it is compared to the 3 dongle. (Memo to self: cancel that £10/month direct debit.)

In addition to tethered USB mode, PDAnet can also handle bluetooth connections. But only on Android 2.0. Sigh. There’s always a catch somewhere. Still…

The lowdown on teardowns

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This chart comes from an interesting piece in this week’s Economist on the business of dissecting electronic gizmos to assess their manufacturing costs.

Most smart-phones’ retail prices (before operator subsidies) are around $500-$600. Not all of the difference is profit. There are many other costs, such as research, design, marketing and patent fees, as well as the retailer’s own costs. But the big gap between the cost of building a smart-phone and its price in the shops should widen further as ever more previously discrete components are packed on to a single main microchip. Howard Curtis of UBM TechInsights predicts that as software and mobile services come to represent more of a smart-phone’s overall value, this too will widen the gap between manufacturing costs and selling prices.

What this gap demonstrates is that for smart-phones, like most other electronic devices, most of the value lies not in manufacturing but in all the services and intellectual property it takes to create and market such products. That is something for politicians to ponder: instead of making empty promises about saving ailing manufacturers they might instead consider how best to promote the growth of high-value service industries.

Sobering to think that the Apple tablet will soon be subjected to this kind of analysis.

iPhone saves lives. Well, a life anyway

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Heartwarming Wired story.

U.S. filmmaker Dan Woolley was shooting a documentary about the impact of poverty in Haiti when the earthquake struck. He could have died, but he ultimately survived with the help of an iPhone first-aid app that taught him to treat his wounds.

After being crushed by a pile of rubble, Woolley used his digital SLR to illuminate his surroundings and snap photos of the wreckage in search of a safe place to dwell. He took refuge in an elevator shaft, where he followed instructions from an iPhone first-aid app to fashion a bandage and tourniquet for his leg and to stop the bleeding from his head wound, according to an MSNBC story.

The app even warned Woolley not to fall asleep if he felt he was going into shock, so he set his cellphone’s alarm clock to go off every 20 minutes. Sixty-five hours later, a French rescue team saved him.

“I just saw the walls rippling and just explosive sounds all around me,” said Woolley, recounting the earthquake to MSNBC. “It all happened incredibly fast. David yelled out, ‘It’s an earthquake,’ and we both lunged and everything turned dark.”

Woolley’s incident highlights a large social implication of the iPhone and other similar smartphones. A constant internet connection, coupled with a device supporting a wealth of apps, can potentially transform a person into an all-knowing, always-on being. In Woolley’s case, an iPhone app turned him into an amateur medic to help him survive natural disaster.

Bet Steve Jobs never thought of that.

Why it’s called hard-ware

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When a company becomes as dominant and successful as Google (or Microsoft, for that matter), there’s a tendency in the mass media (and indeed in the investment community) to assume that when it decides to throw its weight behind a product or service then it’s bound to succeed. Sadly, it ain’t true — as Microsoft has discovered with media players, home media centres and mobile phones. Now it’s Google’s turn to discover that getting into a business where you have no previous experience is a tough proposition — as this dispatch from Good Morning Silicon Valley suggests.

The Nexus One may be made by HTC and its primary carrier may be T-Mobile, but Google’s name is on the phone and Google’s site is the point of purchase, so Google is getting a heaping helping of the customer questions and complaints. But mobile phone users are used to turning to a carrier’s call center for round-the-clock assistance (albeit of varying quality), and Google doesn’t have one of those. Instead, the company’s support services rely on FAQs, forums and e-mail. And that process, it seems, is not straightforward or timely enough for some Nexus One buyers. First came a wave of questions about service plans, upgrade eligibility, shipping, network compatibility and the like — normal for any new phone, and certainly one sold in this unfamiliar style. There were also tech questions, particularly regarding an issue with flaky 3G connections that HTC, Google and T-Mobile are all now trying to figure out. Again, not unusual for a new phone. But the next wave of forum posts started to bring other complaints — about slow responses to questions; vague or partial answers; advice that sent users ping-ponging among maker, vendor and carrier; and accusations that Google was unprepared to offer proper customer care, or worse, that it was trying to make minimally assisted self-help the new normal.

And this morning, there’s another headache brewing — some folks are just discovering that when Google said calling-plan customers who got the $180 discounted price on the phone and then canceled within 120 days would have to pay the $350 balance of the unsubsidized price, that would be in addition to the carrier’s own early termination fee. You do have the option of returning the phone.

LATER: More in the same vein from the New York Times.

Nexus vs iPhone is a skirmish, not the real war

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This morning’s Observer column.

Despite their tender years, the boys who run Google have consistently shown a good grasp of military strategy, the first law of which is always to decline combat on territory dominated by your enemy and fight only on ground where you have the advantage. That’s why for years Google avoided getting into the PC operating system market – Microsoft’s fiefdom – and concentrated instead on search and networked services, where it was overwhelmingly dominant.

This also explains its mobile phone strategy. They recognise that the functional elegance of the iPhone comes from having total control of both the hardware and its software. This kind of integrated mastery, which is Apple’s stock-in-trade, would be difficult to acquire quickly, even for a company as smart as Google…

LATER: I was pondering writing a post expanding the claim in my column about why the iPhone is currently the superior, but I find that Dave Winer has done a much better job than I could. As usual.

iPhotography

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Well, if David Hockney can use his iPhone to produce serious art (along with the guys who do the covers for the ‘New Yorker’), why shouldn’t photographers do the same? That’s the basis for the iPhone Photo Project, an interesting experiment just launched by one of my sons.

This blog is an experiment – to see if I can create artistically worthwhile photographs every day on my iPhone. The idea was inspired by Chase Jarvis’s ‘The Best Camera’ project, which champions the use of the cameras we carry with us all the time as opposed to the ones we don’t. The best camera is the one you have with you, stupid. That strikes me as a powerful and democratising idea and has caused me to ask myself the question “what can I produce on my iPhone?”

It’s a neat idea. I don’t have an iPhone, but I always carry a camera — in my case a Canon IXUS which is actually quite a serious piece of kit. It’s technically much better than the iPhone camera, but of course it doesn’t have any onboard communications (or editing facilities, come to that). So it’s not much use for photoblogging.

And then there are the implications of the new Omnivision image sensor. As the New York Times puts it:

OmniVision, a company specializing in the image sensors for mobile phones, cameras and laptops, announced a new image sensor chip capable of recording 14.6 megapixel single images or full 60 frames per second 1080p high definition video. This is the same quality, or better, than most high-end cameras on the market today. The new chip also captures much higher light levels, creating a clearer picture and increasing image stabilization while shooting HD video.

If you’ve purchased a modern cell phone in the past three years, chances are you’re already walking around with a three to five megapixel camera built into your phone. But due to amount of light these sensors need to capture, the images can be very poor. If consumers want to take higher quality images, or video, you need to carry a separate dedicated camera.

It won’t be long before the images on mobile phones become equal quality to handheld cameras, said Devang Patel, senior marketing manager at OmniVision. He said, “Obviously the hand-held camera will have extra features, like better zoom, but you’ll start to see similar performance between cameras and camera-phones.”