Feb 20 2009
Mobile Spanish lessons
A couple of days at the Mobile World Congress have passed in a blur of new handsets and over-excited press releases, but I’ve learnt a few things.
I now know, for instance, that Barcelona is a city where you can still smoke in the bars and you can make mobile calls from the Metro – a place somewhere between the past and the future then. But I’ve also learnt a few things about the mobile industry.
It’s about the networks
I guess we’re all going to have to get our heads round LTE, Wimax and 4g, because the big news over the next few years is going to be about that boring back-end stuff that phone customers don’t care about. The jargon probably doesn’t matter to mobile internet users either but their experience is about to get a lot better.
Mobile networks are getting faster. I’ve been using a 3g dongle here delivering a reliable 2Mbps, but a trip around the city in an LTE-enabled van, watching high definition television beamed over the network, showed me a whole new world.
Now we’ve learned to be sceptical about promises of technological advances from the mobile industry – a decade after its arrival 3g is only now making a real impact – but I do expect that in a couple of years I’ll be surfing much faster on the move than I do currently at home.
VOIP isn’t rocking the mobile world
The idea of free calls over the internet – or Voice over IP in the jargon – has been all the rage for years now, threatening to rock the fixed-line telecoms industry and now the mobile world.
At the show, Nokia announced a plan to put Skype on new handsets, and 3 has had some success in the UK with its Skype phone. But I’m sceptical about this, having tried out a couple of VOIP apps on my phone.
Fring and Truphone both look good – but only really work when you’re on wifi. Getting a solid wifi connection is still a struggle outside – I’ve got one in my hotel room, but I’ve also got a laptop which is far better suited to making calls.
Truphone has an option called “Truphone Anywhere” for use away from wifi, but when I slowly cranked it into action, up popped a warning that it would not save me money when calling from abroad. Fully integrated Skype on a mobile may be a different proposition – but how happy are operators going to be with Nokia’s plan? I wouldn’t mind betting that those “free” calls on an N97 will turn out to be rather hard to make.
Mobile kills the digital camera?
The idea that we will have one converged device that will do everything has been over-hyped – but surely the time is coming when we can forget about carrying both a simple digital camera and a phone?
This week Sony Ericsson launched a 12Mp phone, and 5Mp seems to be just about standard – with a decent lens and flash that should be enough for most people. Keen photographers will want a digital SLR – but the days of the standalone compact camera may be numbered.
Where is the power?
The single most eye-catching announcement out of Barcelona was the plan unveiled by the GSM Association for what it called a Universal Charging Solution – or what you and I might call one damn power adapter that will charge any mobile phone.
Having travelled here laden with three phones and three different adapters, I can’t wait. But why is it taking so long. When it comes to software the industry is already delivering cross-platform applications to customers – but they’ll have to wait until 2012 for the universal charger, and don’t bet on it arriving then.
