Posts filed under Technology

Nokia and Sony Ericsson have announced at 3GSM that they are joining forces to ensure their new mobile TV phones will work with the new DVB-H mobile TV services that will become available throughout 2006.  The announcement centers around Nokia and Sony Ericsson agreeing to use Nokia’s Open Air Interface (OAI), which specifies how mobile TV devices connect with the DVB-H network and the servers of the overall mobile TV service infrastructure.  The OAI acts as an interface to a network’s mobile TV service. If different mobile phones use different interfaces, then mobile phones using one type of interface will not be able to access the mobile TV service of a network that employs a different interface.  By agreeing to use the same standard, all Nokia and Sony Ericsson mobile TV phones will be able to access mobile TV services that use OAI.  Smart.

 

Read more about Nokia and Sony Ericsson’s DVB-H co-operation after the jump.

Choosing the best mobile TV technology may be more tricky than you’d think.  With the mobile phone industry betting its collective cash on Mobile TV for 2006, there are a bewildering variety of competing standards that can be used to receive your favourite TV programmes.  Which standard you choose will depend on the mobile phone handset you buy, as well as the mobile network operator you subscribe to, as different handsets and operators support different standards.

 

In  Europe, we have two broadcast standards, DVB-H and DAB, as well as mobile TV delivery over existing 3G networks.  In Asia, DMB is popular, most prominently supported in Korea. As a user, choosing the correct standard is crucial if you want to watch the programmes you want on your chosen handset. Choose the wrong technology, and you may find yourself with a mobile TV phone that can’t receive any TV programmes.  So which mobile TV technology should you bet your money on? Read on…!

Samsung have developed a prototype SGH-X700 mobile phone with NFC (Near Field Communication) that can be used for wireless transactions.  Using the NFC X700, users can pay for things such as CDs and DVDs, and gain entry to areas such as tube stations just by waving the phone over an appropriate receiver.  The mobile phone contains an e-wallet facility, which the user tops up with credit before swiping the phone over a receiver to pay for an item. NFC provides the wireless communication channel over which the transaction is made.

 

The new Samsung X700 NFC phone has been developed with Philips and Telefonica Moviles Espana and will be shown at 3GSM, where users will be able to use it to gain access to certain areas of the conference, and buy CDs and DVDs using a special kiosk at Philips’ booth.

 

Read what Philips and Samsung have planned for the Samsung X700 NFC phone after the jump.

Next week will be Big Event time again, with the start of the 3GSM World Congress on Tuesday 14th Feb. For those not in the know, the event is another opportunity for the big mobile manufacturers to strut their stuff and show off their latest mobile technologies. If you thought CES 2006 was good, just wait for 3GSM: it’s all about the mobile!

 

So what can you expect from this year’s 3GSM World Congress? Well, CEO’s for one thing. The big guns from Nokia, Motorola, LG, Ericsson, O2, Vodafone, Orange, and Microsoft will all be there.  Major themes of the show will include mobile advertising, mobile entertainment (music, games, video and mobile TV), multimedia and smartphone handsets, and demonstrations of new ‘super 3G technology, HSDPA. 

 

More details on the 3GSM World Congress preview after the jump.

NEC’s new HSDPA high speed mobile phone has been demonstrated by Japanese cellco DoCoMo.  The new prototype phone was shown transferring a 5MB file over FTP in 14 seconds. That’s 3.2Mbps – not quite the theoretical peak of 3.6Mbps that HSDPA is capable of, but still incredibly fast for a mobile phone. And think carefully about those numbers.  The difference between 3.6Mbps and 3.2Mbps seems small enough to ignore, but it’s still 400kbps: faster than most data services on the market today. A new era of mobile phone services beckons.

 

NEC are to display the world’s thinnest folding camera phones, the NEC N412i and N500iS, and a new HSDPA prototype phone, at next week’s 3GSM conference.  The NEC N412i and N500iS are both 2.5G, with EDGE support, enabling data transfer speeds fast enough to cope with real time video streaming. They also come with MP3 players, and “large” memory. The NEC N412i is also known as the L1 in some countries, and is only 11.9mm thick. The N500iS is the successor to the N412i, and offers iMode support. No details yet on how slim it actually is, though.

Apparently, NEC intend to have a large presence at 3GSM, which is great news for those of us keen to see what’s coming this year in mobile phone land.

 

More details and pictures of the new NEC phones after the jump.

 

All that’s about to change, though, as Nokia’s latest research project has developed a full fledged web server for a mobile phone.  Not just any web server, either: they’ve ported Apache, the web’s most popular web server, onto their Series 60 phones. They’ve also implemented a custom gateway to circumvent operators’ firewalls, so anyone across the web can access the phone’s web content as if it were a traditional web server.

 

Geeks amongst you will be hanging your tongues out with drooling anticipation. Read on to see what exactly you can do with a web server on a mobile phone.

 

[Source: Nokia]

 

 

You may have been impressed with Motorola’s ROKR E2 mobile music phone and iRadio music service when both were announced at CES 2006 earlier this month. But you wouldn’t have been if you live in Japan. This, you see, is the Japanese equivalent from Japanese phone operator AU. The service is called AU LISMO (“Listen Mobile Service”), and like iRadio and many similar offerings from network operators and mobile phone manufacturers alike, it lets you download music, either using PC software, or directly over the air.

 

The killer difference, though, lies with the features of the accompanying AU W41T mobile phone:

Now compare these specs with Motorola’s ROKR E2, and try to work out whether these new phones were announced two weeks apart or two years apart! If you want to see the future of mobile phones, just look to the Asian markets. Japanese and Korean phones truly rock!

 

 

NTT have just launched the amazing new NTT N902i camera phone in Japan. It’s amazing, not because of the enormous megapixellage of the phone (leave that to Samsung, who are up to 8 megapixels and counting!), but the way in which it actively prevents shaken photo syndrome.

 

Anyone who’s ever used a camrea-phone knows how absolutely still you must be to avoid blurring the picture.  What NTT’s N902i does it to take a series of photos in quick succession, and then produce a composite photo with all the blurriness computed out. The result, apparently, is an ultra-clear image. Expect to see this technology on many future camera phones, real soon.

 

Alternatively, of course, you could just save your cash and use MobileMentalism’s handy guide on how to take good pictures with your camera phone (OK, shameless plug, but go on, read it, it really is useful!)

 

Mobile data speeds will surge in 2006, as new generation wireless Internet and mobile technologies converge, according to Korea’s JoongAng Daily.  From the mobile arena comes HSDPA (High Speed Data Packet Access), capable of speeds to your mobile theoretically of 14.4 Mbps (though expect speeds to start at 500Kbps and ramp up to about 7.2 Mbps).  From the wireless Internet world comes WiMAX and its Korean competitor WiBro, the latter capable of 20 Mbps. Mix the two together, and you get a seriously fast broadband mobile network with the potential for some amazing new mobile services.

 

[Source: JoongAngDaily]

 

Read more on what HSDPA and wireless broadband will bring to the mobile world after the jump.