August 13, 2007
Before my bank was Web-enabled, and before it even offered any kind of online banking via Quicken or Microsoft Money, it had an IVR-based bank-by-phone service that was actually pretty convenient, and worked fine for things like checking balances, transfers, making payments and other simple tasks. It was killed as e-banking moved to the Web, but it’s still difficult to do even simple financial transactions from a mobile phone. Now, we’re seeing Citibank, BoA and others start to launch mobile banking on mobile phone screens. My bank is not yet on board, but I’m sure won’t be far behind.
June 27, 2007
Now that the first reviews of the iPhone are hitting, we’re finding what Apple omitted from its first full foray into the cell phone business. 3G speeds are a no-brainer. We’ve known the iPhone would have only EDGE since January, but it’s unfortunate that Apple hasn’t been able to match the rich online functionality of Safari and its YouTube client with 3G although I’m sure that will come in time.
Other omissions may be more intentional– the snubbing of Flash, and Bluetooth’s A2DP or stereo profile. Again, the latter is an unfortunate hole for such a media-centric handset; one of the coolest tricks of other media phones is the ability to pause music to take a phone call. The iPhone supports this over its slick corded headphones, but not over stereo Bluetooth headphones. While I haven’t seen it confirmed yet, DUN probably isn’t supported, either.
Not supporting IM could be a snub against AOL or (less likely) an issue with AT&T, although you’d think Apple would want to support either Yahoo’s or Google’s IM networks. Apple could also be trying to protect AT&T’s SMS revenue, although there are ways to build hooks into cell phone IM clients these days to track individual IMs as “text messages.” This can actually serve as a powerful incentive to upgrade one’s text messaging package.
May 29, 2007
GigaOm compares the approach of WeFi to two other startups attempting to create a quilt of Wi-Fi from the patches of consumers’ homes. Wasn’t this the original business model of Sputnik and now-gone Joltage Networks in the Wi-Fi mini-bubble circa 2002? Fon seems to have been the most successful of these so far, but I have a lot more faith in service-provider initiatives from MetroFi, EarthLink and others; even these will require some fresh thinking to make the numbers work.
April 23, 2007
I agree with Rhonda Wickman of Wireless Week insofar as SMS would have been a better — or at least complementary — way of warning students during the nightmarish Virginia Tech massacre. However, she is wrong to characterize e-mail as “far better than systems used when I was in college - a public safety siren.” Sirens may not be very high-tech but they are real-time and even harder to ignore than an SMS delivered to what could be a handset that is silenced or turned off. You don’t see ambulance drivers sending text messages to the cars in front of them. The clear danger at the university more than warranted similarly intrusive notification.
To all the not-rich-enough-to-have-a-personal-assistant spendthrifts, I ask this: are personal concierge services a bad idea or is just trying to scale them a bad idea? I remember when a previous incarnation of Root.net tried creating one online and now VOCE is asking $500 up front to participate in a wireless one.
It’s one thing if, say, you’re a Centurion card holder and want to use AmEx’s muscle to help you track down a Wii. But, it seems to me that as Internet access on phones gets better, most of the reference end of this kind of service won’t be as important. What would have value to me would be someone trustworthy to help with errands (a higher end version of the concept behind the possibly returning MyLackey.com) or someone to whom I could delegate complex tasks like, oh, a personal assistant.
VOCE’s home page shows a pearl in a PEBL. Can I also order a pebble in a Pearl?
From BoingBoing via Gizmodo.
April 17, 2007
Katie Fehrenbacher lists some WiMAX devices that will soon be coming stateside as Sprint rolls out its third national network and I can’t say there’s a real compelling consumer electronics product in the batch. Assuming the price-performance advantage is there, PC Cards and EpressCards should be popular but low-volume products like Nokia’s N800 and Samsung’s Q1 aren’t going to drive network usage. When Sprint announced its plans for its 2.5 GHz spectrum holdings, it dangled visions of connected cameras, camcorders and portable video games, but it will take some time to make the case to major hardware companies to integrate WiMAX. Also, the cost and chip size will have to be right as space and battery life are always at a premium on portable products.
I’ve seen a couple of products in the past couple of years that let you sync your non-Blackberry to a Microsoft Exchange server that didn’t yet support ActiveSync, but they required client software with a local connection to the server. The paradox is that mobile users tend to have laptop, so these users don’t have a PC sitting connected to the server all day, and hanging on a VPN all day also isn’t generally considered a best practice.
At CTIA, I was excited to hear that Israeli company emoze, which is delivering free push e-mail, had implemented screen-scraping as RIM did for Outlook Web Access users. At first the product worked great, but then it stopped receiving updates. I’ve reinstalled it several times and then spoke with their tech folks today, who say there is a known issue with the T-Mobile Dash that causes emoze to disconnect from the server. The recommended fix is to leave the backlight on. I reinstalled emoze again and it again grabbed a bunch of email but it’s still not in sync, now dropping out around March 27th.
April 4, 2007
In case you were wondering why there was no posting last week, I took a working vacation around CTIA Wireless 2007 in Orlando. I really like spring CTIA as far as large trade shows go. It’s big enough to command a position as an industry focal point while not being so big that taking it in within the alotted days becomes physically impossible without an elite team of ninja bloggers or at least a Segway. Unfortunately, I have neither.
This year I moderated a panel at the Smartphone Summit on smartphones and media with panelists from Nokia, Microsoft, WiderThan, Sling Media and MediaFLO. The panel consensus seemed to be that, while both smartphones and wireless media are gaining consumer momentum, they’re not moving toward each other, at least not yet. Why?
- the relative newfound popularity of smartphones, particularly the QWERTY Windows Mobile variety, which are starting to move well under the $100 price tag
- the fractured state of smartphone operating systems, which make native development less profitable
- the focus on the mass market by carrier initiatives such as VCast and easy to use quick access features such as the “TV” button used by MediaFLO-enabled handsets.
Why develop media optimized for smartphones? For traditional broadcast media, there isn’t much financial incentive, but there’s surely an opportunity for one of the Web 2.0 companies out there to bring some aspects of community and interactivity to a wireless media experience
Will the iPhone goose this market? Well, depending on how you define “smartphone” — and my personal view of the term is liberal — it’s the first high-end device to focus on a consumer media experience, However, much like the WinMo phones, the experience is still based on sideloading, which carriers are at best tolerating and which fail to capture the true flexibility that wireless is supposed to bring us.
Incidentally, this is the 150th post that I referenced in the Out of the Box birthday post.
April 3, 2007
Katie Fehrenbacher nicely packages an optimistic analysis of Helio’s forthcoming Ocean phone at GigaOm after linking to some doom and gloom regarding the MVNO’s prospects. While the AP story in particular details how Helio’s expensive growth is testing EarthLink investor patience, I can’t agree that the Ocean could be an “unlikely saviour.”
Devices aren’t and never have been king in the cellular business (Hear that, AT&T and Apple?). Devices have been closer to the heart of Helio than even other MVNOs, but they are still merely enablers, and it seems as though Helio has done quite well driving SMS volumes even without a QWERTY device. Its marketing formula is still probably only about 30 percent device, 70 percent image.
Helio has courted a high-end consumer but, as Katie notes, competition is stiff for the Ocean with the likes of the imminent iPhone and LG Prada, for which Engadget posted an enticing UI video walkthrough yesterday. As for Exchange integration, I suspect that many who have outgrown the Sidekick or grown weary of its incremental upgrades will take to one of the svelte trio of smartphones (the Q, BlackJack and Dash) running Windows Mobile, particularly as they are now starting to be heavily discounted and primed for Windows Mobile 6 upgrades. They still may not be as pretty on the inside as they are on the outside, but they’re gimmick-free and good enough to sustain inertia.
March 22, 2007
Hang around enough media mailing lists long enough and you will find yourself mysteriously added to some that border on your areas of focus, but are just valuable enough for some reason to justify the inertia of failing to unsubscribe. An example for me is Telecoms Korea, which requires a subscription for news on arguably the world’s most advanced wireless country.
Every so often, Telecoms Korea will throw out an inflammatory headline. Unfortunately, my coding skillz aren’t up to creating the picklists, so I’ll just list the ingredients here for making your own:
Column 1:
Samsung, LG, Pantech, KT, SK Telecom, The Korean government
says
Column 2:
CDMA, GSM, WiBro, GPS
is
Column 3:
losing, dead, dying, dead in five years
