The New Apple iPhone 2.0 able to use faster 3G communication was announced today. It will be available for $199 for the 8GB model and $299 for the 16GB model. iPhone 2.0 will be availabe July 11, 2008.
Competing Smartphones
The Economist magazine notes that while the Apple iPhone has 20% of the smartphone market in the United States it only has 5% worldwide.
There are competing phones from Samsung with superior digital cameras (5 megapixel) instead of 2 megapixel for the iPhone. The iPhone sets the standard for
the quality of its interface, The new iPhone will also have improved enterprise software and integration with Microsoft Outlook email.
The Samsung Instinct will be on the Sprint network at 3G speeds
Samsung Omnia i900 will become available in Southeast Asia first and then be launched to other markets over the second half of 2008, according to Samsung.
More info on the Samsung Omnia i900
Blackberry Bold 9000 is a 3G smartphone.
The Blackberry Thunder touchscreen phone is featured at Blackberry cool They have a picture which shows the Thunder as having a large screen like the iPhone.
Nokia is still the world smartphone leader with the N95 and the Nokia S60
FURTHER READING
The Times Online discusses the competing smartphones
CEO Steve Jobs said the new iPhone, which is based on 3G technology, is 36% faster than top rival Nokia's N95 smartphone.
Jobs says the new iPhone will be available worldwide starting July 11. It will allow up to six hours of Web browsing and five hours of talk time.
Jobs announced the 3G iPhone, which had been rumored for months, at the company's annual World Wide Developers conference in San Francisco.
During the show, Jobs also introduced a slew of new applications for the iPhone, including a wireless system that automatically forwards e-mail to other devices, a friend-finding service called Loopt and mobile blogging software from TypePad.
Other new applications for the iPhone include a service from MLB.com that provides a live scoreboard of major league games, and music-making software, called Cow Terry, for creating songs on the phone.
The new iPhone applications are aimed at boosting revenue from data services. Wireless companies increasingly are looking to these services to offset slowing growth in mobile phone sales. Apple, for instance, will charge $99 a year for its new MobileMe service, which sends e-mail, contact and calendar updates to a user's devices.
The official Apple iPhone site
iPhone 2.0 features listed at Apple.com
June 09, 2008
New Apple iPhone 2.0 Available July 11, 2008 starting at $199
April 24, 2008
Terabit Ethernet around 2015
Bob Metcalfe (ethernet coinventor) gave a keynote speech, "Toward Terabit Ethernet." Metcalfe had told his audience not only that optical networks would soon deliver 40- and 100-gigabit-per-second Ethernet--standards bodies are now hammering out the technical specifications--but also that 1,000-gigabyte-per-second Ethernet, which Metcalfe dubbed "terabit Ethernet," would emerge around 2015. The move from 100 gigabit ethernet to terabit ethernet could involve an overhaul of the backbone network. Technically feasible but who will pay the up-front costs for these next-generation networks? In America, carriers own the pipes, and we don't really see much competition.
George Gilder presented an 'Exaflood' paper, in which he predicts a zettabyte of U.S. Internet traffic by the year 2015," Metcalfe said. "Since I admire Gilder, I extrapolated from his prediction."
An exabyte is 10**18 bytes of data; a zettabyte is 10**21 bytes. Metcalfe pointed to video, new mobile, and embedded systems as the factors driving this rising data flood: "Video is becoming the Internet's dominant traffic, and that's before high definition comes fully online. Mobile Internet just passed a billion new cell phones per year. Then totally new sources of traffic exist, like the 10 billion embedded microcontrollers now shipped annually."
Herwig Kogelnik indicated that current research had advanced WDM (wavelength division multiplexing) technology to a point where economical transmission of 10 channels, each carrying 100-gigabyte-per-second traffic, was now feasible.
Components of the Exaflood
In the U.S. by 2015:
* movie downloads and P2P file sharing could be 100 exabytes
* video calling and virtual windows could generate 400 exabytes
* "cloud" computing and remote backup could total 50 exabytes
* Internet video, gaming, and virtual worlds could produce 200 exabytes
* non-Internet "IPTV" could reach 100 exabytes, and possibly much more
* business IP traffic will generate some 100 exabytes
* other applications (phone, Web, e-mail, photos, music) could be 50 exabytes
The U.S. Internet of 2015 will be at least 50 times larger than it was in 2006.
Part of the increase will be a move beyond regular high definition television
April 01, 2008
Samsung Instinct, Current EVDO Rev A wireless and future Super 3G and 4G
Sprint and Samsung are releasing the Samsung Instinct a iPhone like phone that uses their 3G network (EVDO Rev A, 1400 kbps down/400 kbps up) The Samsung Instinct will be available in June and Sprint is providing and unlimited connection plan Sprint is a company in trouble and is losing subscribers and could have to sell out to another company.
UPDATE: A spokesperson for Sprint said the carrier has decided to sell the device for less than $299.99 and wants to push it as close to $200 as margins will allow. That would make for a mid-range iPhone clone with nice touches like localized haptics feedback (powered by Immersion), visual voicemail, a 2MP camera and an included 2GB microSD card.
A 3G version (with about the same speed over the ATT network) of the iPhone should be available in a few months.
DoCoMo has an aggressive deployment schedule for the 250 megabit per second high-speed wireless technology Super 3G (LTE, Long Term Evolution) and has targeted 2010 for initial rollout.
Verizon (NYSE: VZ) Wireless (including its Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) Group equity partner) recently said it plans to move to LTE and the GSM Association, representing most of the world's cell phone service providers, also has endorsed LTE. DoCoMo picked Ericsson as its partner to supply LTE infrastructure. Ericsson also has been soliciting winners of the recent 700-MHz spectrum auction as candidates for its LTE infrastructure technology.
The likely rollout of WiMAX by Sprint, clearwire and others is one of the big reasons many analysts think the LTE vendors and carriers are being more aggressive with launch plans.
The traditional GSM carriers also will have another technology evolution before reaching LTE. That’s HSPA+, the next iteration in the W-CDMA/HSPA technology that expects to provide data rates of about 24Mbps to 40 Mbps. HSPA+, also called HSPA Evolved, is expected to be deployed starting in 2010.
Qualcomm joined with Vodafone, Ericsson and Huawei on a forthcoming trial of HSPA+. Vodafone started deploying HSPA last year, with data rates of up to 7.2 Mbps. Peter Carson, senior director of product management in Qualcomm’s semiconductor group, says access to all these various air interfaces will be done on the device side through multimodal chips.
Currently most US carriers have made a significant shift to EV-DO Rev. A (600-1400 kbps download and 300-800kbps upload. This is an upgrade of Edge networks 473 kpbs with 200 kbps in actual practice). Coverage maps will show which is available from which provider.Most analysts think it will be at least 2010 and more likely 2011 before LTE equipment starts getting deployed. That’s creates a possible opportunity for another technology some call 4G – WiMAX. WiMAX doesn’t yet have the data rates that LTE (10 Mbps vs. 100 Mbps) but still could provide multimedia applications like video.
Analysts have just started making forecasts for 4G uptake, including LTE, WiMAX and 3GPP2’s Ultra-Mobile Broadband (UMB) fostered by the CDMA community. ABI Research is expecting more than 90 million subscribers for LTE and WiMAX in 2013. Another research firm, Analysys, is suggesting the number of LTE subscribers will hit 400 million by 2015.
Sprint is in talks with Google, Comcast and others to fund the Wimax rollout. Wimax would initially have a peak speed of 10 Mbps (2-4 Mbps in actual usage).
Ericsson's director of government and industry relations, Mikael Halen, says his company will roll out its first LTE base stations in 2009, with commercial services up to 100 Mbps later that year.
Mr Halen says Ericsson will deliver a full prototype LTE network to Verizon in the US, and Japan's NTT DoCoMo before the end of 2008
FURTHER READING
Wimax is already being deployed in Australia
A software upgrade could double EDGE performance in the third quarter of 2008. AT&T would need to deploy the Nokia Siemens software upgrade on its network for subscribers to reap the benefits; so far, not a peep from AT&T about Nokia Siemens' announcement.
EVDO Rev B is available to wireless carriers but so far none are moving to it. EVDO Rev B would be three times faster than EVDO Rev A (9 mbps instead 3.1 mbps)
CTIA-The Wireless Association® announced today that as of December 2007, the industry survey recorded more than 255 million wireless users [USA]. This represents a year-over-year increase of more than 22 million subscribers.
March 18, 2008
Metamaterials can shrink the size of cellphones, radios and radar equipment
NIST researchers have made metafilms of both yttrium iron spheres (right, each about 50 millimeters in diameter) embedded in a matrix, and tiny copper squares etched on a wafer (above). Credit: (Top) C. Holloway/NIST, (Right) © Geoffrey Wheeler
National Institute of Standards and Technology has demonstrated that thin films made of “metamaterials”—manmade composites engineered to offer strange combinations of electromagnetic properties—can reduce the size of resonating circuits that generate microwaves.
The work is a step forward in the worldwide quest to further shrink electronic devices such as cell phones, radios, and radar equipment. The researcher team deduced the effects of placing a metafilm across the inside center of a common type of resonator, a cavity in which microwaves continuously ricochet back and forth. Resonant cavities are used to tune microwave systems to radiate or detect specific frequencies. To resonate, the cavity’s main dimension must be at least half the wavelength of the desired frequency, so for a mobile phone operating at a frequency of 1 gigahertz, the resonator would be about 15 centimeters long. Other research groups have shown that filling part of the cavity with bulk metamaterials allows resonators to be shrunk beyond the usual size limit. The NIST team showed the same effect can be achieved with a single metafilm, which consumes less space, thus allowing for the possibility of smaller resonators, as well as less energy loss. More sophisticated metafilm designs would enhance the effect further so that, in principle, resonators could be made as small as desired, according to the paper.
The metafilm creates an illusion that the resonator is longer than its small physical size by shifting the phase of the electromagnetic energy as it passes through the metafilm, lead author Chris Holloway explains, as if space were expanded in the middle of the cavity. This occurs because the metafilm’s scattering structures, like atoms or molecules in conventional dielectric or magnetic materials, trap electric and magnetic energy locally. The microwaves respond to this uneven energy landscape by adjusting their phases to achieve stable resonance conditions inside the cavity.
On the downside, the researchers also found that, due to losses in the metafilm, smaller resonators have a lower quality factor, or ability to store energy. Accordingly, trade-offs need to be made in device design with respect to operating frequency, resonator size and quality factor, according to the paper.
March 17, 2008
Skype's GM Christensen predict the next 10 years of Skype, VOIP and the mobile internet
Skype's Jonathan Christensen presented slides to the Emerging Communications Conference. Christensen is Skype's GM for Voice and Video. Hat tip to Phil Wolff at Skype Journal.
The Era of Rich Mobile Internet Communications [from 2008-2017]
- Multi-modal communications (original SIP vision)
- Real time HD video, Data, Presence, Text, Wideband Audio
- Smart endpoints, open platform… Application innovation..
- Fixed / Mobile Convergence – for real…
- Mash ups of web based communications
Mobility is the last anchor to the old way with the fastest growth in telecom services today and spectrum scarcity makes it a perfect walled garden. However, over the next ten years it will open up. The 22 MHz of “700 band” spectrum with “Open Platform” conditions applying now is the start of a truly open mobile situation in the USA.
September 28, 2007
Google phone would be free with ads and probably out in the second half of 2008
Businessweek reports that wireless industry consultants and marketing executives with knowledge of Google's plans say it has been showing prototypes of a new phone to handset manufacturers and network operators for a couple of months Industry sources don't expect one before the second half of 2008.
Combine Google's financial heft with its ultra-sophisticated ability to target ads to specific customers. "The day is coming when wireless users will experience nirvana scenarios--mobile ads tied to your individual behavior, what you are doing, and where you are," says Linda Barrabee, wireless analyst at researcher Yankee Group.
The more than 2 1/2 billion phones in use worldwide exceed the number of PCs and TVs combined. On Sept. 17, Google announced a Web program aimed at advertisers who have created sites for display on cell phones and other handheld devices. Like its online ad network, Google's AdSense for Mobile delivers ads relevant to the advertiser's mobile audience. Employing technologies that figure out where callers are and where they're headed boosts advertising prices by 50%.
If Google decides to spend the $4.6 billion that may be needed to win the spectrum auction, analysts speculate that it has several options: continue its broadband expansion, or perhaps buy a wireless carrier, such as beleaguered Sprint Nextel (S ). Then it could launch the first ad- supported, and free, nationwide phone service. "Google is the first gambler sitting down with as big a bankroll as the carriers have," says John du Pre Gauntt, a wireless industry analyst for researcher eMarketer. "By playing in wireless, they have caused people to look at the industry in a different way."
Google is buying mobile social networking sites like Zingku and dodgeball.com
