Everything and the Mobile Software Universe…

Recently Samsung announced Bada, a new development environment: in a nutshell this is an SDK with a set of C/C++ API associated to an application framework, ported on top of Samsung legacy RTOS, or Linux.
Bada will be deployed in a majority of Samsung touch phones from smartphones to feature phones.
Antony has been quicker than me and posted a nice Bada article at Vision Mobile, depicting why this Samsung move may prove to be a wise one. I mostly agree with him, his arguments are around gross margins, market pressure and differentiation. I’ll try to dig a little more around this differentiation aspects in the Samsung case and why they really seem to innovate in this area, especially versus an Android strategy.

When Bada was announced, I was very negative, my first reactions and comments were harsh: again a me too initiative from Samsung, the OEM with fantastic execution but no clear vision of its services/software strategy, trying all the available OS on the planet and waiting to see if one is successful.
Then I’ve looked back at what they achieved recently and what they’ve announced with Bada.

• They are now the undisputed number 2 in number of devices sold (not far from 20% of the market in Q2 2009 for ex)
• The Touchwiz UI 3.0 is on the smartphones AND ALL the other touch phones of the company: difficult to tell who is or is not a smartphone now (I’ve made the experiment at the last CTIA).
• Release of the Touchwiz UI widget SDK to develop widgets for all the Touchwiz based phones.

What are they trying to do with this TouchWiz UI ?: use the best software platforms (RTOS for cost effectiveness and integration, high level OS for SDKs and features) while trying to uniformize the user experience and consolidate the Samsung brand.

Obviously the next step, to retain its customers, a politically way to say “lock them in”, is to have exclusive applications and services accross the Samsung devices line…even better if the customer has paid for it so he won’t throw away its application investments to buy a competitor phone for its next purchase. Same strategy as Apple, but here we are talking about Samsung a company with dozens if not hundreds of different device models, across all the price ranges, selling more than 200 millions phones a year (yes a year! how many iPhones sold today? , ok margins, blablabla…and yes I have an iPhone).
How to do that? Make a robust application environment, OS agnostic, with a dedicated SDK, to allow deployment of the same binary to a range of devices with different software platforms … well this is exactly the description of Bada.
We (speaking in the name of OpenPlug in this sentence only) have advocated this very same idea for the last 7 years to push OEMs in this direction (Samsung and Nokia were part of the lot ), and this is at the end taking of : Nokia with Qt (still has to deliver but the intention is clear) and Samsung with Bada.

But why creating a new one and not simply reuse Android code base?…I’m sure you have the answer already:

• Android is free? Android is by no extend free: you have to pay a lot of your R&D budget to make a phone with your brand, your services, etc…
• Android is open, why not getting it? NO Android is a closed box, Google and only Google can really change it, it’s really time for the industry to wake up: it’s not because you have the code of something that you can control it. If you don’t have the roadmap and the team who is maintaining and developing it you simply have meaningless mega bytes of symbols
• …but this is from Google, the good guys! Sorry, they are not, they are pushing their own services, not yours, and now with the NexusOne their own phone and user experience.

Google/Android has a complete opposite aim versus OEMs own agenda:

• Android is here to push Google services in the mobile world, as a corollary it allows you to swap your device as easily as possible because the new one will have all your data and applications loaded and compatible from the old one.
• … wait,wait this is exactly what an OEM doesn’t want: an OEM wants you to buy your next phone from them, not the competitor. So you have to differentiate.

Samsung, like Nokia, simply doesn’t want that an external third party software house decides if its devices has to be like that or like this… to be look alike brothers to its direct competitors (check the Windows Mobile phones for the last 5 years, and you will get the point : all the same).
So why not following their own path? Apple has made the choice and is successful, Nokia is trying, Samsung has to move, and for me it is doing so in a more pragmatic way than Nokia:

• Bada is not about reinventing a new OS with the underlying plumbing to the hardware as is Nokia Mameo, who cares of that today?
• The User Experience is already in production and refined device after device
• Bada SDK is not “fancy” but raw C/C++ … but what the point as long as I can sell and do my applications for hundred of millions of devices and customers (let the fun to the WebOS guys…I’ll get the cash)

Of course Bada is not quite their today, where are the devices? where is the market place? But it is refreshing to see Samsung taking its own path, its own direction…opening even more opportunities to application developers.

Ok exit the Motofone F3 here is the Sagem my150x : Today I had briefly this baby in hand from an insider. The screen in monochrome, but with a particular technology that looks like old LED based VCR. Notification icons are “hardware based” like the F3, menus are pretty simple and quite well readable with a good contrast, no T9 for SMS. I was impressed by the sturdy sleek and fashion design, and the really great tactile feeling of the case (really similar to the great smooth Samsung plastics).

But what is really amazing is its BOM: 16$ ! Some “rumors” are telling that it will be sold 29 euros in Carrefour. And it seems that in UK Orange to sell Sagem my150x pay-as-you-go phone for 10!

This is the first phone sporting the Infineon ULC mono chip…and this is great!

For further reading check the following reviews:

TrustedReviews – Sagem my150X and MobileGazette Sagem my150x

Hello all…

Last week I attended the Open Source in Mobile conference in Madrid, at which I could get a demo of the “One-Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) XO device from Jeff Waugh, a prominent figure of the GNOME project.

For those of you not familiar with this project, the “One-Laptop Per Child” foundation wants to bring laptop computers to schoolchildren in developing countries. I will not here dwell on the price or success of the device, but rather focus on its software and really innovative user interface.

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So here it comes: a portfolio of web services pushed by an operator, SFR, the french Vodafone. Check for details here (sorry in french):Six géants d’Internet s’associent  SFR en illimité.

Here is a quick summary:

SFR is launching a  best of web  offer, with 6 top of the line services accessible through its Vodafone Live portal.

1. DailyMotion, accessible through a java application that allows a user to send its own videos: it has been done in 2 Months by SilverBlack Wireless (formerly french Cellcast Interactif). Before the end of the year a richer application (java also?) will be available (comments, etc). DailyMotion has signed a 6 months exclusivity with Vodafone. . User pays “only” for bandwidth                                
2. YoutTube: certainly accessible through its mobile version (http://m.youtube.com). No Vodafone exclusivity. User pays “only” for bandwidth
3. Windows Live Messenger, available through the Miyowa solution (server + client midlet): 4 euros per month for unlimited use (!!) or cost is equivalent to one SMS by message sent (!!!). seems expensive but Bouygues has 80000 subscribers for the same service, little cash cow? .                                                                                                                                                                
4. eBay: eBay Mobile by Streamezzo (through their java client): free access (apart from connexion costs), products search, possibility to bid, etc. One month exclusivity to sfr for this mobile access.                                                                          
5. Google Maps: well you know it already
6. MySpace: Mobile version access (WAP/simple web or java app??) … but with a business model like done in the US: access to messages, music and video…for 3 euros per months or 0.5 euros per day of use. In the US (helio and AT&T I think have deployed the service), there were 200k users in 6weeks at 3$ per month, 2$ for MySpace, 1$ for the carrier (The main site has an estimated 55 million users, and MySpace.com is the second-most-viewed-website in the U.S. just behind Yahoo and ahead of Google — and accounts for 12 percent of online advertising).

Here is the pricing model of sfr for bandwidth:

• A “per data session” of 2 Mo at 0.5 euros, for the access to those services
• For the first 50 000 :9.90 euros per months for unlimited access to those  best of web  services + 25 Mo of portal DATA+ unlimited email

  • Web services are here, rushing to the mobile…and can propose a non free business model with no advertisement with no complexes: people seems ready to pay!
  • MIDP, MIDP, MIDP : as it is the only way today to deploy massively services so it is the only viable technology….today.
  • In at least 3 of this 6 cases, a third party (Miyowa, SBW, Streamezzo) has been involved/in charge of the Mobile development and strategy (even in the MS case!) => Mobility is still an “expert only” area, new actors may have a role here.
  • Vodafone is no more willing to redefine itself the user experience of those services, it (at last!) leaves it to the service providers themselves…it is perhaps time for the Andreas Container Projects? to help those kind of deployment, with no to little OEM involvement?

• For the others, 2 plans  Vodafone Live +unlimited emails with 5 Mo or 25 Mo of additional data (off portal??) for 5 euros and 9.90 euros respectively per month

So some quick comments:

Any comments on those last statements?

Hi all

For my first post here, I have decided to just be an aggregator, i.e. spare you the hassle of browsing through all these blogposts about the most-hyped CE product ever: the iPhone… now you have it all here summarised in neat bullet points.

Kudos to Engadget Mobile for their extensive review, The Register for their numerous and humorous articles, as well as iFixit for their step-by-step reverse engineering.

Also worth noting that there is now a very extensive entry for the iPhone on Wikipedia.

In short: it’s a great device in terms of usability and design (so long as you share Apple’s tastes), but suffers quite significant shortcomings when it comes to business productivity (notably due to its poor email application) and lack of capability to have 3rd-party applications installed.

/Guilhem

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Seems to be a great technology: Sensear: Noise-cancelling, Voice-amplifying hands-free system – IntoMobile . Active noise cancellation, and voice amplification at the same time…I would REALLY want to know more about their algorithms. Definitively something great here to at least improve the NUMBER ONE feature of a phone: voice. We don’t have to forget it, see this good article over at Mobile Web Tablet:

So, what’s the killer application for all those mobile devices? Is it search? Music downloads? Widgets? Well, not quite. It’s worth remembering that the three most important applications for mobile phones are: 1. Voice. 2. Voice. 3. Yepp. You guessed it: voice. And then SMS and then nothing and then nothing and then mobile ring tones. Sort of. The funny thing about this is how little innovation there has been in the voice application domain

The Mobile Web Tablet : 3 billion phones and counting!

Really great article to read: The Google Phone: Fact, Fiction and a Huge Link List (via TomSoft) .

I especially been ..not so surprised… about their supposed software stack:

Venture capitalist Simeon Simeonov cites an inside source, who reports the Switch will be “Blackberry-like,” with a “C++ core,” “optimized Java, [and] vector-based presentation,” as well as VoIP and other services.

The Google Phone: Fact, Fiction and a Huge Link List

The vector-based presentation seems to come from their Skia buyout:

One, Skia touted itself as a developer of 2D graphic software for mobile devices, set-top boxes and what it called emerging products.The language was contained on a Web site once operated by Skia. Skia’s first product, SGL, is a portable graphics engine capable of rendering state-of-the-art 2D graphics on low-end devices such as mobile phones, TVs, and handhelds, the Web site said. SGL is feature-set compatible with existing 2D standards, making it ideal to serve as a back-end for public formats such as SVG, PDF, and OpenVG. SGL is licensed as source or binary, and can be customized to match specific HW/framebuffer requirements..

Google Comes Out of the Shadows in N.C.: Search Engine Giant Has Software Operation in Chapel Hill :: WRAL.com

The java vision from the Danger guys they hired, the kernel is probably Linux….

Hum I really don’t get why Java is needed in the middle (Savaje anyone??), but here we go with a brand new complete embedded platform!…over crowded? we can say so. (MS, Symbian, Qtopia, Motorolla linux, Access, Open Moko, Palm, Ajar, Brew, EMP, MSX gaxoo, Open-Plug (in some extent), SKT Linux, Sky Mobile Media, Sasken and so on)

Anyway, for sure it won’t be a low cost phone! … but we are all waiting for it.

Will it be open? What kind of hardware? Is it a complete phone software stack or a companion framework? for sure a server side is on the works….so a next generation of On Device Portal?

Really good read over at : The Mobile Web Tablet : The Mobile OS of the future is…

The bulk of most services will be on a web server. Google Maps Mobile, Widsets, Opera Mini or Gmail are all good examples of extremly capable mobile applications supported by a strong web service. These are all java applications, but as web browsers in mobile phones grow more capable we will see XHTML or Flash Lite-based applications. Widgets, if you like that term.

The Mobile Web Tablet : The Mobile OS of the future is…

Yes and this is a point I’ve discussed already (Back to the future mainframe, centralized computing anyone?) where the clear split between local and server is fading away, but is it really applicable to mobile phones? Not sure for now due to the high latency of the current mobile IP networks, but things are only beginning to be sorted out in the PC world…Mobility is next, for sure.

Web Developments frameworks (like Adobe Flex, MS Silverlight) are already migrating little by little to the mobility space, especially through the crop of On Device Portals that are, more or less services delivery platforms, with a “rich client” on the device, running some kind of Ajax/flash/svg/xml/javascript (put your favorite widget/UI/web2.0 technology here) framework to deliver “content”, content being here the service.

Ray Ozzie recently presented MS silverlight, outlining the following interesting trend:

Ray Ozzie outlined two types of web apps – what he calls “Universal Web” apps, meaning ajax, html, browser based apps. Then he discussed “Experience First” apps – xbox, mobile, pc desktop apps. He pointed out that “the most sucessful solutions have an element each of universal web and experience first”.

Ray Ozzie Keynote at MIX, Las Vegas

So really this is about integrating and adapting:

• On one side the service itself: how to render it, implement it as best as possible.
• On the other side: the device on which it is used: the write once runs everywhere mantra is definitively dead, long live to adaptative or even adapted software!

I’ll quote again the same Mobile Web Tablet article:

The problem with todays phones is not about access to the native OS, but rather how the web or downloaded applications are second grade citizens within the phone GUI. This, however, will change.

Nokias recent move to integrate a widget platform in S60 is a sign of exactly what I’m talking about. Sony Ericssons multitasking java and standby midlets are some other and so is the Apple iPhone. Good and useful widgets are really just a small window to a much larger web service.

The Mobile Web Tablet : The Mobile OS of the future is…

I sort of agree with this comment: service integration is KEY, and while VERY difficult right now, next generation UI (iPhone, LG Prada, SonyEricsson Feature phones (not smartphones, UIQ is for me inferior to their mainstream but I digress), etc) perhaps won’t help cause when a graphical designer is involved to define the whole SUI, it is very very difficult to complement it with new services from the outer world without compromising the phone UI integrity: this is where the notion of “system”, as a collection of services and “Master of Ceremony” of those services interactions is coming to life (I’ll certainly comment much more on this notion on my blog later…).

On the other hand I’m not sure that access to natives phone hardware and services is enough today for mass market phones (this is after all on of the Open-Plug purpose ).

Something I’m not sure today is how those kind of service platforms will be implemented: after all mobile phones are still, and will be for a foreseeable future and for the biggest part of the market really low CPU, low RAM devices, so I’m not sure how to technically leverage this service approach on the mass market (see here for some data ..but my point of view has evolved since then ) , but I’m looking for

It seems that C. Enrique Ortiz is also digging , and found with Dojo an interesting property: working cleanly offline:

But Dojo off line touches on a very important and needed characteristic, a key feature that future mobile web browsers must support: “The ability to work disconnected”, or “Support for disconnected or off line browsing (cache), allowing the Mobile Web application operate as an occasionally connected application”

C. Enrique Ortiz Mobility Weblog

And you? any clue? vision on what this platform will be?

I get good comments from June on this post about Ultra Low Cost phones, about issues related to text entry for her native Kenyan language (Swahili I assume) : she gave me some great material about the impact and development of the mobile phone uses in Kenya. To write this article I’ve then wandering about the net to get some information about the Kenyan way of cellphoning … surprising.

Mobile Subscriptions Skyrocket: Africa far outpaces the rest of the world in average annual growth of mobile phone subscriptions. According to the International Telecommunication Union, from 1999 through 2004 Africans signed up for cellphones at a far greater rate than Asians and nearly three times as fast as Americans. Most of that growth was in the sub-Saharan region [left].

IEEE Spectrum: Africa Calling

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It’s done, kind of officially : first this one

Palm pays $44m for Palm OS source code license

Everything and the Mobile Software Universe… » Palm pays $44m for Palm OS source code license | Reg Hardware

Then this:

PalmInfocenter reports that Opera and Palm have cinched a deal to deliver the Opera 9 browser on future Palm products
…The Blazer browser that Palm has used in most of their products for years is a customized version of NetFront that they license from ACCESS…

Software Everywhere » Palm distances itself further from ACCESS

To finish here is, I think very good news for palm

Palm Announces New Linux Based Mobile Platform Posted By: Ryan Kairer on Tuesday, April 10, 2007 6:24:15 AM Today at Palm Inc’s Analyst Day, Palm CEO Ed Colligan officially announced that Palm will deliver a new Linux and open source based mobile computing platform combined with Palm OS Garnet technology on new products later this year…Colligan also revealed that this was a new platform that Palm has been working on, in house for a number of years. He stated that Palm would not license this new OS to outside hardware companies, meaning this will be a Palm exclusive platform…Colligan said that “clearly we [Palm] have been working on a major new area that has been speculated about in the press and talked about by Jeff Hawkins. Hawkins previously dropped major hints that he would reveal more details for Palm fans at an upcoming conference in May.

Palm Announces New Linux Based Mobile Platform

Here are some Ed Colligan slides on the subject:

So to sum-up:

• Palm get the old PalmOS back in house for 44 Millions $, meaning they want to sell millions of phones using this OS (as it or as a Linux layer?)
• Palm licensed Opera, and not access browser for its future products (and not webkit??? why such a move?? perhaps for the opera widgets approach?)
• Palm was working on its own OS for YEARS! and so they will have again full control over their product! why iPhone looked sooo good? because software and hardware were so well integrated and in control…
• I can’t wait until May when this new class of devices will be revealed….so perhaps I won’t buy an MS smartphone