Mobile Connections

Going Forward I am going to post all my new blogs posts at http://mobileconnections.blogspot.com

Please visit there to see what I have to say and share your views with me.

 

Thanks in advance for visiting MobileConnections and apologies for any inconvenience.

 

Happy New Year

 

In November Avaya announced an iPhone version of its one-X Mobile client which allows iPhone to connect to Avaya IP PBX as a node. Once the iPhone becomes a node it gains access to PBX functions like conferencing, abbreviated dialing (3, 4-digit) and corporate voicemail. Through one-X Mobile client the iPhone essentially assumes the personality of the desktop phone including its Caller ID. Therefore, any call placed from the iPhone once it is connected to the PBX will display the caller ID of the desktop phone to the person being called and the iPhone can receive calls placed to the desk extension.

One-X Mobile client is already available for Palm Treos, Java WAP-based feature phones. Avaya also announced the client for RIM’s Blackberry devices and plans to have clients available for Symbian and Windows Mobile devices in 2008. For the Nokia E-series phones there is also a Dual-Mode client allows the Wi-Fi interface for voice connection while inside the corporate network and provides a handover between GSM and Wi-Fi.  This capability is not available for other devices.

With this offering Avaya provide a very nice Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) story.  By bridging mobile devices to a desktop phone provides a better single-number vision and bring another key device into the folds of the Unified Communications. I think it is time for speak up if it wants to be a player in Unified Communication especially after the recent announced from Microsoft’s OCS 2007.

Also this week Nokia further mapped out the plans for Ovi. Ovie, meaning 'door' in Finnish. It started as a service to provide navigation, music, and games  through a WAP portal on mobile devices. Going forward, Ovi deliver an integrated experience to users by providing easily access to all their content; social networks, synchronised contact lists through a dashboard from mobiles, PC, and web. The goal is to provide a common user interface that provides consistency and simplicity. These services will be available through 2008 and no specific dates are available yet. This is further clarifies Nokia's intention to compete with Apple and possibly others, who are seeking to be the comsumer's default personal information and entertainment portal.

 

 The implications from Nokia's success can be significant, today Nokia has approxmately 1 billion customers. This can create a significant barrier for others to cross. Nokia is talking about partnering with operators and OEMS to deliver the proposition of Ovi. Nokia certianly has the global reach and financial backing to make this a success story and take market leadership.

 

This week Nokia announed that by mid 2008 when people buy a Nokia mobile device they will recieve unlimited access to millions of songs and music free for 12 months. This new service is called "Nokia Comes With Music". Nokia's is partnering with Universal Music International, who will offer access to their entire catalogue to Nokia customers outside of the US. Users will be able to download and store as many tracks as they want from the catalogue during the 12 month initial service period. After twelve months the user can continue to gain access to the service, but will have to pay a subscription. However, the tracks they have downloaded during the initial trials period of 12 months will remain theirs.

This is an acknowledgment of the success of Apple tying music to iPhone is success. Nokia is clearly aiming to provide an alternative to iTunes. It smells like Nokia is planning to go head-to-head with Apple. Lets see what else gets announced at Nokia World 2007.

Yesterday Amazon.com announced the debut of Amazon Kindle, a mobile book reader device. Not that books were ever not mobile, but carrying 200 book with you all the time could be a challange. That is how many books a Kindel can hold. Additionally it has a built-in dictionary with a vocabulary of 250,000 words and definitition. You can also subscribe to on-line newspapers and blogs. Amazon claims that the screen has a paper like display to create an experience similar to reading a book. Kindle weighs 10.3 ounces at costs $399. Amazon is backing the offering with a library of 90,000 books that can be downloaded and each is priced @ $9.99, regardless of the print price of the book.

The device has a EV-DO interface, which provides a high speed wireless access to the on-line store of the books, newpapers, and blogs, for over-the-air download. EV-DO data services are provided in partnership with Sprint, however, the users don't need to pay for the wireless access, it is available as part of the device price. The benefit of EV-DO is that you don't need hotspots to get on-line access. However subscription to on-line newspapers is required.

Amazon is taking on the long estabilished book and paper publishing houses and venturing to change old habits of reading a physical book. Books have not been around for ever, but none of us remeber stone of clay tablets or papyrus parchments. It is a bold move forward and I personally see some benefits of having a Kindle. I have to admit my vocabulary is not as good as I think and I can certianly benefit for the built-in dictionary.

Vodafone and Nokia announced an agreement to launch suite of integrated Vodafone services and Nokia Ovi Services on a range of 3G Nokia handsets. This is a big win for Nokia's Ovi given the speculations that launching Ovi Nokia will alienate its partner operators. The two companies also agreed that the new handsets will have two music services; one from Vodafone and another from Nokia.

If this joint offering is successful, one can expect that the consumers will start to have a broader choice of services. However, right now the agreement is exclusive to Vodafone. But still better that having services only from Vodafone. Once such a mashup of services expands where other operator services from Orange, Telefonica's, ATT, and Verizon are also integrated with services from Window Live and Yahoo's services, the potential of Web 2.0 will emerge. It may be too optimistic of me to soon. But it never hurts to dream big.

Last week AT&T announced it will make the Napster Inc’s extensive music catalogue available for download starting next month. According to the announcement a single song will cost $1.99 or $7.49 any five songs per month. With this announcement AT&T hopes to better compete with Verizon’s Vcast (2 million song catalogue) and Sprint Nextel.

It is expected that this new offering will not work with all the AT&T mobile devices, for example if Apple’s iPhone will be support this service. iPhone is uses Apple’s own iTunes.  Note that iTunes does not allow iPhones to directly download the music to the phone. It requires the phone to be connected to the PC, where the music is download from iTunes whereas, all the services mentioned above allow direct download to the phone and also allows to download a second copy to the PC.  

These are a new breed of services on the phones as they get more powerful and have larger on-board storage capacity. However, there are still a few unresolved issues; music copyrights, limited catalogue, user interface complexity, and bandwidth. I expect that will fix it self sooner than later (note, I did not say sooner that we think).

Expect to see more of the personal media showing up on a mobile device near you.