Posted on

CSR pitches better sound quality, battery life in Bluetooth headsets

CSR announced their Bluecore 6 chip today. It will ship in production volumes in January 2008. CSR claims a more robust connection – with increased transmit power and receive sensitivity. CSR also claims a breakthrough in sound quality, achieved by going from a Continuous Variable Slope Delta (CVSD) codec to Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation (ADPCM). This enables packet retransmission and a halving of transmission bandwidth. The reduced bandwidth requirement results in a reduction in power consumption, and the ADPCM codec yields a MOS of 4.14 compared with a maximum of 2.41 for CVSD.

This is a welcome change, but doesn’t really go far enough. What’s needed is a wideband codec like AMR-WB to yield better-than-toll quality sound. While this would be redundant in a regular cell phone – ADPCM is more than adequate to carry a signal that has been encoded in GSM – it would make a huge difference in dual-mode phones carrying Voice over Wi-Fi.

Posted on

Muni Wi-Fi on the ropes?

Wired has a story about the struggles of several municipal Wi-Fi deployments. Turns out that good coverage requires double the number of access points than planned, and that consumer subscriptons were an order of magnitude less than anticipated (1-2% instead of 10-25%).

The article holds out a few rays of hope: 802.11s for mesh deployments in residential areas, concentrate on high-traffic areas rather than trying to replace fixed broadband access, get the cities to become “anchor tenants.”

On the other hand, there still seem to be plenty of lower profile metro Wi-Fi deployments that are doing OK.

Posted on

Bluetooth headset for the iPhone

I went to an Apple store today, to buy an iPhone Bluetooth headset. I asked the clerk how the iPhone is selling, and he said “Steady, to both business users and consumers.” I came back to my desk to find a press release from iSuppli saying that the iPhone was the best selling smartphone in the US in July, with 1.8% of the overall cell phone market.

The iPhone Bluetooth headset comes in a box about the same size as the iPhone’s box. As usual with Apple, the box and all its contents are seductively designed, a pleasure to unpack and examine. The headset itself is tiny, but it comes with two USB connectors, one a nice docking station for the phone plus the headset, and one a traveling cable for both the phone and the headset.

One benefit of these dual connectors is pairing. To pair the devices simply plug them both in at the same time. That’s all. It worked for me. Another nice touch is the charging progress indicator that appears on the screen of the iPhone. It shows the battery status of both the headset and the phone.

The headset comes pre-charged; it was only plugged in to the dock for a couple of minutes before the light went green. Even plugging it in brought a little lift of the spirit, as I discovered that it uses the same magnetic engagement technology as the MacBook power connector.

What a disappointment when I made a call, though! There was a lot of static and a sound like running water at both ends of the connection. This is par for the course in my experience of Bluetooth headsets (there are half a dozen discards in my desk drawer), but still not acceptable. The headset was about 3 feet from the phone. There are several Wi-Fi transmitters in my office, but Bluetooth is supposed to be immune from this kind of interference due to its adaptive frequency hopping, which is supposed to learn which frequencies are conflicting and avoid them. ** Update: on subsequent calls I didn’t experience the same degree of impairment, so this initial experience may have been anomalous. The call quality on most calls appears to be acceptable. Even better, this is the first in-ear headset I have used that is so comfortable that I forget I am wearing it. This is a breakthrough. But now that it’s in my ear all the time I am beginning to be concerned about battery life. **

About a billion cell phones were sold in 2006, of which about 50% had Bluetooth capability. About 100 million bluetooth headsets were sold in 2006. Although 100 million of anything is a lot, it is only a 10% attach rate for headsets to phones. I believe the attach rate would be higher if the comfort, sound quality and ease of use were improved.

A strange omission in the iPhone Bluetooth headset is the apparent lack of support for playing iPod content through it. While it may make sense to think that music listeners must have stereo, not every MP3 is music. I play a lot of saved NPR clips through my iPhone, and the headset wires are constantly getting tangled up. Balanced against this inconvenience I would be quite satisfied with monaural playback of this content through a Bluetooth headset. It seems high-handed to deny this option to those who might find it useful. Perhaps this design decision has something to do with battery life.

Posted on

Femtocells, FMC, Wi-Fi

There’s an interesting article on femtocells in EETimes. It mentions the Femto Forum. It is a thoughtful look at the prospects for femtocells, a welcome counterbalance to the hype. The most telling quote is from the CTO of Ubiquisys:

We—that is, the femtocell ecosystem—probably have a two-year window to make our mark, ensure we come up with standard interfaces, and, above all, avoid fragmentation.

The two year comment is about beating Wi-Fi dual mode phones to the punch. But currently the primary driver for Wi-Fi in cell phones is feature inflation in high-end handsets, not FMC. In other words, there are really two dynamics driving Wi-Fi into handsets, FMC is the minor one and feature inflation is the major one; femtocells don’t affect the latter.

So if femtocells overcome their numerous challenges, FMC services for consumers will come mainly through femtocells. Femtocells will not impact Wi-Fi attach rate much, since Wi-Fi is becoming a checklist feature on high end phones. How useful the Wi-Fi in these handsets will be depends on how successful the phone makers are at keeping them open.

Posted on

iPhone activation experience

I sat down with my iPhone and my MacBook, turned on the iPhone and tapped on the screen where it said “Activate iPhone.” The screen went black. Not a good sign.
Then I remembered that the iPhone needs to be plugged in to the PC physically to activate it. This is weird, because one of the things I like best about my MacBook is the way I can just put my Mororola Razr on the desk near it and download photos without any fuss.
So I plugged in the iPhone to the USB and fired up iTunes to do the activation.
Some of the questions were intrusive. It forced me to enter my social security number, also a credit card number for iTunes. I would have preferred to wait until I was ready to buy something from iTunes before giving it credit card info.
The minimum billing I could find was $59.99 a month plus a $36 activation fee for an obligatory 2 years.
This is a $1,536 commitment; add in the $600 for the phone and this toy costs over $2,000.
iTunes showed me my new phone number, and the phone screen said:
“Waiting for AT&T activation. This may take some time.”
This sounded ominous, but within a minute the phone said it was activated.
I made a phone call. Sounded OK.

Posted on

New York Times tells it like it is

David Pogue, the gadget-maven at the New York Times, went to a cell phone conference in Italy last week, and learned a few home truths.

On Independence Day he wrote a column that lambasted the US cellular carriers for their conservatism, and the following day he eulogized T-Mobile for deploying UMA. The UMA writeup is a PR flack’s dream. All true, too.

In the column on the calcification of the US cellular carriers, he indulged in a bit of wishful thinking:

If the iPhone becomes a hit, then, it could wind up loosening the carriers’ stranglehold on innovation.

Seasoned denizens of this industry may scoff, but it must be possible. And while UMA strives to exploit the VoIP genie while still keeping it in the bottle, at least its another step in the right direction. In the column on UMA, Pogue made a prediction that I happen to agree with:

But hard to believe though it may be, T-Mobile did make an announcement last week. And even harder to believe, its new product may be as game-changing as Apple’s.

The Wall Street Journal has already made the observation that the network operators don’t necessarily have their subscribers best interests at heart. But these two events in the same week may mark some kind of a turning point. I hope they do.

Posted on

OpenMoko ships Neo 1973

Lost in the iPhone brouhaha was a June 27th announcement about a phone that may turn out to be more revolutionary:

In our factory in China, 400 Neos are waiting… Starting July 9th, we will launch openmoko.com and start taking orders.

400 units sounds laughable compared to the iPhone’s initial run of 6 million. But it is the seed of something that could turn out to be insanely great. Steve Jobs will remember that the initial production run of the Apple I was only 220 units.

The Neo 1973 looks somewhat similar to the iPhone. It has a similar multi-touch screen that has twice the resolution (640×480) of the iPhone, though it is physically smaller.

What is revolutionary is the software business model. The iPhone isn’t even technically a Smart Phone, since it doesn’t support third party applications. The Neo 1973 is Linux-based, it is open source, and you are welcome to modify it to suit your needs.

This is huge for small, vertically oriented ISVs all over the world. While Motorola and other phone makers have already delivered Linux phones, they are notoriously secretive about the APIs, and make it almost impossible to develop tightly integrated applications. With the Neo 1973, ISVs will finally be free to customize a phone for a particular application or vertical market.

The first version shipping in early July will not support Wi-Fi. A revision in October will. This will be a breakthrough device, selling only to enthusiasts and early adopters in 2007, but gaining sales through 2008 as more applications are developed, and as hardware improvements (like faster CPU, larger screen, 802.11n, NFC, more memory, improved battery life, thinner) are made.

Posted on

User opinions on iPhone begin to appear

As the print reviewers have said, expectations for the iPhone have been built so high that it is bound to disappoint in some respects. And a system this complex is going to have a lot of warts even if it’s 99% insanely great.

Even so, some of the criticisms here show that Steve Jobs’ legendary attention to detail may not be infallible.

The lack of user access to the file system and the slowness of the EDGE network appear to be the major issues. Jobs has kind of addressed both these, saying that applications should reside on servers, and data access should be by Wi-Fi.

A comment on this blog points out that Google Mail is actually more in tune with these suggestions than the built in Mail application.

Posted on

AT&T saddles iPhone customers with useless data plan

David Pogue of the New York Times, reviewing the iPod said:

When you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot, going online is fast and satisfying.

But otherwise, you have to use AT&T’s ancient EDGE cellular network, which is excruciatingly slow. The New York Times’s home page takes 55 seconds to appear; Amazon.com, 100 seconds; Yahoo. two minutes. You almost ache for a dial-up modem.

After reading that, I decided that since I would never use the EDGE service (too frustrating). I would forego the data plan on my prospective iPhone, and just use Wi-Fi at home and at work. But then I discovered that AT&T won’t let me do that. The data plan is an obligatory expense if you buy an iPhone.

Adding insult to injury, Randall Stephenson, the new CEO of AT&T, said in an interview in the Wall Street Journal:

With this particular device, to not have an inclusive data package with a voice package would be almost irrelevant, right? This is a data and a voice product. It’s nonsensical to sell a rate plan separate.

It’s as though he is unaware that the type of person that buys an iPhone almost invariably already has Wi-Fi. He must know that nobody is going to wait two minutes for a page to load; if David Pogue’s experience is the usual one, nobody is going to use the EDGE network. Customers will use the Wi-Fi connections they are already paying their ISP (maybe AT&T) for.