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The iPhone as an eReader

On a recent extended trip to England, I discovered Stanza, an e-reader application for the iPhone. Not only did it demonstrate for me that the iPad will obsolete the Kindle, but that the iPhone can do a pretty good job of it already.
Surprisingly, the iPhone surpasses a threshold of usability that makes it more of a pleasure than a pain to use as an e-reader. This is due to the beautiful design and execution of Stanza. The obvious handicap of the iPhone as an e-reader is the small screen size, but Stanza does a great job of getting around this. It turns out that reading on the iPhone is quite doable, and better than a real book in several ways:

  • It is an entire library in your pocket – you can have dozens of books in your iPhone, and since you have your iPhone with you in any case, they don’t take any pocket space at all.
  • You can read it in low-light conditions without any additional light source.
  • You can read it even when you are without your spectacles, since you can easily resize the text as big as you like.
  • It doesn’t cost anything. If you enjoy fiction, there is really no need to buy a book again, since there are tens of thousands of good books in the public domain downloadable free from sites like Gutenberg.org and feedbooks.com. Almost all the best books ever written are on these sites, including all the Harvard Classics and numerous more recent works by great authors like William James, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad and Philip K. Dick.
  • You can search the text in a book and instantly find the reference you are looking for.
  • It has a built-in dictionary, so any word you don’t know you can look up instantly.
  • It keeps your place – every time you open the app it takes you to the page you were reading.
  • You can make annotations. This isn’t really better than a paper book, since you can easily write marginal notes in one of those, but with Stanza you don’t have to hunt around for a pencil in order to make a note.
  • You don’t have to go to a bookstore or library to get a book. This is a mixed benefit, since it is always so enjoyable to hang out in bookstores and libraries, but when you suddenly get a hankering to take another look at a book you read a long time ago, you can just download it immediately.

All these benefits will apply equally to the iPad and the others in the 2010 crop of tablet PCs, which will also have the benefit of larger screens. But Stanza on the iPhone has showed me that good user interface design can compensate for major form factor handicaps.

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Test your broadband connection at the FCC

The FCC has launched a broadband speed and quality test presumably to gather information about the real state of broadband in the US. This is a great initiative and I encourage you to go and run the test.

I tried it myself, and it wouldn’t let me take the test because I put in an English zip code, because that is where I happen to be this week. So I put in my Dallas zip code instead and it ran the test. I hope that there is some check in there that compares the zip code to the geographical location of my IP address, and discards the ones that don’t match, or the results will presumably be worthless.

[Update:]Lauren Weinstein mentions this issue, as well as several others…

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Google pushes fiber

Google announced that it is going to wire a select few communities with gigabit broadband connections. This could be huge.

Something is wrong with broadband access in the US. It was ranked 15th in the world in 2008 on a composite score of household penetration, speed and price.

Google is setting out to demonstrate a better way, though other countries already offer such demonstrations. The current international benchmark for price and speed is Stockholm at $11 per month for 100 mbps. There are similar efforts in the US, for example Utopia in Utah. One of the key features of these implementations of fiber as a utility is that the supplier of the fiber does not supply content, since this would impose a structural conflict of interest.

Google does supply content, so it will be interesting to see how it deals with this conflict. I doubt there will be any problems in the short term, but in the long term it will be very hard to resist the impulse to use all the competitive tools available; “Don’t be evil” isn’t a useful guideline to a long, gentle slope.

OK, it’s easy to be cynical, but at least Google is trying to do something to improve the broadband environment in the US, and it may be a long time before the short term allure of preferred treatment for its own content outweighs the strategic benefit of improved national broadband infrastructure. And this initiative will undoubtedly help to accelerate the deployment of fiber to the home, if only by goading the incumbents.

I touched on the issue of municipal dark fiber a while back.

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Samsung GT-S8500 is first with 11n, BT 3.0 certifications

Engadget reports that the Samsung GT-S8500 is the first phone to support Bluetooth 3.0. A look at the Wi-Fi Alliance website reveals that it was also the first feature phone to gain 802.11n certification.

The certificate is dated December 28th 2009, the same date that the first smartphone was certified for 802.11n – the LG Veri/VS750. The VS750 Wi-Fi appears to be more advanced than the Samsung, since it is certified for short guard interval and WMM Power Save.

While these are the first phones to gain Wi-Fi certification for 802.11n, they may not be the first to market.

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VoIP over the 3G data channel comes to the iPhone

I discussed last September how AT&T was considering opening up the 3G data channel to third party voice applications like Skype. According to Rethink Wireless, Steve Jobs mentioned in passing at this week’s iPad extravaganza that it is now a done deal.

Rethink mentions iCall and Skype as beneficiaries. Another notable one is Fring. Google Voice is not yet in this category, since it uses the cellular voice channel rather than the data channel, so it is not strictly speaking VoIP; the same applies to Skype for the iPhone.

According to Boaz Zilberman, Chief Architect at Fring, the Fring iPhone client needed no changes to implement VoIP on the 3G data channel. It was simply a matter of reprogramming the Fring servers to not block it. Apple also required a change to Fring’s customer license agreements, requiring the customer to use this feature only if permitted by his service provider. AT&T now allows it, but non-US carriers may have different policies.

Boaz also mentioned some interesting points about VoIP on the 3G data channel compared with EDGE/GPRS and Wi-Fi. He said that Fring only uses the codecs built in to handsets to avoid the battery drain of software codecs. He said that his preferred codec is AMR-NB; he feels the bandwidth constraints and packet loss inherent in wireless communications negate the audio quality benefits of wideband codecs. 3G data calls often sound better than Wi-Fi calls – the increased latency (100 ms additional round-trip according to Boaz) is balanced by reduced packet loss. 20% of Fring’s calls run on GPRS/EDGE, where the latency is even greater than on 3G; total round trip latency on a GPRS VoIP call is 400-500ms according to Boaz.

As for handsets, Boaz says that Symbian phones are best suited for VoIP, the Nokia N97 being the current champion. Windows Mobile has poor audio path support in its APIs. The iPhone’s greatest advantage is its user interface, it’s disadvantages are lack of background execution and lack of camera APIs. Android is fragmented: each Android device requires different programming to implement VoIP.

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Apple iPad has proprietary processor

Well, the Apple iPad is out. Time will tell whether its success will equal that of the iPhone, the Apple TV or the MacBook Air. I’m confident it will do better than the Newton. The announcement contained a few interesting points, the most significant of which is that it uses a new Apple proprietary processor, the A4. Some reviewers have described the iPad as very fast, and with good battery life; these are indications that the processor is power efficient. Because of its software similarities to the iPhone, the architecture is probably ARM-based, with special P.A. Semi sauce for power and speed. On the other hand, it could be a spin of the PWRficient CPU, which is PowerPC based. In that light, it is interesting to review Apple’s reasons for abandoning the Power PC in 2005. Maybe Apple’s massive increase in sales volume since then has made Intel’s economies of scale less overwhelming?

The price is right, as is an option to go without a 3G radio. The weight is double that of a Kindle, and half that of a MacBook Air.

I am disappointed that there is no user-pointing camera, because as I mentioned earlier, I think that videophone will be a major use for this class of device.

Update 3 February 2010: Linley Gwenapp wrote up some speculations in his newsletter.

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Skype’s international traffic growing fast

At CES last week Josh Silverman, Skype’s CEO mentioned that Skype’s international voice traffic went up 75% in 2009. This has now been approximately confirmed by Telegeography, which now puts Skype’s share of international voice traffic at 13%, up from 8% in 2008. That’s an increase of over 60% year on year.

Josh Silverman also mentioned that Skype was being downloaded at a rate of well over 300,000 downloads per day. Yes, per day. This number matches CKIPE’s observation that Skype added 2.5 million new users in the 11 days after Christmas 2009.

If you are interested in Skype numbers you can get more at CKIPE and SkypeNumerology.

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Developing for Android: Promise and Reality

When Android came out a couple of years ago, Matt Lewis of Rethink Wireless saw it as an opportunity to avoid the fragmentation that open source projects are prone to:

Google is not a handset OS company. Android is simply a means to an end – the end being to create a vast new expanse of real estate which Google can beam its advertising inventory to. This demands a level of consistency and interpretability from Android so that, regardless of who implements the platform on whichever device, application compatibility is maintained.

Alas, Matt was over-optimistic (or under-cynical). Here’s what Rethink said this week about Android:

As for Android developers, many are angry that there is no SDK as yet for Nexus One. This, in turn, has highlighted the issue of fragmentation, with different OS releases and even different devices requiring different SDKs, with limited compatibility between apps written for the various versions. Until there is an SDK for Android 2.1, the latest OS upgrade, which so far runs only on Nexus One, programmers cannot be sure their apps will work properly with the new handset.

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HD Voice – state of deployment

At the HD Voice Summit in Las Vegas last week, Alan Percy of AudioCodes gave a presentation of the state of deployment of HD Voice, citing three levels of deployment: announced interest, trials and service deployment.

Percy’s take was that in the “Crossing the Chasm” technology adoption lifecycle, HD Voice is right at the chasm.

Here is his list, augmented with input from Jan Linden of GIPS,Tom Lemaire of FT/Orange, Doug Mohney of HD Voice News and Dave Erickson of Wyde Voice:

Category Company Stage
PC VoIP Skype >500 m downloads
QQ (China) >500 m downloads
Gizmo5 (now Google)
Wireline telco France Telecom 500K HD users
British Telecom Trials
FT/Orange Spain Deployed 1Q09
FT/Orange Poland Deploys 1Q10
Mobile Orange (Moldova) Production
Orange (UK) Deploys 3Q10
Orange (Belgium) Deploys 2010
CLEC VoIP Alteva Production
SimpleSignal Production
Ooma 25K HD users
8×8 >70K HD users
OnSIP Production
Phone.com Trials
US MSOs CableVision/Lightpath Limited Trials
Conferencing ZipDX Production
ClearOne Production
Citrix Production
FreeConferenceCall.com Production
Global Crossing Limited Trials

The main codecs in each of these deployments are: Skype:SILK; QQ, Citrix, Freeconferencecall:iSAC; mobile:AMR-WB; all others: G.722.

Alan pointed out the conspicuous lack of involvement of the cable companies (MSOs), even though Cable Labs has done a good job of creating HD specifications for them.

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How 3D TV works

Web searches reveal tons of different technologies, so many that it’s hard to figure out which ones are actually used. It also appears that the format wars are well under way.

At CES last week I stopped in a booth lined with LCD TVs from several different manufacturers, displaying 3D images to people wearing polarizing glasses. According to a person manning the booth, the technique used in these TVs is to encode the images on alternate scan lines, and to have a polarizing filter attached to the screen, arranged in horizontal stripes, one stripe per row of pixels, with each row polarized orthogonally to the adjacent ones. The effect was very good, roughly equivalent to cinema 3D.

The booth also had a DLP projector projecting 3D onto a screen. This required bulkier glasses. According to the person in the booth, the technique used here was to encode the left and right images in alternating frames, with shuttering in the glasses synchronized with the display, occluding the right eye when a left frame is showing, and vice versa. This flavor of 3D didn’t work for me – maybe my glasses were broken…

Confirmation that these are currently the two primary methods of doing 3D on TVs comes from an excellent series of blog postings by Lenny Lipton.