3GSM review
3GSM Barcelona showcased content and music services, as well as high speed networks. But down on the exhibition floor the discussions over means of delivery continued as ever.
The King and Queen of Spain, Wesley Snipes and, er, Craig David. They all came. The King had an eleven o’clock one-to-one on the Telefonica stand, Wesley was lending a new haircut to the Blogstar press conference (along with Caprice and Juliette Lewis) and Craig David sung early one morning (literally, not the song).
Elsewhere the SugaBabes (harshly described to us as the “worst live act I’ve ever seen” by one Freescale employee”) entertained a party given by, ahem Freescale, Judge Jules played out to a rapidly emptying Sony Ericsson party (we’ve got work in the morning) and O2 booked its in-house band The Upper Room to demonstrate how cool it is.
At least most of these got to play inside. Device vendor i-mate booked an underdressed Korean classical pop three piece to freeze five times daily outside their pavilion in the courtyard outside Halls one and two.
All in all, another average 3GSM, then, with a record 50,000 visitors, according to organiser the GSM Association.
But away from the royalty, real and mobile, what was going on down on the floor? Who caught our eye, away from the major press conferences and briefings?
One solution that we liked the look of was from messaging company Glenayre. Glenayre has developed a video and content application within its mailbox, that it calls Active Messaging.
The tool lets an operator insert the application logic for a video into a message, creating an active message that the user accesses through their mailbox.
Mark Yaphe, vp product management at Glenayre, says that the mailbox is a critical customer touchpoint for operators. They access it far more and far easier than accessing a mobile portal.
“Messaging gives you a mechanism to connect people to content and services,” he says. “Why not leverage that for connecting people to content and services? Marketeers are looking for places to show content.
Messaging provides the opportunity for a push service, for example a ringtone, or some other personalised content to be linked into the message. Unlike MMS it allows a user to impulsively take action.”
Yaphe proposes the example of a subscriber who has signed up to a ringtone services. With active messaging that subscriber can opt in to order the rington, the COD, preview and purchase a clip, or send the advertisement to their friends. All of this while reviewing the ringtone delivered to their mailbox.
Because Glenayre develops in VoiceXML, the application logic can be written right into the message. As a method to deliver branded content direct to a user, Yaphe hopes it will prove an attractive aspect of his company’s Versera ICE platform.
Elsewhere we spoke to Sony Ericsson early on the first day. There, Mike Pauwels, senior manager of global product marketing, was hailing the developments that meant the company could now produce 3G phones with similar form factors to 2.5G phones.
“Development is getting to the stage where you can’t distinguish between 2.5G and 3G,” he says referring to the phone’s small form factor.
“If you look at the S700 which we launched a year ago with a 1.3 mega pixel camera on board, it was still quite bulky.
But such is the evolution this phone has a two mega pixel camera and still has a very compact and stylish form factor.”
Despite the TV buzz at 3GSM Pauwels says that he thinks music is the greater immediate 3G opportunity, with TV to follow once music is sorted. He intimates that Sony Ericsson is still going through interoperability and useability testing for mobile TV. So does that mean that manufacturers that are launching TV phones are moving quicker than Sony Ericsson, or are doing so without having gone through interoperability testing?
“These devices on the market — do they have full channel selection, are the services and content available? This is one of those applications where all the key pieces need to be there.”
There were still issues with codecs and DRM around music, he added, and once those were sorted operators would be in a stronger position to attack TV.
“The key buzzword at 3GSM is music, and we have not exploited the full potential yet,” he said. “Codecs, DRM, dual delivery to phone and PC, these are key issues and 3G is the key enabler.”
Sony Ericsson has also licensed Microsoft’s ActiveSync so it can offer push email “in the long run” on its own proprietary OS-based devices, as well as its Symbian devices, Pauwels says. Sony Ericsson will implement the OMA standard for push email as well, he added.
But given Pauwels comments on the ability to have high grade cameras in phones without affecting form factor, we think it will be interesting to speak to
image sensor Micron. Sandor Barna is senior director of strategy and planning at Micron, a manufacturer of memory products but also a company that, in four years, now has market leadership in image sensors for camera phones.
Barna says that the increase in camera phone penetration and increasing quality of camera phones means increasing demands on the memory in a phone, and has been a clear driver of Flash memory.
Barna adds that video will “really” drive memory usage, as it requires advanced compression and image processing memory independent of the storage requirements.
“We think that high end camera phones will have a two camera system. One for taking photos or videos, and the other for video conferencing.”
He also thinks that the market will split, with cheap VGA lens in almost every handset made. “The cost effectively will be less than a dollar,” he says.
At the other end of the market he sees the five mega pixel camera, auto focus lens, optical zoom. To bring moving optics to a mobile scale and sufficient robustness will be expensive though, adding perhaps $20-30 to the cost of building the handset.
And here’s where the business cases of the handset manufacturers and operators might diverge. The handset manufacturers see and opportunity to go after the camera manufacturers. But the operators have no interest in that market at all. People may take high quality pictures, but they will not use the networks to transfer or download them. The operators are faced with is an increased handset cost to either subsidise or sell. Until the price of the technology can come down, that is.
Reducing the cost of building the handset is also exercising Mike Phillips, director of strategic marketing and operator relations, wireless and mobile systems, Freescale Semiconductor.
Freescale has signed up to develop a single core, single chip solution for Symbian.
“The problem up to now has been if you want an open OS like Symbian/ S60 effectively integrated in the architecture. All the open OS products add an application processor, which adds significant cost. Effectively you are left with a two core baseband and applications processor.
“The neat thing about MXC [Freescale’s processor product] is that we can run Layer 1,2 and 3 on he DSP so te ARM processor can be used purely as an application environment for non-real time, running the open OS on a two core open OS architecture. This allow manufacturers to bring an open OS product into a mid tier feature phone space. A single core modem architecture also means there are not two separate memory bases, you get a shared memory architecture.
“As you can see from Vodafone’s endorsement of our strategy, operators want to drive open OS as far down as possible. They cannot have a continuing situation with fragmentation of the handset base.”
Moving over to another hall, one man who doesn’t mind a bit of fragmentation is SDC’s Michael Bornhaeusser. SDC is a company that sells DRM solutions to
“We hate standards, “ he chortles, “we are highly proprietary and actually want to be the standard. And currently we are the market leader for download technology and the world’s market leader for rich media on the phone.”
T-Mobile, FR, Amena and 3 are all clients sutomers of SDC’s DRM client and player. Indeed, the O2 music player was built on SDC’s white label music player, which it built almost as proof of concept.. (“We didn’t want t get into this space but we had to”).
Bornhaeusser’s point is that while the world waits for MPEG LA to release new terms for licensing of OMA DRM, his company (and though he doesn’t say it Windows DRM as well) marches on.
n all the talk of access to content, it’s a sobering reflection of the state of such a critical part of the content industry.