Versatile Amphibian

Connected vehicles are a big theme again this year at Mobile World Congress, with many operators and OEMs rolling out their automotive partners on their stands. Since all of them are secretly just trying to keep up with the Joneses, I thought it might be entertaining to engage in a game of AutoTelco Top Trumps... Typically in this game a Ford Focus would score pretty low down the pecking order. In this case, however, Ford score big points for actually making theirs. Plus, they brought an electric one and that has enormous torque. And a mediocre app. So there. Next up AT&T, who, being wealthy Americans brought not one, not two, but three VeeHicles to the Congress. Their all American Cadillac CTS and electric ETS were rendered anonymous by a mighty Audi S7. 'It's not electric' said the demonstrator, 'it's plugged in to save the battery'. Bonus points to AT&T for surrounding the ETS with Virtual Reality headsets: another must have stand item in 2015. China ...

It would be fair to say that I significantly overestimated Google's ability to kickstart a successful market for connected eyewear in 2014. I was therefore fascinated to see how Sony, that long dormant tech giant, would do with their belated take on the category. After all they remain imaging experts. Smarteyeglass Attach, developed by former Sony Ericsson engineers in Sweden, does what it says on the tin. It turns a normal set of spectacles into a smart set that can display data into the user's eye line by way of a tiny screen. It isn't a particularly elegent device, being nearly 3 times the size of Glass, but it's nothing like as cumbersome as the initial advertising videos suggest. For occasional use it'd be fine. Sony had two demos, one of a game of tennis, the other cycling. The latter was the more obviously useful. A map with directions, speed and direction data are displayed dynamically as the demo rolls through.  Although you do have to look quite far to the...

I've been watching Microsoft win real interest in 2015. They've got tech journos salivating with clever augmented reality technology, made Windows free, brought office to iOS and Android and launched a major ad campaign based on the superiority of the Cortana virtual assistant.  But one thing that's gone under the radar is the launch of the Lumia 435, a new smartphone targeting first time smartphone users and upgraders in less wealthy segments. In the UK is retails at just £70 without a contract. I  spent some time with the device at MWC and was very impressed with the experience.  Physically the demo units all sported rather garish luminous plastic backs and have a screen about the size of that in the original iPhone. It's thick and rather sharp edged next to the zeitgeist devices of today, but is still a fun, coherent package. The OS is Windows - for those of you haven't used the mobile version of this OS, that means scrolling down through tiles of various sizes r...

One of the big themes at this year’s Mobile World Congress was the integration of multiple radio access standards into a single, seamless wireless connectivity system. Variously called “off-loading” and “small cell”, the idea is to provide mobile device users with seamless access to many different technologies simultaneously, providing a massive boost to quality of service. I visited many of the major vendors at MWC – what follows is a few words on the small cell market. Wi-Fi has been a growing part of the industry for a number of years, particularly in densely populated countries like the UK and cities like New York, however it has hitherto been a somewhat unsophisticated system, requiring separate authentication and lacking decent quality of service. All that has changed in the last year or so as technologies from the cellular industry, such as beam-forming and handover techniques have found their way into mainstream solutions. The objective is to create a system that aggregates mac...

Away from the major vendors and their glitzy corporate stands, Mobile World Congress is a great place to meet young and up-coming businesses with a mobile flavour. This brief post showcases the ones that most caught my eye. blippAR (based in Holborn Circus, London) provide an augmented reality advertising platform that overlays rich content onto print content. The technology works really seamlessly from an iOS or Android application and has already been used by major brands like Cadbury, Tesco and Omega, but I reckon what will really make it take-off is native integration into the iOS and Android operating systems. That’s in the pipeline. Siine (also London based) were marketing an improved keyboard experience for Android. This sounds like a small thing, but Siine’s combination of quick templates for commonly used words and general ease of use marks it out as one to watch. I also loved the idea of icons for brands embedded in the keyboard so that “Meet me at Costa at 1600” can be typ...

Nokia announced three new Asha handsets yesterday to great fanfare, in addition to a new, lower priced Lumia. I played with all four devices at Mobile World Congress, a process that got me thinking about Nokia’s current range. My conclusion is that, despite being great products and well engineered, they’re not addressing a serious problem with Nokia’s range – the lack of credible smartphones in the crucial $150/ €100 price bracket. This part of the market is important as it is outside of the typical average selling price of contract smartphones and therefore not impacted by the distortion of operator subsidy that so damages the success of high end Lumias by making them effectively equivalent in price to the unassailable iPhone. For those who haven’t encountered it, Asha is a low-end device based on Nokia’s venerable Symbian 40 “smart-ish” platform that is aimed at feature phone users upgrading to a more feature rich device, either in emerging or developed markets. All three of the new ...

Following the recent announcements that Huawei, ZTE, Fujitsu and Panasonic would (re)enter the European mobile handset markets, I spent Day 1 of the Mobile World Congress focussing on high end smartphones. My objective was to decide whether these newcomers could genuinely challenge today’s hegemony of Apple, Samsung and HTC. The answer was a clear “yes”, but the most obvious challenger was more of a surprise. I’ll give you a hint – they weren’t Japanese... Symbian is not dead, just stunned Before I could get started on this, however, there was the small matter of an 830am Nokia keynote to get out of the way. You may recall that this time last year, Stephen Elop announced his firm’s “exclusive” partnership with Microsoft. This year, despite being promised “significant industry news”, Nokia delivered more of the same. At the high end there were two new devices, the anticipated Lumia 900 and a new camera phone – the N808, featuring a 41 megapixel camera... no, that’s not a typo, it really...