Category: Mobile

[sc:mobile-category ]Woohoo!  Looks like it will be CatWalk as Nokia has just announced the 928 on Verizon so there’s no need for a press conference in London to talk about it 😉

[sc:mobile-category ]So Nokia has announced a press conference for May 14th and a second one on May 15th, so let’s talk abut the last one first and the first one last just to keep things interesting 😉

The May 15th announcement is about “Music discovery” and piqued my interest due to the inclusion of Alan Cross, a legend when it comes to the knowledge of music.  Music discovery is kind of a challenge these days, long ago I gave up listening to the radio so finding new music is a challenge.  I’ve been using AlbumReminder.com to keep track of artists I already know releasing new material, but I haven’t really found a good way to find new artists.

I’m interested to see what they come up with, something that I could use to link new artists to my existing ones and download either samples or full songs I could listen to in the car would be an interesting application.

Now then, that May 14th press conference.

It certainly looks like it will be a new high-end Lumia phone to replace the 920 and if it is just the 928 that will be a huge disappointment.  It seems more likely to be the ‘Catwalk’ device which would pretty much eliminate all my complaints about the 920; thinner, lighter, SD card support all included.

In fact, I’d be hard pressed to find anything wrong with the it if the rumors are true.  My HTC 8X is a great phone, but HTC has had to focus on its Android phones to try and recovery financially so their Windows Phone line has pretty much stagnated.  On the other hand, Nokia has no distractions and has been pumping out a stream of low-end phones.  Now it looks like they’re going to turn their attention back to the high-end and that may very well force me to pick up a new phone sooner rather than later.

The Federal Government recently announced some more details of the 700Mhz spectrum auction that is scheduled for this year, which is kind of interesting.

I can remember a time when using a modem on a residential phone line was not allowed by Bell Canada so I’m no fan of incumbent, monopolistic telephone companies, but is having “competition” better when it really isn’t competition at all?

The wireless industry has been moving along under the “free market” banner for years but real competition has yet to arrive in a meaningful way for most Canadians (yes, Wind and other new entrants bring some competition to the table, but are limited in the coverage).  When the telephone companies first start to appear it was quickly realized that having multiple companies run phones lines to homes didn’t make much sense.  The solution was to give a monopoly to one company per area of service and then force them all to interoperate with each other.

This actually worked pretty well to begin with as the industry grew and only started to fall off the rails when new technology came along that threatened the status quo.  The monopolies of course tried to kill the new tech, but eventually failed to do so.

So why haven’t we realized that building three or four wireless networks to do the same thing is a waste as well?  Ok, sure, when there were competing standards (CDMA and GSM) there was an argument to be made to support multiple networks, but LTE has won.  There is only one standard and maybe now its time to rethink how we license wireless operators.

Let’s face it, many of the ‘tricks’ wireless providers use today to keep people on their networks (long term financing of phones, locked hardware, limited hardware options) look a lot like what the phone company use to do as well.  Could a hybrid model be created that would reduce the cost of the infrastructure and spurs competition as well?

I think its possible.  Nationalize the underlying network, build one set of towers and run it as a monopoly with regulations that require open access.  Then providers like Bell, Rogers and Telus can offer services on top of the network (access to the phone network, the internet, their own content, etc.), forcing them to complete on price and features instead of which phones they have.  This would allow smaller providers like Wind to compete on a level playing field instead of having to spend years building out infrastructure and spending billions on spectrum and roaming agreements.

In the end, just like with telephone service, national wireless coverage is the goal and duplicating the effort two, three or four times is just a waste of money that end users have to pay for through higher monthly bills.

[sc:mobile-category ]The Blackberry Z10 has been out for a while and a friend of mine picked one up a couple of weeks ago.  I had a chance to use it a bit and my initial thoughts are kind of mixed.

The hardware is quite nice, a well-built phone that can pretty much compete with other phones that are out there.  The display, while a little small in comparison to the monsters that are out there these days, is still large and bright, especially if you are coming from an older BB.  My work phone these days is a BB Bold and in comparison to that the Z10 has a monster display 😉

In reality, no one is going to buy the Z10 due to its hardware.  It’s nice and all, but it’s really no different from any other smart phone these days.  Smartphone hardware has pretty much plateaued.  If the Z10 is going to be successful, then its the software that has to do it.

And that’s where the problem really is.  The OS just doesn’t pop out at you, it looks kind of visually boring.  It all works, the gestures are kind of neat and it runs quite smoothly but it doesn’t feel like a brand new OS.

Thinking back using it, it kind of felt abrupt.  Transitions between apps and screen happen quickly (which is normally good) but almost felt too quick.  That might be one of those things you get use to after a while, but it was just something that felt a little off while I was using it.

BBM is there, but that’s not nearly as big a deal as it once was.  With falling market share, most users have moved away from BBM to other cross-platform messaging clients.  In fact, the other day when WhatsApp was released for BB10 my friend was more exited about it than BBM.

I asked him why he choose the Z10 over and Android or Windows Phone device (an iPhone was never in the running and he does have a second Android phone) and for him it came down to having several Playbooks that he could use the BlackBerry Bridge functionality with.  I guess vendor lock in wins again 😉

The Z10 I was playing with also had the Otterbox and that was not a good thing.  I have had an Otterbox for several of my phones and I am a big fan in general, but the Z10 box has a couple of design flaws atypical of them.  First the case doesn’t come anywhere close to being flush to the display so there is a good 1/4 inch raised lip around the entire phone.  This makes it seem much thicker than the phone actually is.

As well, the Z10 uses a swipe from the bottom up to bring up the home screen, the case has a tapered edge down to this but it interferes with the swipe quite often and I found myself having to swipe two or three times to get it right.

Overall I imagine I’ll get a Z10 (or its successor) at work at some point, but there’s nothing that it brings to the table that makes me excited to get it.  And that’s probably its biggest issue, there’s nothing to drive new users to the platform and that spells trouble in the long run for the company.

A while ago Bell released the Portico update for my HTC 8x and since then things have been going  well.  Unless of course you had a Windows Phone 7 and install the 7.8 update, then not so much 😉

I have not had a single reboot since I installed the update and so there’s not really anything else to say about Portico.

Microsoft though did kind of screw up with the 7.8 update as the live tiles seem to be pretty much broken and they stopped the rollout a little while ago.  Since then they’ve been working on a fix and it appears they’ve finally started rolling it out.

I plugged in my HD7 the other day and two updates came down:

• 7.10.8860.142
• 7.10.8862.144

Installation was straight forward and there’s no obvious changes, but presumably the live tiles work better 😉