Dev::Blog

Found via the TorCamp Google Group, here’s an awesome summary of mobile data costs in Canada vs the USA, which included this gem in the comments:

Now Rogers and Telus are offering unlimited music downloads, as in the “Load up your 4GB MP3 phone” for $20/month ads. If you were to pay their regular data rate of 5 cents/kb for this (hey, it’s all 1’s and 0’s), the cost would be:

$209,715.20

Let’s see, buy a home or fill up my phone with data… Or get functionally the same thing for $20 if I just download music…

Of course, that’s not technically true - Rogers, for instance, charges a flat 50 cents per music download to your phone (on top of the subscription for unlimited access), which, for the average song size of (say) 3.5 megs, would be considerably cheaper (though still over a thousand dollars, by my somewhat broken math). Still, it hits a lot of the issues surrounding wireless data squarely on the head.

That said, I’m not so sure price is the only problem anymore. Since getting my nifty new E61, the number of times I use WiFi on the phone is rapidly curving to the zero line in the chart. If I were to enable my EVDO-equipped ThinkPad, however, I imagine it’d be a different story, but not by much - the reality is that my life is set up so that 93% of the time, I’m within reach of a networked device, and the other 7% I’m typically very happy to be unplugged. I’m still searching for the killer app, and email isn’t it.

Technorati Tags: mobile data, wireless data

Just signed up with IMified - they let you interact with a bunch of online services over instant messenger. While I don’t use most of the systems enough to bother, one thing I do need is a simple bare bones to do list system, and I don’t want to have to remember another URL and login.

As luck would have it, IMified has a basic set of organizational tools built in. including to do list management. The interface is basically a set of menus, and you drill into them with successive messages back and forth.

But enough about IMified - it’s just that it happens to be a perfect example of how a multiple message SMS (mobile phone text message, natch) session would work. The next time I have to put one of those together, I’m making a bot to prototype it and hopefully leave in the wild once things go live (except for premium rate (pay) SMS I guess). It’s a great way to get the message (sorry) across to clients without having to explain how to send a text in the first place, though granted, you’d probably have to do it in front of them, as I imagine the number of chatters at that level are about the same as the number of (non-BlackBerry) texters…

Technorati Tags: IMified, SMS, mobile

I swear, I installed DivX on my E61 with the intent to watch the occasional podcast or TV show, and did so much before reading that Telus is going to start selling mobile porn. Apparently they did actual market research of their customers’ browsing habits to support the notion that people might like looking at naked people doin’ it.

Technorati Tags: Telus

So I wanted to install DivX on my Nokia E61, but the installer kept giving me a “certificate error, please contact phone supplier” and since I wasn’t going to contact eBay about it, I had to poke through the menus a bit, which is something I needed to do anyway, and still have to on a daily basis, because a Nokia UI is a tad different than the Motorola one I’m used to…

Anyway, I guess the issue is similar to trusted content on the web, and the phone’s trying to protect me from installing something that says it something else, but in this case I downloaded the file from DivX, so unless they’ve been hacked, I’m about as safe as I am installing, well, pretty much anything else that I find on the interweb.

So. To install software that has a certificate error, you need to change the installer setting to “ignore the certificate,” which is probably less safe and may result in 553 yaks appearing in your living room, use your judgement, etc. To start the madness, follow this menu path:

Menu, Tools, App. manager, Options, Settings, Software installation, and change this to “all.”

In my case, it let me watch AVI files from Google Video (downloaded and transferred from a PC). Now I’ve got to go buy a bigger memory card… Knowledge is expensive!

Technorati Tags: E61, DivX

I got this gem in the mail from Rogers last night: on the front of the envelope, it says in big red letters “browse the internet for FREE on your phone.”

Free mobile internet? Whuzzah?

Of course, the letter inside has some minor details: “now there’s no charge to launch your phone’s Internet browser or to shop in select categories from your navigate mobile Internet home page… If you’d like to check e-mail, chat, or need immediate access to the Web, select the following chargable [emphasis mine] mobile internet categories.”

Yep, the store is the internet, as far as Rogers is concerned.

Coincidentally I got this message the same night I picked up my new smartphone with Wifi. More on that later…

Technorati Tags: mobile web, Rogers

I almost missed this one: the Globe and Mail ran a story about wireless data use in Canada. The article hints at the problem, and the 35 comments confirm it: it’s way too expensive. Still the carriers claim they’re happy, with 100% growth annually. This includes text messaging, but I suspect the whole industry’s being fueled by the Blackberry.

Lots of great stats in the article: Canadian telecoms are getting around $5 per month per user for data services, which accounts for 9% of their revenues. That might seem good for a device that used to just make phone calls, but it’s 12% in the USA, 19% in Germany, 21% in China, 22% in Britain, and 28% in Japan.

The money quotes come from IDC analyst Lewis Ward and American Technology Research analyst Rob Sanderson, who say, respectively:

It’s clear from the survey results that many people just want to use their mobile phone to make calls.

and

Someone has to get less greedy and more volume oriented than price oriented.

No 3rd party is going to spend significant amounts of cash to develop the content that’s going to drive usage with the cost model that’s in place today for consumers or providers. I remember one discussion with a carrier and a music publisher and an integrator - the first two parties each wanted 50% of the pie, which left a big fat 0 for the team that was going to have to do all the work and marketing. There’s no way that volume is going to make that work.

Of course, and I think I mentioned this in an earlier post, the Canadian carriers might simply be unable to deliver the kind of infrastructure needed outside of a select few major cities: at a million dollars per cell tower and with two competing wireless standards, there’s not a lot of bandwidth to go around.

Technorati Tags: wireless, mobile, mobile data

While at the Vista launch even this week, I had a chance to talk with some folks from Bell Mobility, one of Canada’s three cell phone carriers. They suggested that they were looking into raising the 250 meg/month cap on their data plans, but I didn’t get the feeling that things would open up at all at the consumer level.

Interestingly, one of their data sheets said that they were selling the AudioVox PPC6700 phone with wi-fi enabled. That’s a bit of a surprise, since Rogers took the “sell the Nokia e62, which is just like the e61 but doesn’t have wi-fi” route. The Bell website doesn’t say anything about wi-fi for the phone, so it’d be worth asking at a store to be sure, but if it’s true, it might be a sign of a change in attitudes with at least one of the carriers. Or a mistake.

A while back I had a chance to talk with someone from Telus, and he suggested that the reason for the slow spread of the mobile web in Canada had more to do with the lack of cell phone towers. Bell and Telus are able to share theirs, but bandwidth is still limited in some areas, and at $1 million per tower, it’s not likely that excess capacity will boom anytime soon, at least not outside of areas where the VPs have homes and cottages, and I don’t imagine that Bell will announce a special “VP zone” package with better pricing for people who live in those regions…

Technorati Tags: mobile, wi-fi, Bell, Telus

I got an SMS from Nakama the other day inviting me to fill out a survey. I hardly use the mobile web anymore, since I’m almost always at a computer these days, but I’d been meaning to try something other than just reading news on my phone, so the timing was nice.

The experience wasn’t too bad, but it would have sucked if it was a year ago and I didn’t know that I could easily flip from an SMS with a URL to a browser by hitting Menu -> Go To (in the past I’d type the whole URL, parameters and all, with my keypad). The layout of the survey was well suited to mobile phones and didn’t use up my entire monthly bandwidth allocation, which was also appreciated.

If you’d like to see what it’s like to surf via mobile, I uploaded a video of the first few screens (thus fulfilling my “I’ve been meaning to try YouTube” goal as well). You can check it out here. It’s a little fuzzy - I had a hard time focusing on the phone screen with my camera for some reason - but you should get the idea. This is on Rogers EDGE with a V551. Note the delay between display of the text and the application of the styles…

Technorati Tags: Nakama, mobile

The launch of Nakama had me looking at my phone again. I’m using a Motorola V551, and it works OK, but there are a bunch of things (that have nothing to do with call quality) that I’d like it to do - better camera, memory card, bigger screen, WiFi, keyboard, etc. I don’t much care for what I could see on the Rogers store, but thankfully they’re GSM so I can just get an unlocked phone
off of eBay or from a reseller here in Toronto (aside: what does it say about your offering when your biggest competitive advantage is that your customers don’t have to use your products?)

I’ve heard good things about Nokia, but I’ve never used one. I knew the E61 looked neat when I walked past it at a kiosk, and it would be perfect if it had a camera. The N series looks pretty decent, though there’s no keyboard.

Then I saw the N95, which I guess just came out. 5 megapixel camera, HSPDA (which may be offered by Rogers soon), GPS, 802.11g, and a bunch more. Short of the keyboard, it’s everything I ever wanted in a phone. Sure, I predict a battery life of around 20 minutes and a list of around $1000, but hey, if a not-qute-yet available product
can get me to hold off spending money on something available now for a few weeks or months, that’s not bad.

After all, it’s not like I ever leave the house anyway.

It looks like mobile data is officially dead in Canada, at least if a recent survey of pricing plans are any indication.  A while back, you could get an unlimited data plan for $100/month, which was a lot, but at least it was an option.  Now, however, all three carriers have added a cap on data transfers of 250 megs a month.  Rogers’ is 200 megs.  That might be more than enough for a BlackBerry, but come on, don’t insult your customers by calling it a PC Card plan…

In other news, Toronto Hydro says they’ll have their downtown wifi network rolling out on September 7th, so figure roaming connectivity in the core by Hallowe’en.  As other companies follow suit, hopefully this will do something to disrupt the carriers.