It rules out old cars

While the Trafficmaster system (which has 100k+ cars on O2 2G) is a standalone box I suspect the Co-Op system plugs into OBDII on the car which is why Co-op won't take cars older than 2001 when the standard was made mandatory.

This means you can't go for anything low powered and interesting, like say a 2CV or Suzuki Cappuccino.

Simon

It's more binary than how many minutes are saved

There a massive benefits in doing business face to face. I've spent enough of my life on conference calls to know how hard it is to make them productive. Plenty of the real stuff is done around the metaphorical water cooler.

If the journey times are shorter people are more likely to turn up.

Simon

OK, so that's my next phone sorted then

I had hoped for 41Mpixel PureView but guess that's a little way off and you can wait forever. I like my 800 but really do want WP8

cool software bro

needs more hardware: a thumbwheel like the Sony CMD-Z5 and early Blackberrys had. Who knows we might even get back to mobes you can use with one hand.

S

The problem with automating things is malware

When an S3 sees the NFC sticker it automatically opens the web page. If you were unscrupulous you could fill that page with malware. if you were really unscrupulous you could transmit the NFC signal at way over the specified power and every Android NFC equipped phone in range would become a target.

Windows mobile asks before obeying an NFC signal.

The way to avoid the tax is to spend the money in the US

And buy T-Mobile

Perhaps they should put more effort into their software

Their HTML5 implementation of Words With Friends is buggy and slow. Oh, so slow. It takes several minutes to boot on a Windows Phone.

Two years

That's how long it will be until the mobile industry falls out of love with NFC. It will not be $50bn of transactions Franco Bernabè forecast at MWC2012

(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/28/mobile_ceos_against_the_world/), It's the next UMA, or Push To Talk, a fad the operators think they want until they find out that consumers don't and then the next shiny thing comes along.

When the operators stop wanting it - that is paying the manufacturers to put it in - new models will stop having it. And the banks will say "what happened there".

If Tesco which is a retailer, and a bank and a mobile phone network can's see the point, who can?

The missed story is Blackberry

People are generally brand loyal. there is a confirmation bias that they are savvy and bought the right thing last time, so for Blackberry to poll so low with the "Would you consider buying this brand again", is extremely serious. However good the Z10 is we've heard the story before with the Storm, Torch and 9900 and they have lost the consumer confidence, it will take more than one generations of good products to restore that.

It's a culture thing..

The expectation that everything should be free on the internet means people expect games to be free. What pays the programmers wages? It's what's led to the "freemium" model.

This tallies with my "research"

When you ask someone "what phone will you get next", the answer "I don't know" often means they do know and it's not a straight upgrade but they are having reservations about making the change. Those reservations are not about ecosystem but about integrity of moving contacts across.

I've been asking "what phone will you buy next" of people on buses and trains for the last twenty years. I guess I speak to around a dozen people a week. People used to want to move from the 3310 to T68.

The trend from aspiring to the next Apple to aspiring for a Samsung is long established. I think what comes next is more interesting. My money is on Nokia, looking at the retro vibe.

The biggest lesson in the weakness of ecosystem is TCOKR who thought BBM would lock people in. People have gone from "loving" their Blackberry to "hating" it. The emotions can be very strong. Some say they only stick with it because they want a hard keyboard. Most aspire to something else. Of course TCOKR did themselves no favours with dreadful devices like the Storm, Torch and to a lesser extent the 9900, but I think product is less important than fashion.

There is a well-trodden path of Blackberry -> iPhone -> Galaxy S3,

Many of those locked in to iPhone contracts will jump to the Galaxy S4 as soon as they get the chance.

The main driver for people moving is "wanting something different". Unfortunately most of the differences are software and to the vast majority of people that's invisible and just classed as "how it works". Of course them mean "how it behaves" and they have no clue or interest in how it works. The OS isn't a strong enough differentiator for most people.

They buy Brand.

The MKM survey was in the US where operator brand dominates. You can still stop someone on a bus or train in the US and ask them what phone they have and they will say "Verizon" rather than Samsung. The iPhone and Razr have diluted this to some extent. In the rest of the world the phone brand is very much stronger than the operator brand.

What is needed to grab attention is something that doesn't look like an iPhone with square corners. We need a thin, aluminium Nokia communicator with 9210 styling cues. The world is waiting for a phone with a keyboard which isn't a Blackberry. Yes, I want WP8 but most people don't care.

Just what I want

A watch that needs regular charging.

No thanks

Name calling - They started it

The whole reason that we got the name LTE was that anything beyond 3G was outside the remit of the 3GPP. So it got called "3G LTE" specifically so that the could look at "4G", and ODFM without saying that's what they were doing.

Cellular

There seems to be proper cellular coverage underground at Canada Water. I hope this is the start of moving beyond wi-fi

Remember the US market is heavily operator controlled

All it takes is one operator to do a deal with Apple/Samsung/Nokia/Blackberry and it can shift a quarter, then that can look like a trend.

Secure

A friend sent my son a password by photographing his notebook where it was handwritten He did it because he was too lazy to type it but it strikes me as a particularly good defence against automated snooping.

Just what the operators want - Not

Another over the top player. Unless there is some strategy for the operators to get a slice of whatever the revenue model is expect manufacturers to be asked not to include this as a default when you but a phone though a network.

Tesla: the ultimate in man Maths

Looking at the Wikipedia entry Tesla has raised over $400m. That doesn't include another $465m of US government grant (although I think some of that got rescinded) and $10m from the State of Texas to build their new gull-wing MPV there. I seem to remember some Toyota investment too.

So It's pushing a billion dollars in investment to sell 10,000 cars.

Simon.

If you are thinking about the products you are missing the point

It's all about distribution. Nokia has fantastic retail distribution, it's the world leader with Samsung in second place. I've heard drug companies complain that they can't distribute medicine to many places that Nokia (and Coca Cola) can reach.

A retailer in India makes a tiny margin on a phone and only gets three days credit. Nokia can do next day delivery, everyone else takes a week. So a retailer can sell a Nokia phone before he has to pay for it while he has to find cashflow for other devices.

Typically this is low end phone like the 1200 but when the cost of the devices ramps up it becomes even more significant.

People in India do want iPhones, A mobile phone is a significant status symbol and Apple is right there at the top, but the retailers want to sell Nokias.

It's going to be a race between Apple building out it's distribution network and the operators closing in on the "Over The Top players", by which they mean Apple and Google.

LatAm is particularly interesting, again Nokia is dominant, it was a two-horse race with Motorola but I suspect Google will have pissed that away by shutting down "non-core operations". At the moment Android is the strong LatAm OS, and that's keeping Apple out, but Telefonica is backing Firefox it a bid to fight both iOS and Android. I spoke to one senior exec of Telefonica LatAM on a bus at MWC who said he'd stop selling Andriod tomorrow if he could.

Bear in mind this is all about power over the consumer. How good or bad the phone is has nothing, or at least very little, to do with it.

Churn

Is that 1.5% figure annual or monthly? What's the length of a contract? If it's a 3 year contract only 2.8% of people can churn in any month. Even on a two year contract it's only 4%.So if 1.5% of people churn that's something like two out of every five people don't renew.

Simon

It's going to get a lot worse for Apple

The attribution of the phrase "Be nice to people on the way up, you may need them on the way down" may be in doubt, but it's value is not. Apple has not been nice to its customers on the way up.

And by customers I don't mean consumers. Consumers are the people who buy phones singly. Customers are those who buy in bulk, the retailers, wholesalers and principally the mobile phone operators.

If there was a theme at Mobile World Congress it was how much the operators hate Apple (and Google in the merging markets), how the operators feel that the Over The Top players have stolen their lunch money.

Ever since AT&T's Ralph de la Vega sat down with Steve Jobs and did a deal which gave the iPhone a clear run at the market the mobile industry has been pouring money into the pockets of Apple and the industry has had enough.

Their solution - Firefox - is not a good one but that won't stop the operators from doing whatever they can to move consumers onto something which isn't Apple, even if it has to be Google, and I see a rosy future for Windowsphone.

When I worked for Motorola, and we were making rubbish phones - a decade ago - there was some sympathy and support from our customers because we'd made money for them in the past. They still ranged our products and maintained a good business relationship with us.

Apple will get no such favours. The operators are itching to drop iPhones from their portfolios and at the first hint of consumers moving to the next new shiny thing they will.

Galaxy S4 anyone?

In the meantime expect lots of new marginal new products from Apple - the first sign of trying too hard will be when they start doing lots of fruity colours.

Simon

Generally there are issues with touch-screen phones for the elderly. One is that our skin loses conductivity over time so capacitive screens aren't great. Another is that there is quite a learning curve in getting to the dedicated apps. You'd need something that could boot into a senior mode.

There has been some interesting UI work done in the space, look for an announcement from Doro soon to complement the 740 I wrote about for The Reg last year. It's also worth looking out the Threedomphone work from the design company Ribot.

However it's a mature (er..) market in Japan and Fujitsu is launching another Grandroid phone with Orange France: http://www.fussfreephones.com/2013/02/orange-and-fujitsu-launch-grandroid-phone/

Simon

It's such a shame it's x86

It would be much more exciting for the whole IT industry if they had continued development of the Cell processor. Now (ARM, low end, aside) Intel has a clear run at the processor market and we'll see less innovation.

I'm not sure about whiskey, but it's perfectly fine to dilute Whisky, indeed it's a fundamental part of the taste. Many whiskys are sold cask strength and are intended to be diluted. What is heresy is "a couple of rocks". You should NEVER add ice to whisky.

Tesla is a confidence trick. Look at the hundreds of millions which has been poured into the company and the thousands of cars they have sold. Musk needs to prop up confidence. Top Gear did not apologise.

Operator margins

When 3G was auctioned there was significant MTR revenue.

It was divisive of the European governments to sell spectrum and then undermine the business model which supported it,.

It's no wonder the operators were more cautious this time.

Simon

I understand that operators have given some M2M customers assurance that 2G services will continue.

The feature I want..

Is a small CCD camera built in which saves a picture of the build at each layer to the SD card used for the model, then I can do a time-lapse based on layers on time. Ideally with the head out of the way of the model for each frame.

Selection

I wanted to do a round-up, giving some idea of future direction. The objet might be way out of a hobbyist's reach and the materials costs for it are eye-watering. Something that would cost 20p on a makerbot will cost £50 on an Objet, but it is where I think the future is going.

I really didn't want this to just be FDM printers but haven't enough experience of powder deposition.

I didn't include a rep-rap as whatever I said about them was open to "it depends on how you build it" so it's very hard to have an opinion.

there was always a value in having something oddball

Like the excellent DAI.

The signoff is the important bit

It's not the Apple sales figures which matter, it's the bit in the copy which says "With Apple sales flatlining in Europe". The iPhone just isn't cool any more, it's the S3 the kids want

Go and have a look

Send LOHAN to have asniff.

There will always be a place for Blackberry

But it will become a niche player which is good at secure email. That's not important enough for lots of people who will favour "secure enough" and other things like NFC, Floating cameras and ecosystems.

Blackberry should build an e-ink long life email device and licence BBM to ONE android manufacturer to give them a point of differentiation.

Watching that makes me sad

Kewney would have loved it.

Simon

Why restrict it to people whov'e lost limbs

I'd love an extra arm or two - Beeblebrox style. Then I could type, hold the phone, use the mouse and perhaps pour a drink all at the same time.

It's being worked on at MIT: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628885.800-need-a-hand-wearable-robot-arms-give-you-two.html

The not so hidden nugget in the tariffs is the £5 add-on which gives you unlimited ROAMED voice and texts. For travellers this is an excellent deal, assuming of course that you are old and grey enough to still use voice.

This is what I did with the 3D models I made:

http://www.chocablog.com/features/3d-printing-chocolate-people/

Life in 2G

If you could get hold of figures for phone sales, you'd be surprised just how many 2G phones are still being sold. I'd quite like to see 3 using some of the 1800MHz spectrum they are getting from EE to roll out GSM.

how much is "less"

It all hinges on what O2 will take. it needs to a ~2%. This is typically what credit card companies (with all the extras you mention) charge.

But being a mobile operator is a 20% margin business. If it took off (ha!) the gross margin of the whole of O2 would take a dive.

Simon

They are turning into a US company anyway

There were no Finns on the stage for the 920 launch. The only person who wasn't American was Canadian.