GigaOM

The more our cell phones come to resemble miniature computers, the harder it is to eke out decent battery life, leaving some of us with little more than fancy bricks at the end of a long day. In order to get a better sense of what exactly saps the juice from cell-phone batteries, I talked to a few people in both the chip and handset worlds.

The biggest battery drain, according to my sources, comes from the display, which is one reason it’s going to be hard for iPhones and such to move much beyond 4-inch displays with current technology. A solution can be found in organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). Samsung has demoed OLED screens of some 14 inches that consume about 1 watt of power; displays measuring 6-7 inches that consume about 750 milliwatts are theoretically possible as well.

After the display, the chips and applications running on those chips can act as a drain. The chip industry is keen on boasting how their Atom or ARM processors consume very little power, and indeed, most cell phone semiconductors have an array of features designed to keep power consumption down, such as figuring out how far the phone is from a base station based on the signal strength and amplifying its signals only as much as it needs to in order to reach that station. Basically it only yells as loud as it needs to in order to be heard.

Other chips, such as Wi-Fi or GPS, can be turned off when not in use, so they don’t continually seek out networks or satellite signals. In other words, if you’re concerned about power, Wi-Fi VoIP may not be the application to use. Ditto for a social networking app that uses GPS or Wi-Fi to find friends wherever you are. Other battery-intense applications include watching movies or web surfing, primarily because they keep the display lit.

The final element is just that — the elements. Cold weather saps batteries by preventing them from reaching their full potential. If you can keep your phone close to your body rather than in a purse or bag, it can help a little, but in general if you’re freezing, your battery is, too.

OK, now I know I have your attention! In India, the 3G iPhone goes on sale today and people are lining up to buy a device that is seriously, and I mean seriously, expensive. Bharti Airtel and Vodafone (India) are the two carriers who are selling the device in India.

On the Bharti Airtel network, the device is going to cost between $730 and $830 dollars, depending on the device you buy. Furthermore, the device is locked to Bharti’s special network. So for a family of three (mom, dad and a kid), the 3G iPhones will cost around the same as Tata Nano, the $2,300 people’s car that launched earlier this year.

The high cost isn’t stopping people from wanting the device. About 200,000 phones have been pre-ordered. “I must assure you that we are not making any profits by selling the iPhone 3G. We are only providing network services and the prices have been fixed by Apple,” Sanjay Kapoor, president, mobility, Bharti Airtel told a local blog. More than 30,000 unlocked first generation iPhones are already running on Bharti’s network.

Even though Apple has yet to show off turn-by-turn directions on the GPS-enabled iPhone, navigation is one of the fastest-growing categories of mobile devices apps. As comScore recently noted, map use on cell phones in the U.S. during the three-month period ended May 31 was up 82 percent over the same period last year.The demand is particularly high for step-by-step pedestrian navigation. GPS makers are responding by getting their services onto phones or, in some, cases, making phones around their services.

TomTom, based out of the Netherlands, deployed its Navigator 6 software at the end of 2006 on a wide array of handsets including models from Nokia, HP and Palm and included a Bluetooth GPS receiver to allow phones with no GPS chip to use the service. Intrepid TomTom-ers say they’ve even gotten it to connect to their BlackBerrys. And although it hasn’t yet been approved by Apple to be sold in the company’s App Store, the GPS maker has already gotten its service to run on the new iPhone. “We have made our navigation system run on the iPhone; it looks good and works very well,” a TomTom spokesperson wrote us in a statement. “We will have to look more closely to Apple’s strategy before we can say more about what kind of opportunities this will bring us.”

Meanwhile GPS veteran Garmin started offering its navigation software for the likes of BlackBerry and other smartphones last year. Continue »

Om has complained about his frustration with the 3G iPhone, which has poor reception and forces him to spend more time on the 2.5G EDGE network than he thought, but the issue may be with Infineon’s 3G chip, according to Richard Windsor, an analyst with Nomura Securities. In a research note today, he said: “We believe that these issues are typical of an immature chipset and radio protocol stack where we are almost certain Infineon is the 3G supplier.” That comment might cheer AT&T, but it’s bad news for Infineon, and perhaps a warning to the chip industry about quality control.

Windsor writes that the problem isn’t likely to be solved with firmware updates, which means Apple could have to replace the chips so users get the performance they were promised. If the chip is the problem, this would be the second large chip failure this summer, with Nvidia’s faulty graphics chips placed in thousands of laptops grabbing most of the headlines so far.

The Nvidia issue appears to be caused by poor packaging, and the company has taken a $150-$200 million charge related to fixing the problem, but neither OEMs nor end customers are happy about the situation — especially Nvidia’s reluctance to disclose the full scope of the failure. I’ve emailed Infineon to see what they have to say about the iPhone chip and whether they make it themselves or outsource production as Nvidia has done with its graphics chips, but given Apple’s tendencies we might have to wait a while until we know the truth.

A report out from Chetan Sharma Consulting proves that data is the big story when it comes to wireless operators in the United States. Driven by flat-rate plans, increasing 3G coverage and the iPhone, data spending reached $8.2 billion for the second quarter of 2008, or about 21 percent of the total wireless services revenue. The boost in wireless services increased average revenue per user by 5 percent to 50 cents, offsetting a 5-cent decline in voice ARPU.

Verizon, which leads U.S. wireless operators with its 60 percent 3G subscriber penetration, saw the most growth in 3G usage and the most data revenue — $2.6 billion for the quarter. However, AT&T, the exclusive provider to the Internet-friendly iPhone, had only 25 percent 3G subscriber penetration but also saw its data sales come close to Verizon’s at $2.5 billion, proving that the Internet on the phone is a powerful driver of data revenue. Continue »

The iPhone App Store is red hot: In its first month, more than 60 million software programs were downloaded, and it generated about $1 million a day in sales. That information comes from Steve Jobs in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. In his interview, Jobs says the developers took home $21 million in the first month, of which $9 million went to the top 10 developers. One of the biggest selling app: Sega Corp’s $9.99 Super Monkeyball game, which sold more than 300,000 copies in 20 days. (iPhone as a gaming platform isn’t such a crazy idea after all!)

About 10 million apps were downloaded in the first week of the launch of the Apps Store. Jobs said that Apple takes 30 percent of the total sales and that covers the costs associated with keeping the App store running, including the cost of credit card transactions. “This thing’s going to crest a half a billion, soon…Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time,” he told the Journal. Jobs said that going forward, in the world of mobile phones, the differentiating factor is going to be software.

The big question about the Apps store is whether downloads are going translate into actual and sustained usage of these apps. Continue »

Yesterday, the guys from eBuddy sent me a press release (pdf link) that made me wonder: With the rise of flat-rate data plans for feature-packed mobiles and the high-speed 3G network becoming commonplace, will mobile IM start to eat into the lucrative SMS business?

The data from eBuddy would suggest as much. The company claims that 5 million copies of their mobile IM client were downloaded in the first year the company made the software available. The company is processing a billion messages every month from two million unique monthly users. I am still not clear how it translates into big business, given mobile advertising is still in the early development phase.

eBuddy is quite popular in Europe, where 3G has become pervasive. This explains to some extent the heavy messaging reported by eBuddy. It is also an area where SMS charges are quite high, so it’s cheaper to use mobile IM than sending text messages. Mobile IM is a pretty hot market, with a bunch of players, such as OZ, trying to grab the brass ring. Nimbuzz is another recent entrant. Research analysts at Informa estimate the global market for mobile IM will hit $11 billion by 2011.