GigaOM » smartphone

The internet of things: a market landscape

Jon Collins — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 06:55:20 +0000

What can we expect the IoT landscape to look like, and how will its impact be felt? And is the attention being given by governments, manufacturers, and industry players merited, or is this just a fad? In this paper we look at the trends leading the growth of the internet of things, its components, and its characteristics. We examine the scale of the different opportunities and early examples of use cases. Finally, we look at potential inhibitors to adoption and potential challenges, notably around security, privacy, and system failure.

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While you’re waiting for your Fairphone, here are some tips for smartphone sustainability

David Meyer — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 10:16:37 +0000

You may have read about Fairphone, a Dutch startup that is trying to build – as the name implies – as fair a phone as possible. That means building transparent relationships all the way down the supply chain, in order to source conflict-free minerals (tin, tantalum, cobalt, gold) and ensure the handsets are built under acceptable working conditions. The company will also donate €3 ($3.94) from each sale to the establishment of safe e-waste recycling schemes.

Fairphone announced yesterday that it had taken in 5,000 pre-orders, meaning it can now start developing a finalized product. The company is still just over a week ahead of the target date it had set for the goal, so you can still pre-order if you want to be among the first buyers (you’d get a special edition Fairphone, too).

This is a really important scheme. The phones only cost €325 ($426.50) including tax and, if they materialize as promised, they will serve as proof that it is possible to make an affordable modern smartphone in a much more ethical way than is currently the norm. We’re talking a quad-core 1.2 GHz processor, Android 4.2, 960 x 540-pixel resolution screen, removable 2,000 mAh battery, 16 GB of storage and 1 GB of RAM, 8 MP rear-facing camera, 1.3 MP selfie-shooter, and so on.

However, it’s important to remember that – even without the Fairphone – there are steps you can take now to make your smartphone use as sustainable and ethical as possible. These pretty much all come down to this precept: hold off replacing your handset for as long as possible.

Here are a few suggestions for those of you who need to buy a handset now:

Go quad-core: This is almost a no-brainer these days anyway, but I suspect smartphone evolution is entering a plateau phase on the processor front, much as PCs did a few years back. Four cores will suffice for pretty much all applications for at least the near-to-mid-term – in fact, two cores usually do the job; the addition of more cores is more a power-management play than a boost in horsepower.
Shun the omnibody: Fully-sealed handsets may allow for thinner designs and sleeker looks, but if you can’t replace the battery you are likely to find yourself ditching the phone once it wears down. Not only that – it also makes it harder to recycle the device afterwards (the same goes for laptops, by the way).
Minimize fragility: I’m not talking about screens here, obviously, but – from my experience – glass backings for smartphones are a bad thing. Phones get dropped, they get flexed too far, and even Gorilla Glass can get cracked after a while. The less likely you are to break your phone, the less likely you are to require a replacement. Go for casing that will stand up to day-to-day use.

Of course, none of these tips solve the problems of harsh manufacturing conditions and unethically-sourced raw materials – for that, you’ll need to wait for Fairphone and/or the wider changes in the industry that it will hopefully stimulate. But, while you’re waiting, there’s no reason not to favor the most long-lasting alternatives we have today. And remember: only buy that Fairphone if you really need a new handset.

PS – I can’t resist leaving you with this video of the Fairphone team demonstrating their delight at hitting their pre-order target:

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Verizon’s new supersized LTE network will be bigger and badder, but not faster

Kevin Fitchard — Wed, 29 May 2013 22:32:04 +0000

Verizon Wireless is still months away from rolling out LTE network No. 2 using its recently acquired cable company airwaves, but that hasn’t stopped it from seeding its customer base with devices that will support the new 4G frequencies. Other press reports have claimed this new network will double speeds available to those supported devices, but that’s not the case. This is more of a capacity upgrade than a speed boost, but customers will definitely see their mobile internet experience improve.

Verizon is selling seven devices that sport LTE radios in the Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) band – including the popular Samsung Galaxy S 4 and Nokia’s latest Windows phone, the Lumia 928. When the new network goes live, Verizon will ship out a software update that will activate its dormant AWS radios, Verizon spokesman Tom Pica said.

The other AWS-capable devices are Samsung’s two 10-inch Android tablets, two Verizon Jetpack mobile hotspots and a USB dongle. The current LTE iPhone 5 iteration used by Verizon doesn’t support the AWS band, but that could change with future versions. Meanwhile, the forthcoming BlackBerry Q10 will be able to access the new network, Pica said.

Customers won’t necessarily get faster speeds (though they might experience some initial bandwidth gains over these less-crowded AWS airwaves), but they will have access to a lot more network capacity. Verizon will be adding anywhere from 20 MHz to 40 MHz of new spectrum to its LTE systems – either doubling or tripling its current 4G capacity.

What’s more, Verizon will be focusing the new LTE systems in congested urban centers. It will overlay capacity at cell sites where demand is highest and in some cases surgically inserting bandwidth into highly trafficked indoor and outdoor areas using small cells. Bottom line: customers with newer AWS-capable devices will have access to a hell of a lot more network and enjoy a better mobile data experience in the exact places that experience tends to suffer.

Eventually Verizon will be able to use new LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation techniques to combine its two 4G networks into a single superfast system, but we’re still a year or two away – and another generation of handsets – from seeing that capability.

Going forward, Pica said, Verizon will require its device makers to include AWS support for most new LTE devices. So even if your current smartphone won’t work on the forthcoming network, your next Verizon smartphone most likely will.

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Why the snap of a photo changed my mind about Google Glass

Eliza Kern — Thu, 16 May 2013 00:03:13 +0000

As a serious smartphone addict who jumps at the sound of an iPhone buzz, I know that I really don’t need more internet in my life. So I haven’t had much interest in Google Glass so far, assuming it would just serve to put more apps in front of my face that my current attention span doesn’t need, and that my iPhone could easily handle.

But this morning when I was walking through downtown San Francisco before Google’s I/O conference, I was crossing a street when I saw a particularly pretty scene of the sun rising between two buildings. Hoping I’d have enough time before the walk signal ended, I dug my iPhone out of my bag, swiped to open the camera, snapped a photo, and then jogged to the curb to avoid getting hit by cars. (Mom, I hope you’re not reading this.)

So a few hours later, when I tried on Google Glass for the first time and said the command “take photo,” instantly capturing a photo of my colleague Kevin Tofel standing in front of me without moving either my head or my hands, I started to see the appeal of Glass.

I’d read a decent amount about the technology since Sergey Brin dropped from a helicopter at last year’s Google I/O, and not only was I sort of confused by the specifics of how Glass works (A camera on your face? Facebook on top of everyday life? How do people see when they’re wearing them?), I was turned off by the severely dorky appearance and the idea of constantly monitoring the things around you. They seemed vaguely creepy and intrusive. I was not attracted to the idea of wearing them as a normal person walking around town.

But even though I only got a short spin with the technology on Wednesday, it only took a few seconds for me to understand why people are so jazzed about Glass.

I put them on my face and was immediately impressed with how lightweight they felt. Despite their futuristic, clunkly-on-one-side appearance, they didn’t feel very bulky or heavy on my face, and it was easy to see the room around me while wearing them. (Even though they weren’t fitted specifically for my face the way they would be if I purchased them.) The screen felt much smaller and unobtrusive than I’d imagined, and it wasn’t hard to swipe the side of the glasses to navigate the screen. But it was the voice commands, and the “take photo” command, that changed my perspective on the technology.

Would I spend $1,500 on them right now? Definitely not. If you need prescription glasses of any kind, it would be hard to combine those with Glass. While Google has launched them in some jazzy new colors, you still look absurd wearing them (whether you’re in the shower or not). This probably makes me somewhat vain, but I’d want them to look cooler and less futuristic before I wore them in everyday life (seriously, embed them in some Warby Parker frames, and I’d be way more down with the idea.)

And once apps start streaming into the glasses, I can’t imagine how seeing New York Times headlines and tweets wouldn’t be distracting while you’re doing things like walking or driving. Of course, none of this even gets into the new etiquette that would have to arise from the spread of Glass.

But despite all the drawbacks, speaking the words for the “take photo” command made me realize that even if wearable computing has a pretty dorky image right now, the potential practical applications for real-life people who don’t consider themselves nerds are endless — once the technology gets a little more refined, and we figure out how to use them in public.

I talked to one Google employee who said she sat in her sister’s graduation and streamed video through Glass to family members from afar, and another who said she uses it to take photos of her little kids when her hands are full. I would imagine it could be huge for people with disabilities, or people doing outdoor sports (Kevin mentioned you could take photos of mile markers while running a marathon.)

“Every time we’ve tried to do something crazy we’ve made progress,” Larry Page said on stage today. So does Google Glass seem a little nuts right now? Sure. But if a few years from now I can snap a photo of a sunrise without having a near-miss with traffic, I’m open to the possibilities.

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Why retailers should forget showrooming and turn to in-store Wi-Fi

laurielamberth — Mon, 06 May 2013 06:55:36 +0000

Showrooming. Everybody’s heard of it by now — conniving shoppers checking out a product in a retail store, then buying it online later for less. But today it makes more sense for retailers to shift their focus away from this practice and focus on harnessing the shopper’s in-store wireless experience for themselves and their brands. In addition to making mobile-data-hungry customers happy, customer-facing in-store Wi-Fi networks will bring the retailers themselves much value.

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Nokia to invest in array camera outfit Pelican Imaging, report says

David Meyer — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 07:41:53 +0000

Nokia’s investment arm is set to back Pelican Imaging, a Californian company that takes an unusual approach to smartphone cameras, according to a report from Bloomberg.

We’ve covered Pelican before. The startup has designed an “array camera” that is essentially composed of multiple smaller cameras, all organized in an array. Why do this? Because when you get to the tiny form factor required of handset cameras, the sensor is so small that you’re highly limited in terms of the number of megapixels you can squeeze out of it before image noise becomes unbearable. New approaches are needed, and this is one of them.

Of course, if using many tiny cameras was that easy, we’d see it done in smartphones already. The secret sauce lies in the software used to bring the multiple resulting images together, and it’s that part of Pelican’s work that seems to have attracted the interest of Nokia Growth Partners.

“It’s very complicated to do this algorithmically and Pelican is one of the companies that has mastered this technology,” partner Bo Ilsoe was quoted in the piece as saying.

Imaging is central to Nokia’s current handset strategy, from its top-end Lumia Windows Phone smartphones down to its cheap Asha phones — all these devices have clever photo-taking features of one kind or another. The standout model there, so far, is the Symbian-toting 808 PureView, which uses a technique called oversampling to get something usable out of a 41-megapixel image (the same technology is apparently coming to the Lumia line, too). However, that camera module is rather chunky — something which array cameras are designed to fix.

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The WhatsApp-friendly Asha 210 is a reminder of Nokia’s low-end capabilities

David Meyer — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 08:50:19 +0000

WhatsApp should receive a boost in emerging markets through a Nokia phone, announced on Wednesday, that features a dedicated hard key for the SMS rival.

The Asha 210, which will come in both single- and dual-SIM versions with retail prices starting at $72, has a physical QWERTY keyboard and is therefore well-suited to messaging and social networking services. The handset will come with a free subscription to WhatsApp, which usually costs $0.99 a year, and the service is also integrated with the 210′s phonebook.

“We are very excited about our partnership with Nokia Asha complementing our strategy of giving people around the world an easy experience when keeping in touch with their friends,” WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton said in a statement.

Like other Asha phones, the device runs the Series 40 operating system. Nokia started calling the touchscreen Asha phones (of which the 210 is not one) “smartphones” last year, much to the annoyance of some observers, but in some ways that was a fair move: after all, Series 40 handset owners also get to download apps from an app store that contains many of the offerings familiar from Android and iOS. The social experience that is the focus for many “proper” smartphone users can be found here too, albeit in a slightly cut-down fashion.

The Asha 210 comes preloaded with YouTube, Twitter and Facebook (the recently-launched Asha 205 came with a dedicated Facebook button) and a 2MP camera with its own hard key. As with the 205, a feature called Slam makes it possible to share content with nearby Bluetooth phones without having to pair the devices. The phone’s battery lasts for up to 46 days on the single-SIM version, and up to 24 days on the dual-SIM version – you don’t see this kind of longevity on a typical touchscreen phone.

This is a great deal for WhatsApp, particularly as many of its key rivals – such as Tencent’s WeChat — are strongest in the emerging markets where Nokia’s low-end devices are sold. These alternatives can still be found in Nokia’s S40 app store, but users should be effectively steered in WhatsApp’s direction by the inclusion of the hard key. A reminder of the numbers here: WhatsApp may have 200 million users, making it “bigger than Twitter”, but WeChat has 300 million users.

And from the Nokia perspective, the Asha 210 is a reminder of what can be done with the now-aged S40 platform in certain markets. This device will be going up against very low-end Android phones, which offer a much wider range of apps but not necessarily better performance (and seriously, battery life is a major issue in many of these markets), and the soon-to-be-released Firefox OS phones, which are HTML5-only and as such an unknown quantity at this point. Given its social chops, the 210 will be a fairly impressive contender for many users.

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MoboSens, a Square-like tool for eco warriors, lets you crowdsource water pollutants

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 22:39:08 +0000

Clear water doesn’t always equal clean water. Toxins such as nitrates and arsenic can reside in water that looks perfectly potable, but thanks to a research project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the power of sensors, smartphones and supercomputers will create a water quality monitoring project that can tell you if your water is safe to drink as well as track a community’s water over time.

The project, called MoboSens, relies on a large sensor plugged into the audio jack on a smartphone. It looks like an ugly (and huge) Square dongle, but instead of taking payments it senses water quality using a microeletromechanical (MEMs) sensor inside the dongle. The goal is to eventually use the MEMs packed into the device to measure nitrate, heavy metal, carcinogens, and bacteria in water.

The data is shared with an app running on the smartphone and then sent to the cloud for detailed analysis and storage. People interested in participating can support the project on Indiegogo through May 11. The project also won second prize at the Vodafone Wireless Innovation Project awards ceremony last week.

I like this project because it taps into what is awesome about the intersection between consumer technology and science. Companies such as RootMetrics and Waze, which use smartphones to crowdsource data about cell service and traffic, respectively, are more consumer friendly examples of this trend. This project adds more tailored sensors for the phone but taps into the same benefits of crowdsourcing.

Meanwhile on the back end, the data goes to people with the compute power and expertise to use it to focus on more than just the water at hand, making it possible to draw conclusions about overall water systems. In this sense, MoboSens is trying to do for the environment what doctors are doing through a combination of smartphones and sensors to offer a view of our collective health.

These projects take the notion of gathering personal data and empowers people to contribute it for the benefit of all. That’s the real promise of the internet of things.

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Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:55:38 +0000

“Social customer service” refers to those services that provide customer support via social media channels. Providing such services is no longer merely a niche or specialty sideline. Challengers, or disruptors who were early with the new technology, are working to expand and integrate their offerings into enterprise systems and processes.

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How to quickly edit and share photos from your point-and-shoot camera on your iPhone

Geoffrey Goetz — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:42:40 +0000

It is no secret that smartphones like Apple’s iPhone are getting better and better at taking some really good pictures. With sales of compact cameras dropping by as much as 30 percent in 2011, entry-level snapshot cameras manufacturers have tried to stand out by adding features smartphones don’t have: cameras with better lenses like Canon’s S110 with its extremely fast f/2.0 aperture for low light situations, and the SX280 with its 20x optical zoom for far away shots.

But Canon, for one, also sees the advantage of pairing up with the iPhone. It has an app called CameraWindow that allows devices to wirelessly access photos directly on the point-and-shoot camera. This year Canon started including the feature that enables similar apps to be used by its higher-end cameras; previously it was all low-end devices. I had a chance on a recent holiday to try out the CameraWindow app on the just-updated S110. Here’s what I was able to do with my iPhone 5.

Access camera photos on your phone

The way it works is simple: both the camera and your iPhone join the same Wi-Fi network. (If a Wi-Fi network is not available, the Canon PowerShot camera will create a local Wi-Fi network that can be used solely for the purpose of reviewing and transferring photos.) You start off by pairing the iPhone and the camera together. Upon the initial connection there are a few steps to complete, but the Camera will remember the nickname of the iPhone it paired with to make future connections fast and easy.

Once the connection is established, you can either review the photos from your camera or from the iPhone. When you see a photo you like, you can transfer it from the camera to the Photo Library on the iPhone. As soon as the photos are on your iPhone, you can then use any number of applications to modify and share. I was able to use iPhoto on my iPhone 5 to create a great gallery that documented our trip, and was also able to share the images in my iCloud Photo Stream.

Update location information remotely

Another interesting feature of CameraWindow is its ability to record your GPS location when taking pictures. You set up the app to record your location information to a log while you take photos with your Canon PowerShot camera. When you are finished, you pair up your camera with your iPhone and elect to add the location information to the photos you just took. The photos on the camera are then updated with the latitude and longitude information. No need to transfer the photo to your iPhone first in order to perform this operation. The photos stay on the camera making the whole process quick and easy.

Canon’s CameraWindow works with iPads and Android devices as well. The functionality provided in an app like CameraWindow is a great way to extend the capabilities of my point-and-shoot camera. It’s a handy way to get photos off of the camera when in the field and quickly edit and share them with family and friends, as well as update the information of each photo while it is still on the camera.

While some have already written off the era of the compact point-and-shoot camera entirely, I still feel that there is a need for a better optics and saving the original RAW image file when it comes to taking truly great photos. Looking beyond the compact market, Canon has also been introducing this smart app strategy into their DSLR lineup. So it all just depends on how much you are willing to spend on the ability to take better photos. With Canon pairing with smartphones like the iPhone 5 using their CameraWindow app, it’s a good way to have the best of both worlds.

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