Nokia N97 - the "social phone"

Well, here we are. Continuing the fight for supremacy in the mobile phone market, Nokia just released the new N97 model at the CCIB in Barcelona today. Just looking at it it seems like a nice, modern phone. It also has most things you could want, or as Nokia themselves put it, it's a product that "carves a new space in the otherwise blurred realm between smartphone and laptop".

Quite.

No, but seriously, this looks like a really up-for-it phone. If phone is the correct word to use anymore, that is. It's also clear that Nokia are tapping into the whole social media market - Facebooking, Beboing, Twittering, what have you, it's all done better with this phone than with any previous Nokia phone. The step to a full fledged laptop is still quite substantial, guess you'd need an inflatable screen and keyboard to bridge that gap.

Other than that, I'd be happy to get my hands on one. The pricetag might just be a little bit prohibitive, in Finland it's estimated at 550€ pre-tax. With the current economic climate, the timing could perhaps have been a bit better. On the other hand, this product probably just goes to show how on-the-edge Nokia is. The real money is in the cheap phone market.

But, well, if you happen to have one spare, do send it this way :) I promise to evaluate it thoroughly!

Music, handsets and an iPhone killer.. or is it?

If you buy a new phone within the next 12 months (as many many MANY will do, myself included I hope :) you'll probably find a new icon in the menubar, right next to all the usual Calendar and Gallery icons. It'll be called Music Station, and it will be pretty nice, but a bit nasty as well.

See, iPhone is coming out on the market shortly. It's a really nice device, as can be seen on numerous places all over the 'Net. Now, the drawback is that the iPhone will be tied up to a specific operator. In the US it'll be AT&T, and so on - and in order to avail themselves of all the possibilities iPhone offers, the users must sign up to that said operator. As far as has been reported so far, the iPhone won't be downloading tunes off of iTunes either, which makes Music Station all the more intriguing.

Thing with Music Station is that it lets you subscribe to all the music available from most major labels and a lot of indies as well, for 2.99€ a month. Download all you want, listen all you want - as long as you subscribe. And here's the nasty part - if you stop subscribing, you can't listen to any songs anymore, not even the ones you've downloaded. But the playlists are stored, so as soon as you start paying again, you can listen again.

What to think of this then? Well, with iTunes being priced at $0.99 per song, it's a helluva lot cheaper. Still, with iTunes you get to keep the song... My gut feeling is that as long as the players behind Music Station can get the telecom industry behind their product (and it's looking good so far) they have a good chance of upheaving iTunes hold of the market. Must see to it that it's included in my next phone ... :)

If you're gonna watch mobile TV - watch it on this

Having familiarized myself with the earlier, pretty bulky and unwieldy, versions of gadgets supporting DVB-H (that's Digital Video Broadcast-Handheld, a standard for mobile broadcasting advocated by the DVB project, Nokia, Siemens etc, and in competition with DMB, the Korean version, MediaFLO etc) this next gadget to be out on the market feels like a trip back to sanity. Nokias N77, a new phone in the N-series, is for once a phone that doesn't try to look like anything but a phone. It has still got DVB-H compatibility, though, which means that you can watch mobile television on it.



It's got a 2,4" screen with 320x240 pixels resolution and up to 16 million colors, so it perfectly possible to actually watch something on it as well :) And weighing in at 114g, you can lug it around anywhere.

So, one of those for me as well, thank you. Out Q2 2007, reportedly. For reviews of said phone, please go here or here, to start with.

Mobile industry + the next big thing = mobile tv

Well, if anyone still had any doubts about television - and all sorts of entertainment media - coming to mobile phones just about NOW, all they would have to do is take a quick look at the worlds largest mobile industry summit, starting today. The 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona is more like a television industry congress at times, especially looking at who is talking about what and why. To grab some of the headlines, as examples:

- Mobile Entertainment Summit - How mobile is changing TV forever
- Entertainment Summit - Clash of Cultures: Who wins when entertainment and communications converge?
- How mobile can be the next great information and entertainment channel
- Technology Symposium - Mobile TV

and so on...

Fair enough, lots of talk is of course about what is generating the revenue at the moment - which to a large extent seems to be made up of the developing markets - but mobile entertainment and mobile television is sexxxxxy, and everyone wants in on it.

As a pretty nice way to kick things off, it was today announced that the Sundance Film Festival is contributing with five made-for-mobile short films, which have been made as a part of the Sundance Film Festival Global Short Film Project. Amongst the directors are people like Justin Lin (Better Luck Tomorrow, The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift) and Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine).

Here's hoping they'll put them on the web when the congress is finished!

To sum it all up - mobile tv, in one way or another, is on its way. There's no escape, nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide. Let's just, for the sake of all that's holy, hope that as much time and money is spent on making good content for them mobiles as there is for hosting congresses about mobile tv and sorting out the technical mumbo-jumbo.

Can anyone say no to Virgin?

Well, the moment they start offering something alike to their Virgin Media, freshly relaunched in the UK, in my surrounding, I'll be there to snap it up in a second.

Although I myself is into the content-side of the television and interactive business, trying my damndest to come up with new and entertaining (and preferrably attractive and revenue-enhancing) ideas, I cannot but think that my life would be made a little bit easier by, for instance, Virgin Media. Ok, so you pay some, but you do get some as well... Pay £40 a month (that's the four-service VIP package Virgin Media offers, you can go for 2 services or 3 also, £20 and £30 respectively) and you'll end up with "a HD-enabled PVR, 10Mbps broadband, unlimited UK landline calls, and a mobile phone with 500 minutes of mobile airtime per month, 1,000 texts a month and £60 airtime."

One other offering in connection to the above is called Virgin Central, "a hybrid linear/on-demand channel offering up content from Buena Vista International Television and Alliance Atlantis, among other providers." Set to launch in a couple of weeks time, it just might be something to keep an eye on as well.

Any downsides? Nah, apparently not, as long as them £40 don't bother you. Customer support should apparently be up to scratch nowadays, and everything should be rosy and sunny. Go Virgin, go!

...and after that spot of unabashed promotion, for which I'll receive not one cent, a look at some other stuff, more in the television field:

- CBS in the US are launching a "mobile store" and two ad-funded WAP (does that still exist?) sites for sports and news. Perhaps not that impressive.
- Telefónica in Spain, however, are working on a pilot to deliver iTV, radio and music to mobile handhelds. They've elected to use Alcatel-Lucent's "Unlimited Mobile TV" solution for the techie stuff.
- and Endemol is still the king when it comes to game shows and such - two more have been commissioned by ITV1 in the UK, called "For the Rest of Your Lives" (from the brains behind "Deal or No Deal") and "Golden Balls" (nothing to do with Beckham, apparently)

Mobile market and IPTV

Analysts are always pretty keen on analyzing things, I've noticed. For the most part many of the reports published can be ignored, or at least put in the read-at-some-point-if-there-is-absolutely-NOTHING-else-to-do heap.

A couple of reports this week seem quite interesting, though. First of all, Informa have released a report regarding the mobile market and the high probability that mobile operators will be missing out on the opportunity to get their share of the enormous amount of revenue to be made in that market over the coming years.

The report states that mobile operators should NOT try to be something that they are not - meaning that they should stick to what they know, offering mobile coverage to their customers and billing them for it. To get into the content part of mobile media, the best thing is to form alliances with companies providing such content - not to start developing and offering such content themselves.

Pretty straightforward advice, right? I'd be following it, were I a mobile operator :)

Another report, from Strategy Analytics, states that IPTV will reach 80 million subscribers by the year 2011. This does not contradict earlier reports, but the interesting thing is that this report suggests that more than half of the IPTV subscribers will actually not pay anything for their IPTV. Instead, most will be bundled up in triple-play subscriptions offered by the telcoms, including broadband, VoIP and IPTV all in one package.

Now there's an interesting situation - where will the money to make IPTV programming come from then?

More and more mobile television

Looks like everyone and their grandmother are convinced that mobile television is da sh*t, at least if you look at all the new offerings jumping up left and right. In the UK, for instance, you have 3 and mobile media company Player X teaming up to offer the properly named Geek TV. The channel offers made-for-mobile content, but also full length tv shows, like Miami Vice. I'd like to watch that, if I could...

In other news from the mobile tv market, analysts at ABI Research predict that the emerging market in China will have 32 million mobile video users by 2008. That's quite a lot. The major upswing for mobile video in China is thought to be the Olympics in 2008 - I mean, who wouldn't want to watch women shot put qualifiers on their 1,5"x1" screens? I for one will be glued to my mobile.

To conclude - it just doesn't look like mobile tv is going to go away. So for all of us in the content industry, there is just one thing left to do: figure out how to make good content for the smallest of screens. Piece of cake, right? Right.

It's them little things...

Put aside all thoughts of Mobile television, of tv shows filled with user-generated content, of hype words like "360 commissioning" and stuff like that.

Just think - "mobile phone". Yep, that's right. It's the portable thingee that lets you stay in touch with the rest of the world quite easily (as long as the battery hasn't run out).

Now - operator O2 in the UK have just launched a pretty nifty little thing. It's called My Bluebook, is totally free, and lets the user load up images and text messages to a server for storage and for possible sharing with other people. The upload happens via SMS.

In the future, O2 is planning to include Outlook-synchronization, videoclips, address book backups etc.

In my opinion, this is neat. The worst thing that can happen to your average citizen today - if not counting serious disease or major accident - is that the phone dies or gets nicked. All of a sudden you have no numbers, no contacts, no archived SMS:s, no pictures... it'll take you days and days just to get your new phone on track.

So, the prize for the "Sensible Solution of the Week" goes, hands down, to O2. Congrats!

Photos with a mobile phone part II

Ok, mobile phones are not the greatest photographic equipment on earth. The new Nokias are, however, starting to look pretty darn good.

But, if you're like me, stuck with a two year old phone with 1,3 Mpix and no lens protection, you just have to make do with what you've got. And sometimes them photos trn out pretty nice after all. Here, for instance, a picture from my hometown Vasa, a partly-cloudy morning when we were going fishing...



On the other hand, the digital zoom-capabilities of the phone-camera are mostly theoretical, as there is no way you can see what you've taken a picture of, after you've taken the picture with zoom. Without it though, it's nigh impossible to see across distances anyhow - like this, the Brazil vs Ghana game at this summers World Cup, played in front of 65.000 spectators in Dortmund (yours truly included)



My point? Gotta get me one of them new Nokias... :)

Photography with a mobilecam? It IS possible

Part one of my recently (like 2½ minutes ago) launched quest to prove that it IS possible to get some nice photos even though you're using you old, beat up mobile phone camera with only 1,3 Mpix resolution - here's a photo from Bore Place in Kent, UK, where we spent a week in October 2005 developing a show of ours... Pretty nice, huh?