re: EETimes on CeBIT
<< slandering is not FUD so Eric will keep his silence on this one<ggg> >>
Wrong! <g>
No mention here of lazyqcomm. <gg>
Just figured it out ... they blew the budget on spectrum. <ggg>
>> Eyeing I-Mode, Phone Vendors Go For Multimedia
March 27, 2001
Junko Yoshida
EETimes
Hannover, Germany
Inspired by the success of NTT Docomo's i-mode mobile-Internet service in Japan, cellular handset makers are scrambling to deliver multimedia and next-generation software environments for third-generation cell phones.
Signs of what might be called "i-mode envy" were everywhere at the huge CeBIT trade fair here last week. Companies like Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola showed up with everything from clip-on mobile digital camera modules for handsets to music players and Internet radios. And handset vendors are behind a push for a universal mobile game platform.
But observers warned that a fragmented software platform could be a stumbling block to the arrival of trendy applications in next-generation cellular. As many as seven operating systems have a shot at becoming the environment of choice for 2.5- and 3G phones, while the battle over markup languages is split into at least three camps.
The host of products that dazzled the CeBIT crowds bore an unusually strong flavor of consumer-electronic gadgets, thanks in part to new partnerships between leading mobile-phone vendors and streaming-media and digital-imaging technology companies.
Nokia, for example, collaborated with RealNetworks on its Mobile RealPlayer, which streams video onto Nokia's 9210 communicator. Not to be outdone, Ericsson announced an agreement with Microsoft Corp. to integrate Windows Media Audio and Video support on Ericsson handsets. When linked to the R520 handset, the prototype it showed can play back personal music collections and streamed Internet radio.
Meanwhile, digital imaging is quickly becoming a must-have. Both Motorola and Ericsson used CeBIT to promote mobile digital photography on their handsets. Ericsson has designed a camera module built around a CMOS imaging sensor for its GSM handsets, while Motorola demonstrated the industry's first JPEG2000-compliant miniature clip-on digital camera with its new General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) handset.
Nokia, too, has a plan for a small camera. Called Concord, it uses CMOS technology, has VGA resolution and transfers images to the Nokia 9210 communicator over infrared links or via an MMC memory card, plugged into both the camera and the communicator. The camera will be bundled with the first shipments of the Nokia 9210 in the second quarter.
Motorola's offering-built in collaboration with LightSurf Technologies Inc., an end-to-end digital-imaging technology company-can be used as a standalone camera (it comes with its own photolithium cell). The flash memory inside can store about 30 to 40 photos. Once pictures are taken, consumers can take off the tiny battery cell and plug the camera right into Motorola's new GPRS phone to send pictures.
Eric Bodnar, vice president and chief technology officer at LightSurf (Santa Cruz, Calif.), said handset vendors do not necessarily want to become digital camera makers but see something like a clip-on camera as a "fantastic accessory business. The focus here is visual communication. A lot of design issues need to be handled differently than in developing a plain digital camera."
To corral the camera's cost, LightSurf touts its distributed image-processing architecture, equips servers in the network intelligence and tasks them with jobs like image enhancement, reformatting and optimizing pictures to the display resolution of a receiver, be it another cell phone or a PC.
Agilent's Image Sensor
A Motorola-branded phone shown at CeBIT uses Agilent's VGA-resolution CMOS image sensor and an ARM processor that runs wavelet-based compression. The RISC processor also runs LightSurf software designed to accelerate the speed of uploading images, along with other software to encode additional data, such as the types of lenses and sensors used in the camera. These allow a server to make intelligent choices in postprocessing, Bodnar said.
LightSurf did a live demo at Motorola's booth, using Vodafone's GPRS network to send a JPEG2000-compliant compressed image file to a LightSurf-enabled server in California. The resulting display was an enlarged, high-resolution picture on a flat panel in the booth.
In contrast, Ericsson's CMOS sensor-based module was designed as a simpler, lower-resolution camera. It captures images of 352 x 288 pixels with a color depth of 24 bits, and compresses them into a JPEG file. SRAM integrated into the module can store up to five images for later use. An image, once shot, can be sent as e-mail or added to a user's personal WebAlbum on the Ericsson Mobile Internet portal stored in the camera.
Other consumer devices demonstrated by mobile telecommunications companies included AAC/MP3 music players and Internet radios, including what developer Ericsson claimed was the world's first "cordless Internet radio." The battery-powered radio and can be placed anywhere in the home, up to 100 meters from a Bluetooth access point with a broadband Internet connection. It can also be connected via an Ethernet cable to a broadband modem.
As Microsoft, Palm, Symbian, Wind River and the Linux open-source community duke it out to win a place for their operating systems in next-generation cell phones, the action at CeBIT centered around presentation software. The three main contenders are Compact HTML, used by 21 million subscribers to Docomo's i-mode; the Wireless Application Protocol, now built into some 14 million phones; and a new version of WAP, set for a standards vote in June, that uses XHTML and a technology known as "cascading style sheets."
Nokia plans to license the source code in a new microbrowser based on WAP 2.0 to other OEMs in August. With it, "the user interface can now move from just text to a much more complex presentation," said Brian Woods, a product manager at Nokia. The new style sheets help render text in ways optimized for a phone's particular display, he said, and "this gives the developer much more flexibility."
European handset vendors seem to be gravitating to the Internet-friendly XHTML and making attempts to harmonize it with WAP. Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice president of Nokia Mobile Phones, promised that the first terminals supporting the WAP-XHTML combo will roll out late this year."We believe XHTML will bring WAP and the Web much closer," Vanjoki said.
While pledging to support legacy WAP content, handset vendors like Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens and Motorola-together with service providers such as AOL in Europe-recently launched "an initiative to jointly proceed with the utilization of XHTML," said Tapio Hedman, Nokia's vice president. He called XHTML "a breakthrough toward a true mass-market mobile Internet," closing the gap with fixed-line Net access.
Indeed, compatibility with Net protocols helped drive i-mode to instant success in Japan, said Tomihisa Kamada, executive vice president and CTO at Access Co. Ltd., a Japanese software company that helped develop the Compact HTML (CHTML) markup language used by Docomo in i-mode.
Many of i-mode's building blocks are based on open Internet standards, said Kamada. By contrast, he said, "A WAP gateway is required to do protocol conversion from HTTP and TCP/IP to WAP protocols, and content conversion from [WAP] WML text to binary data."
At CeBIT, Access rolled out a microbrowser of its own that looks to give Nokia's XHTML entry a run for the money. Designed for 2.5- and 3G wireless applications, the Compact NetFront Plus has native support for CHTML, WML and XHTML Basic. Handset vendors can support content based on all three markup languages in a single browser (see story, page 6).
Elsewhere on the software front, in an effort to stoke demand for the next-generation networks and devices introduced at CeBIT, Ericsson, Motorola and Siemens Information and Communication Mobile jointly announced plans for an industry initiative to define a universal mobile games platform. Tim Krauskopf, vice president and general manager of Motorola's Internet Software and Content Group, called the move necessary to "simplify gaming application development" for mobile devices.
In the Game
Besides dealing with more than a dozen incompatible mobile game-development platforms, software developers like Activision and Electronic Arts now have to design different versions of the same game. This is because different methods are required to access network functions such as billing, authentication and location services, Krauskopf said. "We've recognized the need for identifying common features and developing a reference design."
Nokia is notably absent from the games collaboration, but the company has taken a lead in the mobile gaming market by providing a development platform and offering a number of games for its Club Nokia members.
Though Nokia has not yet joined the initiative, "we are extremely interested in getting an industrywide API for mobile game development," said Ilkka Raiskinen, vice president of mobile applications and services at Nokia Mobile Phones. The company would like to see involvement by game developers too, he added.
The consortium's initial goal is to agree upon open application programming interfaces and a software development kit that will be made available for licensing. The three companies expect to have specifications available in the third quarter. They have already agreed to collaborate with Metrowerks, which will support the joint platform in its Metrowerks CodeWarrior Integrated Development Environment. <<
- Eric - |
