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Nokia, Siemens, Ericsson, Sagem, Alcatel, Symbian.
The list could go on. Many, many of the big players in the mobile phone market (phones, network technology, software) are located in. Europe. Europe is a huge market. Not only Italy or Finnland, but also the other big and small countries (DE, FR, GB, ES) have a penetration beyond 60%. There are approximately twice as many mobile phones in Europe as in the US.

And the younger generation wants to do more than just phone someone. SMS, Games, even the number of ringtones or display colors is a very important factor for many customers here.
I believe that while EMS (enhanced message service) was useless like WAP, MMS (multimedia message service) will be used widely. Many people (especially nerds) laugh about these uses but you shouldn't underestimate how much they are accepted by other people. Mobile Multimedia Instant Messaging willl later (with the help of GPRS and UMTS) bring the Internet into the mobile world:
EVERNET. It's not just a marketing hype! If the price is ok (and even if it isn't -> SMS), the (European) customers will use it, because it changes their life so much. For all these features you need software, capable delivering these "services":
You should take a closer look on the Symbian OS v7. It's a well engineered OS with a bright future. One day, at some places in Europe, it might be used more frequently than MS Windows.

We will see who will win this war. One could even call it a war between continents... but this would perhaps be too flamebait. My guess: At the end everyone will find their niche!

Nokia, Siemens, Ericsson, Sagem, Alcatel, Symbian.
The list could go on. Many, many of the big players in the mobile phone market (phones, network technology, software) are located in. Europe. Europe is a huge market. Not only Italy or Finnland, but also the other big and small countries (DE, FR, GB, ES) have a penetration beyond 60%. There are approximately twice as many mobile phones in Europe as in the US.

And the younger generation wants to do more than just phone someone. SMS, Games, even the number of ringtones or display colors is a very important factor for many customers here.
I believe that while EMS (enhanced message service) was useless like WAP, MMS (multimedia message service) will be used widely. Many people (especially nerds) laugh about these uses but you shouldn't underestimate how much they are accepted by other people. Mobile Multimedia Instant Messaging willl later (with the help of GPRS and UMTS) bring the Internet into the mobile world:
EVERNET. It's not just a marketing hype! If the price is ok (and even if it isn't -> SMS), the (European) customers will use it, because it changes their life so much. For all these features you need software, capable delivering these "services":
You should take a closer look on the Symbian OS v7. It's a well engineered OS with a bright future. One day, at some places in Europe, it might be used more frequently than MS Windows.

We will see who will win this war. One could even call it a war between continents... but this would perhaps be too flamebait. My guess: At the end everyone will find their niche!

There has been a lot of Linux buzz over at Ericsson for quite some time now. They are betting the shop that the underlying JAMBALA architecture will run on Linux Clusters. The lab that is working on this initiative is located in Montreal, Canada.

There has been a lot of Linux buzz over at Ericsson for quite some time now. They are betting the shop that the underlying JAMBALA architecture will run on Linux Clusters. The lab that is working on this initiative is located in Montreal, Canada.

Hello Mister "Paper genius":

A lot of "Paper MCSEs" understand this because the networking exam covers the OSI model. The same thing goes for those "Paper CCNAs".

If you are so smart then you should know that TCP/IP does not follow the OSI 7-layer model, in fact, it predates it.

diagram of OSI vs TCP/IP (not entirely accurate, but the best I could find in 2 minutes of searching)
a better but smaller diagram

Because of this, you end up blocking more than is required.

Any network admin worth his weight in salt should know that the default firewalling policy should be to DROP/REJECT and only allow on a need basis. You lament that home appliances firewall "too much." I would venture to say that home users should have every port blocked inbound at the ISP level -- the internet would be a much nicer place, as we wouldn't have nimda and code red flying around.

Recommended if you can get them in the US.

> If Nokia made WAN gear, I'm sure they wouldn't be quite as vocal about it...

...Or like their *friends* at Ericsson: Combining the two?
(This more informative article is unformtunatiely in that awful language.)

BEFORE everyone goes to the Ericsson job site and slashdots it, I'd like to take this opportunity to say that there are currently three jobs available: two in the Netherlands and one in Nigeria. Alas, I don't believe any of them involve walking around pretending to be tourists while getting paid.

Liquid Audio basically received a patent for saying that a domain ending by "co.uk" is in the UK.

We all know that .com/.net/.org aren't restricted to the United States anymore, but even ccTLDs aren't necessarily geographically restricted. Years ago, there was a poster in one newsgroup I followed. I don't remember his name, but I recall that even though he was here in the US, since he worked for Ericsson, his email address ended in .se (this would've been before they snagged a .com address).

There's also the little matter of ccTLDs (.to, .tv, .nu, etc.) that have been opened up to everybody. If for some strange reason I decided to register alfter.tv and associated that with my home server, I would be disappointed with a geolocation system that concluded from my domain name that I was on a tiny island in the south Pacific.

Here's a paper from Ericcson that gives more detail about triangulation accuracy. Essentially the best you get is something like 100 meters in urban areas, depending on the method.
It also depends on the equipment used, but I assume that mobile phone network operators install that extra equipment anyway for location based services.

I'm not really sure, but if it was the same size aa the Ericsson Chatboard, I would say it's quite useful. I was able to use it without pressing other keys mistakenly.

A wireless earpiece for cellphones, eh? What a good idea!

Driving around in a station wagon "full" of equipment sounds like ancient times. I took a course in "mobility and wireless networks" at my University (Swedish)), where a representative from Ericsson was invited and demo:ed a device that looked exactly like a normal cell phone.

He hooked it up to a laptop via serial and USB and got all kinds of data from the GSM/GPRS network.

It was also very easy to inject malformatted data in the GSM/GPRS network and simply make it crash, he told us. The networks in the area where they develop it were prone to be down... ;)

Here you have a link to the official website (http://www.ericsson.com/tems/gsm/pocket-gsm.shtml ) along with a picture of it. He told us it cost about US$20.000 to get hold of one of them, and many phone operators in Europe use them.

For the past year and a half i've carried the Ericsson Chatboard with my t26 and now my t39m with hbh-15 bluetooth wireless headset.

The keyboard in the phone is no new paradigm -- think back to the late 90s with the release of the Nokia 9xx0 phones. Despite their size they are still popular as mobile email/web terminals.
I personaly prefer to the t39m to my collection of 9xx0 phones....

...and 12keying your message isnt really that bad, ask any guitar player...

The white paper(PDF) on the on the SonyEricsson P800 has plenty of details. I'd recommend taking a look if your interested in this great new platform. I'd really like for Symbian gain popularity in the US.

You can already get them! Ericsson make them.

Actually the new puppy uses GPRS for packet data, not Mobitex like the 957 and other older models.

This actually troubles me somewhat. Read around on the 'Net about what mobile devices worked on 9/11 in NYC, and you'll generally find that Blackberries on Mobitex worked fine while other networks were jammed. Don't know if GPRS (which is really new) would provide the same reliability... anyone know?

That's interesting-- could you please name these companies that are doing so well financially and also cite references for their good deeds and kind employee relations.

Nokia
http://www.nokia.com/insight/index.html

Ericsson
http://www.ericsson.com/ericssonresponse/
http://www.ericsson.com/sustainability/

Ikea
http://www.ikea.co.uk/about_ikea/code_of_conduct/w ork.asp

Lego

http://www.lego.com/eng/info/profile.asp

It sounds good but more of a rumor than anything else.

It's not just rumour, you just live in the wrong part of the world. I know many Americans find these thing difficult to believe. That just shows how screwed-up the American mentality has become.

One big difference between here and America is that, these companies policies aren't just for PR purposes, but they are actually core to the peoples life values. If you actually visited these countries and saw it for yourself, then you'd understand that the "America way" isn't the only way, or necessarily the best.

That's interesting-- could you please name these companies that are doing so well financially and also cite references for their good deeds and kind employee relations.

Nokia
http://www.nokia.com/insight/index.html

Ericsson
http://www.ericsson.com/ericssonresponse/
http://www.ericsson.com/sustainability/

Ikea
http://www.ikea.co.uk/about_ikea/code_of_conduct/w ork.asp

Lego

http://www.lego.com/eng/info/profile.asp

It sounds good but more of a rumor than anything else.

It's not just rumour, you just live in the wrong part of the world. I know many Americans find these thing difficult to believe. That just shows how screwed-up the American mentality has become.

One big difference between here and America is that, these companies policies aren't just for PR purposes, but they are actually core to the peoples life values. If you actually visited these countries and saw it for yourself, then you'd understand that the "America way" isn't the only way, or necessarily the best.

Why do you talk about getting a camera on a phone as something in the future? They already exist. I saw one in a shop window (along with a Bluetooth kit).

Have a look at this press release from Ericsson: Ericsson unveils first GSM mobile camera - CommuniCamtm. Notice the date? Wednesday, March 21 2001.

UMTS is not a company. It is the 3G phone services standard itself. And it will be mainly implemented by a tyre and rubberboot factory and a 125 year old mechanics company.

Ericssson's language, Erlang, mixes garbage collection and realtime systems without a problem.

OK, admittedly a telephone exchange doesn't exactly have the same safety-critical problems as aircraft avionics or intensive care patient monitoring. Plus the Erlang GC system won't work for Java and remain real-time (it depends on each thread having a local heap so they can be GC'd separately). Still, it does show that the combination of real-time systems and garbage collection does work well, even outside academia.

What will happen when GPRS becomes more common? Many of the services that Locust offer via SMS seem much more naturally suited to GPRS. It may be that Locust will run out of users in the long-run anyway as these services become more common place as part of a GPRS subscription.

The R380 is btw released as 380e, an updated (much faster) version with USB as well now.

(and of these, the 9210 will appear in the us as 9290)

Links:

Symbian
Ericsson
Nokia

This is a cool phone that propably suits my needs better than the nokia phone.

(and bluetooth, and irda, and SyncML, and background pictures, and sound&pictures in SMS [EMS], and ...)

Well, there's always the Ericsson T39. Bluetooth, GPRS, POP mail client, WAP, and SyncML. All in one very small phone.

Huge disclosure: I work for Ericsson.

If you have an Ericsson phone, we publish AT command references for many of them at:

http://www.ericsson.com/mobilityworld/ in the "Open Zone" area.

(Full disclosure: I'm Lead Technologist for Ericsson Mobility World USA.)

The key improvement they made over previous phones seems to be implementing vCard standard for contacts - every name on my phone can have up to four numbers assigned, as well as an email address and postal address.

vCard (and the successor iCard) allows some intelligence when sending data between different systems - rather than relying on hard-coded rules such as "take the first number only," it can extract all X numbers when the receiving system supports them, or only the most important number. For example, you may decide that the home phone number is the "primary" way to reach a contact, and set that as the one which should be transferred to a system which only supports one number.

FWIW, the T39 also comes with a really slick calendar. The calendar uses the vCal standard, so depending on how obscure the transport protocol is, it should be pretty easy for someone to grab the data from the phone via serial/IR/BlueTooth and sync it with a Linux app which supports vCard/vCal.

Keep your eyes open for SyncML phones like the Ericsson T39. Looks like a pretty cool standard and fairly open...

PDA's, PCCard Wireless Modems, Streaming Audio, Video Phones, Instant Messageing, etc..

Currently I have an Omnisky using CDPD (over ATTWS) and it rocks, I can SSH into my boxes, and work remotely. (Saves your ass more than once..) I just upgraded to a Ipaq PocketPC and waiting on my GPRS modem. Someone even picked me up a keyboard (god love those expense cards) for it. Full size Qwerty, and an SSH client. :)

And if you want a keyboard for you cellphone, get a Ericsson Chatboard It works with the Erricsson CDPD ATTWS PocketNet phone, so you can browse the web or irc. (No SSH yet, but I can wish.)

Or just to enable you laptop for wireless, go get a CDPD PCMCIA card from Sierra Wireless

Point is, I just listed some consumer products, there are business uses, kiosks, hardware monitors, coke machines, police mobile computers, fire and rescue, etc... Really with HighSpeed Wireless and Internet access, there will be some killer applications that people havnt even thought about, or waited till the technolgy was available. Now wheres my streaming pr0n. :)

--
No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris ... [because] no known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping. Orville Wright (1871 - 1948)

... and yes, I'm on GPRS. It's kinda cool. WAP finally makes sense.

Damn I love this phone.

My setup is:

• Psion 5mx running Opera (for /. and such)
• Ericsson SH888 for connectivity - will upgrade to an Ericsson R520M with GPRS RSN.
• HP 215 camera with Compact Flash cards that can be read by the 5mx. Yes, this is not the newest model that you can get - but it was cheap.
• TomTom GPS with Roadplanner for Europe. For use when travelling long distances by car. Otherwise, I use a map (hint: it doesn't run out of batteries)

But being able to grab a photo, chuck the CF card into the 5mx and fire off an email with the picture attached, all within 15 minutes - that's cool!

And best of all: I have all this right now :-)

• WAP may suck, but not as much as people claim: I mean, the majority of wapsites are not created with care. They usually don't care about usability and user comfort, as Jakob Nielsen says; most of them don't mind about making too much accesses to the wireless network instead of pushing the limits of the phone memory and not rethinking the whole content for the wireless medium. The bare 1300 and something bytes of max. wml deck of the Nokia 7110 (the phone reference), is enough to make some pretty things, but people prefer to link everything, despite the high user cost of accessing the wireless network.
• WAP insecure? no more than other services All the people who get in WAP always complain about the white spot that makes the WAP Gateway, but don't realize that this element in the architecture is the safest of all. It's easier to defend a single machine where you know exactly what kind of things it should be doing that any other, let's say a mirror of an ecommerce site database. Phone companies can monitor this machine well. And in the other side, if anyone gets to infiltrate in the gateway, he would have to search and identify very volatile tiny strigs of plaintext in ,tipically, 4Gb memory of a monitored server, and believe me, even having full root access to the server it's almost impossible.
• The real reason with the failure of WAP services: I have observed during all this wireless hype that the real reason for peole rejecting WAP is that the services already made doesn't give the people using it real value and they are very overpriced. All the sites offer the same: some news, stock info... that's all? And all of this is billed at such astronomical prices that is cheaper buying a whole newspaper that consulting a news item on WAP. I have calculated that the right price to make wireless services explode would be about 0.60 euros per Megabyte transferred.

...go look at http://www.ericsson.com/blip .

Oh, goodie, a standards compliant Web site. On this machine I have:

• Netscape 4.7 with Shockwave Flash plugin
• Mozilla M18
• Konqueror 2.1
• StarOffice 5.2
• Lynx
• w3m

None of them can render the site properly or allow you to browse it. Only Netscape and Mozilla can see anything at all, and Mozilla can't get past the first page. These are the people we're trusting to develop interoperable technology?

WE all think it would be great as a wire eliminator, but unfortunately Ericsson doesn't want it to be used for that, won't talk to anyone who does, and it's their baby.

Ericsson's only application so far is advertisng. That's right, you're walking down the street, you pass a Coke machine, your cell phone goes 'blip blip!' and a text message asks you if you're thirsty. You're walking through the mall, you pass Victoria's Secret, your cell phone goes 'blip blip!' and informs you that thong underwear is half off. You're crusing down the freeway, you pass a billboard and . . . you get the idea. And they literally want it to go "blip blip" - go look at http://www.ericsson.com/blip .

Do YOU want your cell phone going "blip blip" and offering you advertisments two thousand times a day?

And they SAY it only costs $5 per unit in quantity, but since nobody is manufacturing anything in quantity, the cost is right on par with 802.11b at the moment.

This problem can be overcome by getting a triple mode phone or borrowing a phone (putting in your own SIM) when you cross the pond. The site also indicates that Handspring is working on a triple-band phone module that will be avaliable for those who live in !North America or frequently travel around the world.

As for the SIM cards, why would you expect them to be provider independant? They are your means of authenticating yourself to the network. Seems kind of silly to think that they would be provided by someone other than the network operator.
_____________

(There are pictures etc if you roam the site. The European version is being advertised heavily in Europe - it's really cool, and also runs the Epoc operating system from Symbian

See Symbian's website for more info, or just browse around on Ericsson's for some pictures of the R380 smartphone running Epoc ... or look at the devices Motorola, Sanyo, Psion etc will release.

The future looks bright indeed!

I seem to remember that, as well. If you drop the focus on PalmOS, then there are several combined phones and PDAs out there. The most known one is the (semi-ancient, but recently software-upgraded) Nokia 9110i, and the brand-spanking-new Ericsson R380. These are GSM phones, of course...

>I've been wondering how long it would take somebody to combine one with a good PDA...

Actually, Ericsson seems to get there... Their forthcoming R380s phone comes with quite a nice display and EPOC (Psion's PDA OS) as its OS (complete with pen and stuff ;)) Although I've only used the Emulator (for checking the WAP stuff I do), it looks quite useful. Now if only they'd finally get it out ;)

For the Emulator click here (probably have to register, tho).

For a look at the phone click here.

>I've been wondering how long it would take somebody to combine one with a good PDA...

Actually, Ericsson seems to get there... Their forthcoming R380s phone comes with quite a nice display and EPOC (Psion's PDA OS) as its OS (complete with pen and stuff ;)) Although I've only used the Emulator (for checking the WAP stuff I do), it looks quite useful. Now if only they'd finally get it out ;)

For the Emulator click here (probably have to register, tho).

For a look at the phone click here.

I disagree. GSM came out in 1991 (or something like that), while CDMA came out didn't come out until 1995. US carriers have picked up CDMA and have distributed it across the country (except AT&T (which does TDMA) and PacBell Cellular (GSM...at least out here on the west coast...I'm sure other providers across the US use GSM, too) Anyway, CDMA is rapidly growing as a technology (currently, there are about 70 million users to GSM's 300 million) At the end of the year 2000, marketing "experts" are predicting 90 million CDMA users to 320 million GSM

The *entire* world is slowly switching to CDMA...While GSM isn't going anywhere for a long while CDMA provides *so many* clear benefits to the cell phone providers (better use of the bandwidth, better call security, less power required, more simulatanous users, true soft handoff, etc) Ericsson (formerly only a GSM company) has announced plans for both WCDMA & CDMA Systems. I think that you'll notice that GSM's writing is on the wall.

The only real downside to CDMA is the US Government. They consider it as a "weapon" (just like encryption), so exporting it is really inconvient. I currently work for a major cell-phone company, and I am familiar with both technologies (more so CDMA than GSM). To learn about CDMA, I had to sign agreements that I wouldn't export the knowledge to any non-authorized people, etc. When I was learning about GSM, I just went to my class and no one cared about spreading the technology. That will be CDMA's biggest obstacle.

I disagree. GSM came out in 1991 (or something like that), while CDMA came out didn't come out until 1995. US carriers have picked up CDMA and have distributed it across the country (except AT&T (which does TDMA) and PacBell Cellular (GSM...at least out here on the west coast...I'm sure other providers across the US use GSM, too) Anyway, CDMA is rapidly growing as a technology (currently, there are about 70 million users to GSM's 300 million) At the end of the year 2000, marketing "experts" are predicting 90 million CDMA users to 320 million GSM

The *entire* world is slowly switching to CDMA...While GSM isn't going anywhere for a long while CDMA provides *so many* clear benefits to the cell phone providers (better use of the bandwidth, better call security, less power required, more simulatanous users, true soft handoff, etc) Ericsson (formerly only a GSM company) has announced plans for both WCDMA & CDMA Systems. I think that you'll notice that GSM's writing is on the wall.

The only real downside to CDMA is the US Government. They consider it as a "weapon" (just like encryption), so exporting it is really inconvient. I currently work for a major cell-phone company, and I am familiar with both technologies (more so CDMA than GSM). To learn about CDMA, I had to sign agreements that I wouldn't export the knowledge to any non-authorized people, etc. When I was learning about GSM, I just went to my class and no one cared about spreading the technology. That will be CDMA's biggest obstacle.

The fastest mobile wireless speed I've seen announced on more than a test basis was in Turkey at 26kbps (here).

Though if you don't mind not being able to surf when in motion, Richochet has 28kbps now, becoming 128kbps soon, in several US cities (here). Ricochet claims they can go 70mph, but some people on Epinions.com disagree.

The Ericsson R380 seems to combine a cell phone and a PDA quite nicely, it even uses EPOC as its operating system which is considered pretty robust. Those two devices seem to be good candidates for a 'merger'.

Unfortunately, Ericsson seems to be unable to finish the product. Anyone else knows what's the problem? They've now scheduled it for 3rd quarter 2000...

Go to Ericsson's site and take a look at this baby. Approx. 2x4 in for a *global* (Europe/US) GSM phone. If that phone had some of the functionality of a PDA, I wouldn't want anything else.

But hold on; what else do you need? a decent screen, an easy input system (e.g. Graffiti), a calendar, etc. Well, what if the screen and input part was a separate device, a "dumb PDA" if you will, about as big as that cell phone, but all the processing, memory, etc, were in the cellphone itself? So, e.g. you could have access to your calendar without the "dumb PDA" auxiliary device, but when you needed some better I/O, you could lug the tiny "dumb" terminal with you, or even use your laptop instead?

That's exactly the promise of Bluetooth: a "Personal Area Network", where naturally, the cellphone becomes the CPU (because more people are likely to lug around a cell than a Palm) and any other device (a PDA, a laptop, a printer, even your Casio wristwatch :-) are terminals to the data stored there. Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola will take us there; they are all part of the Bluetooth SIG, and they are behind Symbian, which will probably end up kill the Palms --better OS, better industry support.

engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.

Hmm, I wonder what will happen to Ericssons co-op with Microsoft?
htt p://www.ericsson.com/infocenter/publications/conta ct/Microsoft_alliance.html

Um, actually, Ericsson makes quite a bit more than just plain cell phones. It's always fun to forget this, go to their site and hit the top combo box. It fills the screen with esoteric stuff! ;^) Anyway, I hope these plans (or some plans!) include the idea to add Bluetooth tech to a cell phone, so that it can make calls through some kind of base station while I'm around the house. That would give the best of two worlds from the same phone; low land-line rates while at home, mobile telephony as soon as I step out the door; all using the same handset of course. I've been waiting for this for a number of years now...

Didn't see this mentioned in the press release, but this was reported by C|Net yesterday. It's a "Screen Phone" that will run RedHat and uses Bluetooth to communicate with its basestation, has a speakerphone, touch screen, web browser with Java support, and email client. In other words, a web pad with telephone features. Another picture on Ericsson's site. Pretty cool looking, no pricing mentioned and is supposed to hit the market later this year.