Slashdot Mirror
What's Happened In Mobile Over the Past 10 Years
andylim writes "recombu.com has an article examining what's happened in mobile over the past ten years, including BlackBerry launching its first smart phone in 2002, Motorola launching the Razr in 2004 and Apple launching the iPhone in 2007. As a commenter points out, the first camera phone (Sharp J-SH04), which was released in 2000, featured a 110,000-pixel (0.11MP) CMOS image sensor, and a 256-colour (8 bit) display."
What's happened is that countries without legacy copper and overbearing telcos have leapfrogged the US in terms of, well....pretty much everything mobile.
Which is still more than I need
Hey, mobile phone hardware designer types:
The flip format is by far the superior design for a phone, as it allows the phone to halve it's length when not in use and simultaneously protects the screen and user controls.
As much as I'd like to buy a cool phone like an iPhone or Blackberry, the "brick" format makes it a non-starter.
Until then, I'm sticking with my RAZR V9.
(Yes, the Blackberry Pearl is a flip - my wife has one - and that's not a bad phone at all. I *might* just jump at the next gen version of that)
The other big selling point for me is battery life. Notwithstanding the decent media features on my V9, I never use it as a music player because that chews pretty heavily into the battery, and a phone's primary purpose is communications first. Maybe make a phone that has two batteries, and separates the "phone" functions from the "media" functions...
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Wow. Or:
Awesome. Just awesome. If you think there's more depth than this, there's not. That is the sum total of the analysis of those two years.
This deserves a mention, the legendary Nokia 6310i still has a thriving refurb market to this day. That thing is probably the highest quality mainstream phone ever made. http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/12/20/nokia_breakthrough_phone/
3G (UMTS) turned out to be a bit of a disappointment with the required cell density there are only a few 3G-only networks in densely populated places like South Korea, 2G GSM is likely to stay around well into the LTE era.
Satellite phone networks have also come a long way since the initial bankruptcies and unreliable services. There are now at least 4 Geosynchronous orbit satellite phone networks with handheld phones and the two LEO networks that went bankrupt both recovered and are planning to launch new satellites. The phones themselves also not half the size they used to be.
What about Montgomery, Birmingham, or Huntsville?
They missed the most important event of the year: launch of Nokia N900.
Sorry, the wrong subject. I mean, Nokia N900.
Whenever mobile phones are mentioned on Slashdot, something akin to the following comment will inevitably appear:
'All I want is a phone that makes calls.'
I've never quite got my head around a tech site like Slashdot, where the demographic is almost certainly interested in new technology having such a negative response to technological advances in what our phones can do. You rarely [never?] hear this with other technology on this site:
'I wish Windows 7 had less features. All I want is the ability to write a letter'
'This 4Ghz Core 2 Due Hyperfighting Special Edition is too fast for me. I want a 68030 at 25Mhz'... instead we get 'Imagine a Beowulf cluster of...'
Is it because the non-techie crowd have embraced mobile tech, in some instances more than us (given that some teenagers seem to text more than they speak) and we've been out done? Are the non-techies better at mobile tech than us?
(Yes, I know that Slashdot doesn't speak with one voice, but I bet the comment appears somewhere in this article).
They are smaller than brick phones and the screen can be bigger.
Besides, you can answer a call just by sliding the screen.
They still haven't sold me on needing one. I have a work phone, and if I lost use of it tomorrow, I doubt I would replace it. Possibly with the cheapest prepaid phone service I could find if it was guaranteed to work.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
I lost the links, but not too long ago I found information showing that the US had only marginally more towers than Germany did back in 2006.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I wish Windows 7 had less features. All I want is the ability to write a letter
I wish Windows 7 had fewer features. All I want is an OS, not an entertainment center loaded with DRM so that people who want to watch movies on their PC can do it without buying the "entertainment center" version. I don't want Aero Glass and the Sidebar and System Restore and all the other memory- and laptop-battery-wasting CRAP that Windows has accumulated over the years. When I use Windows, I use Windows 2000 or XP.
I want a phone that just does "phone stuff", so the power that goes to the faster CPU can go to giving me longer standby time, so the space taken up by the large screen and camera and flip-out keyboard can go to a larger battery instead. Because my first cellphone was a dumb bar phone, just a phone, with a battery pack that could go three days without a recharge... and for my current phone I have a charger at home, a charger in my office, and a charger in my car just in case. Text, sure, but leave out the MP3 player and camera and web browser and all the rest of the glitz until battery technology is up to the job.
Being interested in technology doesn't make one automatically in favor of stupid ideas just because they're shiny.
Both hands to open? Seriously?
All you do to open a V9 is kinda slip your thumb in-between the halves and snap it open, like an old-school Trek communicator. Easily done one-handed, and is an automatic muscle-memory for me now.
And hinge mechanisms can easily be engineered to last; it just takes making hinge robustness a design priority. In fact, all the mil-spec rugged phones I was looking at recently were all flips.
If you want a brick, hey, more power to you. But I want all those smartphone features in a flip.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
The quality of a camera isn't measured in megapixels. It depends on the quality of the optics and the sensor. A 10MP camera in a cell phone is only going to give you huge, noisy images.
There's also predominantly 3G networks in Australia - one of the national mobile carriers has bigger coverage on UMTS/HSPA than on GSM. For a rural example, the 300km stretch from Mildura to Broken Hill has absolutely no GSM or 3G coverage after leaving Mildura, but UMTS works for 2/3 of the way.
Cell density is required to be high in densely-populated areas with the current public appetite for data, but it doesn't mean that UMTS won't service large cells. People simply don't put the same demands on GSM cells because data throughput is awfully slow.
...is not quality, but immediacy.
I don't always have my camera on me, but I ALWAYS have my phone. The ability to grab a quick snapshot or video clip when something unexpected happens is priceless.
And the further ability to get that shot out on the network, before it can be censored... I've never had to rely on that, but it has done great things for other people.
And while it will never compete with a SLR bodied, pro camera, I've been pleasantly surprised by just how good a RAZR V9 can be. "Cell phone quality" need not mean "horrific".
And it works through the daysight on a TLAV 1m turret. That has proven useful.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
If you really want to know, there are several newspapers in Mobile that probably offer online archives going back that far that would tell you everything you wanted to know about the events of the past decade.
The Mobile Press Register is probably a good place to start..
10 years and the summary reads Blackberry, Motorola, Apple?
Well, keep wondering...
"Blah blah blah." - [citation needed]
That's an amazing amount of developments for a small city in Alabama.
But I thought Blackberries were Canadian...
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
That has been the big thing in Mobile if you go by Wikipedia.
Their they're doing there hair.
I think the main problem is the fact that there is nearly no real competition among the big cell phone providers. Look at AT&T, yeah, they are willing to do smear ad campaigns against Verizon and Verizon is willing to do the same to AT&T yet both seem more hell-bent to screw their customers more than actually change anything. Verizon seems to insist on castrating their phones, yeah, things have gotten better, yeah, they got the Droid which is perhaps one of the best phones of the year and one of the most open phones, but at the same time they screw their BlackBerry customers by trying to integrate Bing in there rather than whatever search provider the customer wants ( see http://jkontherun.com/2009/12/17/verizon-bing-make-google-go-boom-on-blackberry/ )
If a single telecom could get A) Amazing coverage B) Fast networks C) Good phones D) Openness it would be great. But instead we get AT&T the overpriced carrier with good coverage, a fast 3G network and decent phones. Verizon, another overpriced network with good coverage, a -huge- 3G network, and phones that are castrated. T-Mobile which has good support (look at how they supported unlocked iPhones http://www.ismashphone.com/2009/05/tmobile-tech-support-hearts-unlocked-iphones.html ), open phones, but has a tiny 3G network and generally spotty coverage. And Sprint which is nice and cheap and has unlimited plans, has decent phones, but coverage just isn't quite there yet.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Cell phones are microwave ovens cooking your head. Hold next to any body part, especially your head, at your own risk. Always use the earbuds/microphone or at least a bluetooth device.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
There *is* more depth, take a look at the final item:
2010 There are rumours that Apple is going to launch a larger iPhone/tablet device. Palm will hopefully announce a new phone at CES and everyone hopes that Nokia will unveil something amazing.
Capiche ?
What, no mention of the Motorola F3? It made the biggest positive change for a mobile devices in the past 10 years. Namely, it dropped features - all of them, except for making calls. Give me a phone with a decent battery life and slim-enough to fit in a shirt pocket, I can bring my own damn camera. I can even bring a netbook if I feel withdraw symptoms from lack of youtube videos, I'm a man after all, I was made to haul stuff around. Get off my lawn!
If you look at it in certain way. It's a testament to growing popularity of cellphones throughout the world.
In 2000 there were around 700 million subscribers globally. Now it's at 4.6 billion, and still growing rapidly. It's not about features, it's about phones that allow such numbers of connected people; this will be their most important impact on our civilization.
One that hath name thou can not otter
If a single telecom could get A) Amazing coverage B) Fast networks C) Good phones D) Openness it would be great.
In many countries, they are single provider (or at least started that way). One company does the towers. They get the service for everyone. The carriers compete on price, features, phones, whatever, but everyone is on one and only one network that it is in the interests of all carriers to keep up and keep open.
The US gave away spectrum to the local companies, never expecting mobile phones to be "national" and then had one other set of frequencies to sell to the highest bidder. It has changed since then, but it is still one where the providers are happy when the other's networks go down. Where areas are covered poorly, and no one cares because at least they own frequencies to lock others out. And you lock your stuff to your network (illegal in much of the world) and try to harm your users with monopolistic practices.
Turn over the frequencies to a single company who makes and supports the network, then charges for time on it, make it illegal to lock phones to a network, and you'll see a massive improvement in the US network in a very short time.
But that's socialist, so we'll get our "optimal" capitalism that leaves us paying more for less.
Learn to love Alaska
True, but the coverage in the rest of the country (where I happen to live) is still very good. You will have to go far into unpopulated woods to lose the signal entirely, although more advanced technologies like EDGE or 3G drop out soon outside cities or major roads. The upcoming 3G over the 900 Mhz band should help solve some of this problem.
In the countryside, the telcos are actually more or less forcing people to cellular by dropping maintenance of fixed wire lines, which is much more expensive in sparsely populated areas than maintaining a few more base stations. Many hate this because then they cannot get ADSL lines and have to rely on slower wireless data.
We could also turn over the network to a LOT of companies, put down regulations on frequency usages and open networks. Then we separate out the bandwidth and network maintenance provider from the service provider. Worst case, we have to have the government run the network cause it isn't profitable for the private sector.