In the UK you can get an average GSM phone unlocked with a small bit of hardware available for about $50. There are lots of places which offer the service to unlock phones for you for a lot less than that.
Unlocking is often as simple as sending a couple of ASCII characters in on the serial port on the bottom on the handset. At worst, you need a special connector to connect to pins under the battery. There are no PIN codes etc that I know of that are required.
Some operators, like Orange, sometimes modify the firmware slightly adding some operator specific features, but this generally doesn't cause problems upon unlocking. For example I have a phone now running on another network, but it still has an Orange splash screen!
Ok the UI is a bit sluggish, but 10 seconds between calls? On my T68i I can dial within one second after a call has ended. And redialling can happen in one second by hitting the green key twice.
I'll agree that the T9 system has some major flaws - for example: * typing in a phone number or a time of day - you either revert to multi-tap or press menu-3 to enter it as a new word in the dictionary! * caps-lock is rather random
Looking at the PC industry in the 80's/90's, you'll see that America beat Europe: Microchips: Intel (US) Platform: Windows (US) Applications: Office (US) Number of users: US
You'll see a similar story with the Internet / broadband.
But look at the big players in mobile: Microchips: ARM (EU) Manufacturers: Nokia (EU) Platform: GSM (EU) Applications: Symbian/Series 60(EU) Service providers: Vodaphone (EU) Number of users: EU
But I think Qualcomm may have a point...
If you look at the fastest implementations of new technology, it is always going to be the closed, imposed standards that impress first and take hold. That gave GSM a headstart. And Docomo had a massive monopoly in Japan which meant that i-Mode was a big success when they rolled that out. There's every chance that Qualcomm's closed technology will dominate, and the astounding success in S. Korea and Japan of 3G has shown CDMA2000 beating WCDMA hands down. So despite the whole industry not wanting to swallow Qualcomm tax, they swallow ARM tax and Symbian tax and know they are better off for it because they are the best technologies.
The picture may be a mock-up, but these phones exist. The Symbian Expo last week had a good number for people to play with, make calls with and I've heard these things are pretty stable beasts too considering we're not expecting them out till October or so.
One thing to watch out for is the frequencies supported by the phone.
900Mhz - European & Asian networks 950Mhz? - new USA networks 1800Mhz - European & Asian networks 1900Mhz - most USA networks
To roam across Europe or Asia you basically need dual band 900/1800 or it will end up not working in many countries.
The P800 is tri-band covering 900, 1800 and 1900 Mhz networks and is set to launch in both Europe and US. This is in stark contrast to Nokia's big competitor to the P800, the 7650, which will only be sold in Europe.
The great thing about programming the P800 (and the Nokia 9210 or 7650 when it is out) is that you are not constrained in what you can do. In Qualcomm's BREW phones and usual Java/MIDP phones you have no (or limited) access to: call handling, diary database, address book, sound etc. All these are possible with Symbian apps. This gives a lot of great opportunities.
To have a go yourself at writing in C++ or Java for such devices you can download full phone emulators and Symbian SDKs for free. e.g. Nokia
The P800 is about the same size as the T68 and the 8210 which makes it down there with the smallest on the market.
BTW Microsoft have put their full weight behind Bluetooth recently. They are trying to sell phones too, so there would be no reason to kill it off for strategy reasons.
I agree there is a lot of potential here with Bluetooth to have two separate devices, but to be honest, next year's phones will be the power of laptops two years ago, so why not steal as much PDA functionality as possible and make it as usuable as possible in the normal phone form factor. Hey if you love to do spreadsheets but find the screen too small, get a PDA too.
The manufacturers like handset (sales) volume. It is the carriers who don't like subsidising all those new handsets. 'Churn' is a big issue among carriers right now.
I just had a go with this and some example output is displayed below. Basically you can do a search of their main web pages, request a cached page or use their spellchecker.
What you really want is a Bluetooth SDIO card for your Palm and one of the many GPRS/Bluetooth mobile phones out there. You get a great, light, high battery life phone. You also get to continue using your PDA, but with fast email and web access. In a year or two, you can upgrade either and still have a working combination no problem. Hey, why not get a groovy BT headset - you'll never need to get your phone out of your pocket/bag again, apart from to recharge it! (Make calls with voice dialling. Update your phone book with Outlook and auto-syncing...)
Now you're convinced it works better, justify it with the numbers:
Bluetooth upgrade for your Palm = $129 Bluetooth/GPRS phones e.g. Ericsson T65 = $220 or $30 with a contract (in the UK) Total = $350 or $160 with contract
OK, heck let's chuck in a new Palm m125 for $200 Total = $550 or $360 with contract
The Sony Ericsson P800 is not out for another 6 months at current estimates. And although it runs Symbian's EPOC OS, it will likely be similar to the version on the new Nokia 7650 which is out in a few weeks. And I'm told that it doesn't even have a web browser (just WAP), let alone a keyboard.
Much more capable is the XDA made by mm02 running Pocket PC 2002. Gorgeous beast - similar to the iPAQ but with a phone inside. Treo has a keyboard though, so is better for emails. This might be out soon...
The GPS protocol is indeed published in full. The military grade GPS uses decryption keys which are not published, but with the degradation currently turned off, there is no advantage in using the military signals.
It is perfectly feasibly to build your own GPS simulator. You'll need a good head for maths, signal theory and RF electronics though... That's why the ones you buy cost many thousands of dollars. The simulated signal can emulate the real GPS signals well (including multipathing, doppler etc) so it is not really feasible to differentiate the two.
GPS receivers CAN (in theory) work indoors, despite what the usual handsets do.
> The Personal Location System incorporates > enhanced GPS technology, which enables it to > obtain location information indoors as well as > outdoors. (from the FAQ)
Having worked in the GPS handset industry previously I can tell you there are three methods to achieve this: a) Receivers are getting better - more effective, steeper-edged filters and lower noise mixers means better SNR, so that you can pick up a weaker GPS signal. This is the usual claim of 'enhanced GPS' from Snaptrack etc. and I'm doubtful this has been employed. b) If you let it be known to the receiver that you are remaining in the same place for a while then it will just increase the 'integration time'. Essentially the GPS signal received repeats every millisecond and you pick out the signal from the back ground noise by averaging chunks of 1ms. The longer you do the averaging, the more you lose the noise. This relies on the signal not changing (you must be stationery of the order of a couple of centimetres). But the theory goes that if you stay still for a few minutes, you can pick out them signals from inside a normal office building. I've never seen it done, but is certainly feasible. Maybe these guys have done it. c) Cell phone location systems are widely available (e.g. Cambridge Positioning Systems) but only work in areas of high population (lots of base stations to triangulate from). Luckily this is exactly complementary to GPS which tends to work best away from buildings. Maybe cell phone location is also used here - but then they would have probably claimed that since it would be pretty novel.
Yes Silicon Valley is in a low. No that doesn't mean it will rise again.
SV has relied on waves on new technology being ultra-successful. Ten years ago they were in crisis like today, but lucky for them, the Internet happened. (And a similar 5-10 yr cycle with chips, PCs etc). Will there be another technology rebirth to build companies on anytime soon? That's the real indicator of a rebirth.
I can see a whole new charging mechanism which will solve this. Different sorts of data demand different prices (for example):
1. Stuff the user wants - $30 per megabyte. 2. Stuff the mobile operator wants you to have - free 3. Stuff 3rd party advertisers people want you to have - $5 per megabyte to the advertiser. 4. Stuff 3rd party advertisers are desperate for you to have - $5 given to the user?
(don't forget that SMS is of the order $1000 per megabyte!)
The operators are going to want to use the new capabilities of the phones to advertise and pay to use the real estate on your screen. They want to advertise their services...because they can and it'll make them money! So they will be happy to spend unused network capacity on this at no charge to the user.
Unlike email, sending an SMS costs money, so how do the spammers do it?
Well, there are a bunch of networks across Europe which all allow SMS to travel between them for free - they have mutual exchange agreements. There are a lot of these networks: all the operators and a lot of small players which provide email2sms and commercial SMS type services. The spammers pay once-off to use these commercial services and then pump out millions of SMSs.
So what happens is that Vodaphone for example then cancels its contract with that little commercial SMS company and the company changes it's services/rates/business. Meanwhile the spammer moves on to another small commercial SMS provider.
It's just the same cycle as regularly switching ISPs, spamming successfully before getting blocked.
With OSS code around, it's a fantastic opportunity to *read* lots of other people's code. Writing some HTTP protocol stuff? Take a peek at the Mozilla, Konq, curl etc source for some pretty wildly different ideas at how others have tackled it, and compare it with your own ideas.
Books and professors never seem to teach you about ideas for debug, error handling, build systems, using profiling tools etc. Also, by dipping into lots of projects you can get a feel for what's good and what works for different situations, much quicker than the usual company where you'll tend to stick to the same tools and systems, not to mention a small pool of opinions.
The environment / requirements of your software will no doubt be changing quickly so you need to keep getting wider experience than your job generally gives you.
The Intel Xeon actually has *another* set of registers to cope with the second thread.
Unfortunately, the big slowdown in computers is accessing memory and peripherals on the various buses. Looking at the details of the Xeon, it still competes (and queues) for access to memory.
It's also worth considering that although programs tend to have a few threads to look after things like printing while you carry on writing your document, you tend to by using one or maybe two threads heavily at once and the rest are just mostly idle, waiting on hardware and interrupts.
Intel themselves are claiming 10% speed improvement, even when compiled to take account of SMP, or 30% for specially optimised code (yeah as if that's going to be popular). Don't get fooled into thinking your PC is going 2x faster.
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In the UK you can get an average GSM phone unlocked with a small bit of hardware available for about $50. There are lots of places which offer the service to unlock phones for you for a lot less than that.
Unlocking is often as simple as sending a couple of ASCII characters in on the serial port on the bottom on the handset. At worst, you need a special connector to connect to pins under the battery. There are no PIN codes etc that I know of that are required.
Some operators, like Orange, sometimes modify the firmware slightly adding some operator specific features, but this generally doesn't cause problems upon unlocking. For example I have a phone now running on another network, but it still has an Orange splash screen!
Ok the UI is a bit sluggish, but 10 seconds between calls? On my T68i I can dial within one second after a call has ended. And redialling can happen in one second by hitting the green key twice.
I'll agree that the T9 system has some major flaws - for example:
* typing in a phone number or a time of day - you either revert to multi-tap or press menu-3 to enter it as a new word in the dictionary!
* caps-lock is rather random
This is not true on my T68i. In the missed calls window, hit the Menu button and click on "Add Number".
I believe you have picked up an issue with early firmwares.
Looking at the PC industry in the 80's/90's, you'll see that America beat Europe:
Microchips: Intel (US)
Platform: Windows (US)
Applications: Office (US)
Number of users: US
You'll see a similar story with the Internet / broadband.
But look at the big players in mobile:
Microchips: ARM (EU)
Manufacturers: Nokia (EU)
Platform: GSM (EU)
Applications: Symbian/Series 60(EU)
Service providers: Vodaphone (EU)
Number of users: EU
But I think Qualcomm may have a point...
If you look at the fastest implementations of new technology, it is always going to be the closed, imposed standards that impress first and take hold. That gave GSM a headstart. And Docomo had a massive monopoly in Japan which meant that i-Mode was a big success when they rolled that out. There's every chance that Qualcomm's closed technology will dominate, and the astounding success in S. Korea and Japan of 3G has shown CDMA2000 beating WCDMA hands down. So despite the whole industry not wanting to swallow Qualcomm tax, they swallow ARM tax and Symbian tax and know they are better off for it because they are the best technologies.
The picture may be a mock-up, but these phones exist. The Symbian Expo last week had a good number for people to play with, make calls with and I've heard these things are pretty stable beasts too considering we're not expecting them out till October or so.
One thing to watch out for is the frequencies supported by the phone.
900Mhz - European & Asian networks
950Mhz? - new USA networks
1800Mhz - European & Asian networks
1900Mhz - most USA networks
To roam across Europe or Asia you basically need dual band 900/1800 or it will end up not working in many countries.
The P800 is tri-band covering 900, 1800 and 1900 Mhz networks and is set to launch in both Europe and US. This is in stark contrast to Nokia's big competitor to the P800, the 7650, which will only be sold in Europe.
The great thing about programming the P800 (and the Nokia 9210 or 7650 when it is out) is that you are not constrained in what you can do. In Qualcomm's BREW phones and usual Java/MIDP phones you have no (or limited) access to: call handling, diary database, address book, sound etc. All these are possible with Symbian apps. This gives a lot of great opportunities.
To have a go yourself at writing in C++ or Java for such devices you can download full phone emulators and Symbian SDKs for free. e.g. Nokia
.The P800 is about the same size as the T68 and the 8210 which makes it down there with the smallest on the market.
BTW Microsoft have put their full weight behind Bluetooth recently. They are trying to sell phones too, so there would be no reason to kill it off for strategy reasons.
I agree there is a lot of potential here with Bluetooth to have two separate devices, but to be honest, next year's phones will be the power of laptops two years ago, so why not steal as much PDA functionality as possible and make it as usuable as possible in the normal phone form factor. Hey if you love to do spreadsheets but find the screen too small, get a PDA too.
The manufacturers like handset (sales) volume. It is the carriers who don't like subsidising all those new handsets. 'Churn' is a big issue among carriers right now.
I just had a go with this and some example output is displayed below. Basically you can do a search of their main web pages, request a cached page or use their spellchecker.
n d_Culture/History"}
e mpire.htm" ... "
Dave
$ java -cp googleapi.jar com.google.soap.search.GoogleAPIDemo XXmykeyXX search "british empire"
Parameters:
Client key = XXmykeyXX
Directive = search
Args = british empire
Google Search Results:
======================
{
TM = 0.117071
Q = "british empire"
CT = ""
TT = ""
CATs =
{
{SE="", FVN="Top/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/Society_a
}
Start Index = 1
End Index = 10
Estimated Total Results Number = 688000
Document Filtering = true
Estimate Correct = false
Rs =
{
[
URL = "http://www.btinternet.com/~britishempire/empire/
Title = "The British Empire"
Snippet = "| Introduction | Articles | Biographies | Timelines
| Discussio
n | Map Room | Armed Forces | Art
Directory Category = {SE="", FVN=""}
Directory Title = ""
Summary = ""
Cached Size = "5k"
Related information present = true
Host Name = ""
],
...
What you really want is a Bluetooth SDIO card for your Palm and one of the many GPRS/Bluetooth mobile phones out there. You get a great, light, high battery life phone. You also get to continue using your PDA, but with fast email and web access. In a year or two, you can upgrade either and still have a working combination no problem. Hey, why not get a groovy BT headset - you'll never need to get your phone out of your pocket/bag again, apart from to recharge it! (Make calls with voice dialling. Update your phone book with Outlook and auto-syncing...)
Now you're convinced it works better, justify it with the numbers:
Bluetooth upgrade for your Palm = $129
Bluetooth/GPRS phones e.g. Ericsson T65 = $220 or $30 with a contract (in the UK)
Total = $350 or $160 with contract
OK, heck let's chuck in a new Palm m125 for $200
Total = $550 or $360 with contract
Treo = $550 or $399 with contract.
Now you see why Bluetooth is so special.
The Sony Ericsson P800 is not out for another 6 months at current estimates. And although it runs Symbian's EPOC OS, it will likely be similar to the version on the new Nokia 7650 which is out in a few weeks. And I'm told that it doesn't even have a web browser (just WAP), let alone a keyboard.
Much more capable is the XDA made by mm02 running Pocket PC 2002. Gorgeous beast - similar to the iPAQ but with a phone inside. Treo has a keyboard though, so is better for emails. This might be out soon...
The GPS protocol is indeed published in full. The military grade GPS uses decryption keys which are not published, but with the degradation currently turned off, there is no advantage in using the military signals.
It is perfectly feasibly to build your own GPS simulator. You'll need a good head for maths, signal theory and RF electronics though... That's why the ones you buy cost many thousands of dollars. The simulated signal can emulate the real GPS signals well (including multipathing, doppler etc) so it is not really feasible to differentiate the two.
GPS receivers CAN (in theory) work indoors, despite what the usual handsets do.
> The Personal Location System incorporates
> enhanced GPS technology, which enables it to
> obtain location information indoors as well as
> outdoors.
(from the FAQ)
Having worked in the GPS handset industry previously I can tell you there are three methods to achieve this:
a) Receivers are getting better - more effective, steeper-edged filters and lower noise mixers means better SNR, so that you can pick up a weaker GPS signal. This is the usual claim of 'enhanced GPS' from Snaptrack etc. and I'm doubtful this has been employed.
b) If you let it be known to the receiver that you are remaining in the same place for a while then it will just increase the 'integration time'. Essentially the GPS signal received repeats every millisecond and you pick out the signal from the back ground noise by averaging chunks of 1ms. The longer you do the averaging, the more you lose the noise. This relies on the signal not changing (you must be stationery of the order of a couple of centimetres). But the theory goes that if you stay still for a few minutes, you can pick out them signals from inside a normal office building. I've never seen it done, but is certainly feasible. Maybe these guys have done it.
c) Cell phone location systems are widely available (e.g. Cambridge Positioning Systems) but only work in areas of high population (lots of base stations to triangulate from). Luckily this is exactly complementary to GPS which tends to work best away from buildings. Maybe cell phone location is also used here - but then they would have probably claimed that since it would be pretty novel.
Yes Silicon Valley is in a low.
No that doesn't mean it will rise again.
SV has relied on waves on new technology being ultra-successful. Ten years ago they were in crisis like today, but lucky for them, the Internet happened. (And a similar 5-10 yr cycle with chips, PCs etc). Will there be another technology rebirth to build companies on anytime soon? That's the real indicator of a rebirth.
I can see a whole new charging mechanism which will solve this. Different sorts of data demand different prices (for example):
1. Stuff the user wants - $30 per megabyte.
2. Stuff the mobile operator wants you to have - free
3. Stuff 3rd party advertisers people want you to have - $5 per megabyte to the advertiser.
4. Stuff 3rd party advertisers are desperate for you to have - $5 given to the user?
(don't forget that SMS is of the order $1000 per megabyte!)
The operators are going to want to use the new capabilities of the phones to advertise and pay to use the real estate on your screen. They want to advertise their services...because they can and it'll make them money! So they will be happy to spend unused network capacity on this at no charge to the user.
Unlike email, sending an SMS costs money, so how do the spammers do it?
Well, there are a bunch of networks across Europe which all allow SMS to travel between them for free - they have mutual exchange agreements. There are a lot of these networks: all the operators and a lot of small players which provide email2sms and commercial SMS type services. The spammers pay once-off to use these commercial services and then pump out millions of SMSs.
So what happens is that Vodaphone for example then cancels its contract with that little commercial SMS company and the company changes it's services/rates/business. Meanwhile the spammer moves on to another small commercial SMS provider.
It's just the same cycle as regularly switching ISPs, spamming successfully before getting blocked.
With OSS code around, it's a fantastic opportunity to *read* lots of other people's code. Writing some HTTP protocol stuff? Take a peek at the Mozilla, Konq, curl etc source for some pretty wildly different ideas at how others have tackled it, and compare it with your own ideas.
Books and professors never seem to teach you about ideas for debug, error handling, build systems, using profiling tools etc. Also, by dipping into lots of projects you can get a feel for what's good and what works for different situations, much quicker than the usual company where you'll tend to stick to the same tools and systems, not to mention a small pool of opinions.
The environment / requirements of your software will no doubt be changing quickly so you need to keep getting wider experience than your job generally gives you.
The Intel Xeon actually has *another* set of registers to cope with the second thread.
Unfortunately, the big slowdown in computers is accessing memory and peripherals on the various buses. Looking at the details of the Xeon, it still competes (and queues) for access to memory.
It's also worth considering that although programs tend to have a few threads to look after things like printing while you carry on writing your document, you tend to by using one or maybe two threads heavily at once and the rest are just mostly idle, waiting on hardware and interrupts.
Intel themselves are claiming 10% speed improvement, even when compiled to take account of SMP, or 30% for specially optimised code (yeah as if that's going to be popular). Don't get fooled into thinking your PC is going 2x faster.