Mobile Phones Blog

In the consumer world of multimedia handsets, DRM or digital rights management is a dirty word. DRM is the name for the software that encrypts all the high end video that comes to a handset and stops you from using it on other devices right? Well it used to be. That may be about to change.

There are lots of things wrong with what we call “old” DRM, which was prohibitive, but still many hurdles before “new” DRM comes into play, which will protect movies from being ripped off, but will no longer stop consumers moving them easily between devices. But if reports emanating from the US this week are correct, one major step, which may make all the difference, is about to be taken.

Sony Pictures will embrace a new approach, and bring with it almost all of the Hollywood studios, and by association virtually every broadcaster and content owner. The system is being called Open Market and it is a generalized DRM framework which can both support the concept of domains and can work with multiple DRM technologies.

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Today’s headlines have been full of Microsoft’s release of the second beta of Internet Explorer 8, its first major upgrade of its browser in two years and a significant overhaul in terms of privacy, search and other key facilities. But since Microsoft recently admitted to missing its targets for shipments of Windows Mobile, it has been strangely silent on plans for the next mobile version of its browser - and it is here that it really needs to pick up the pace, as Mozilla readies souped-up mobile Firefox products and Nokia gains ground.

The latest figures on the mobile browser market show that Nokia, Opera and Openwave remain dominant, with their browsers the default in two-thirds of web-enabled handsets in July 2008. By contrast, Microsoft IE Mobile, Safari and BlackBerry’s own browser all had shares less than 5%. The presence of Openwave shows how many midrange phones still feature just basic browsing facilities, though this product will lose ground as even lower end smartphones acquire full internet and rich media facilities.

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Police across Scotland today launched a 24 hour crackdown on motorists who drive while using handheld mobile phones.

Motorists have been reminded that they face a £60 fine and three points on their licence if they are caught using their mobile phone handsets while on the road.- 

Those driving uses, coaches and goods vehicles can face heavier punishments still if they flout the law, with the possibility of a £1000 or £2500 maximum fine and possible disqualification from driving.

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The new wave of the web is all about non-technical users being able to create applications and share content, and open source organization Mozilla is in the forefront of making these capabilities usable on mobile devices as well as PCs.

Now the Mozilla engineer who has led the development of the popular Firefox browser for handsets is bringing us ‘DIY mash-ups’, adapting a key technique for mixing and matching elements of different web services create new ones ‘Lego-style’. The new plug-in, Ubiquity, which brings these facilities to non-programmers, is particularly designed to address the difficulties, for consumers, of creating their own web experience on the mobile device. Notably, it will allow consumers to use natural language to tell the browser what to do and organize the interface.

The brain behind this breakthrough - which could help consumers easily create their own web look and feel, and share their own applications, on their mobiles - is Aza Raskin, the Mozilla Labs senior engineer who headed up the organization’s high profile bid to put Firefox up against Opera, Mobile IE and other handset browsers (he is also the son of Apple Mac pioneer Jef Raskin).

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Nokia today came out with a startling Autumn extension to what these days it calls its Nseries multimedia computer range - dual slider handsets which are jam packed with entertainment options, ready for shipment in October.

The two additional devices, the N85 and the N79 both come with 10 N-Gage games bundled, a 5 Megapixel camera with the same Carl Zeiss optics that are built into its N95 and N96 top ranges of handsets. Additionally they have a built in FM transmitter so that like the iPhone and iPod they can transmit stored music to play through a car stereo.

The N85 comes with a 3 month subscription to a voice navigation service, and it has a phenomenal OLED display. OLED displays use about 40% less power than the LCD equivalent, offer far more brightness and contrast from blacks to whites and are tipped to eventually become the replacement technology for LCD. Right now OLED screens are just appearing on handsets, although the Sony Ericsson Z610i boasted a mini-OLED display, and Sony have just released a 3 millimetre thick 11 inch TV screen using the same technology. The N79 has a conventional 2.4 inch QVGA screen.

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We always go on about how tough it is that the UK cannot get its hands on decent mobile TV services, mostly due to a lack of spare spectrum for DVB-H or other broadcasting services, but there turns out to be more than one way to skin a cat.

A year ago a small US company called Broadcast International introduced a completely new concept in video over a constrained network like a DSL line or better still a switched cellular connection. The idea is fairly simple to describe, but tough to build, it takes 5 or 6 different approaches to digitizing video - using different encoding algorithms - and digitizes and compresses video using all of them in parallel, and picks the outcome with the lowest bit count to use for each frame produced. Previous approaches used one standard encoding approach like MPEG2 or MPGE 4/H.264.

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You may have wondered just what has been the problem with handset companies like Nokia getting their hands on quality music and video for their handsets and portals such as its Ovi portal. If Apple can do it for the iPhone, why can’t other handset companies or operators like Vodafone, do it for themselves. They seem to be managing with music, but not quite so much with video.

Well one of the issues that it always comes down to is something called Digital Rights Management software, something that consumers have come to hate, because it usually means not being able to do what you want with the content that you’ve paid for.

Studios won’t release legal TV and film content, and record labels won’t release music unless a company like Nokia can complete a security audit, showing that it is looking after the content properly and that the device won’t be another place for content to leak onto the internet (okay, so most of it has already leaked there, but that’s content owners for you).

One of the most DRM celebrated efforts, driven by Nokia and Vodafone, but backed by almost everyone in wireless who matters, was the Open Mobile Alliance DRM completed in 2004, written to be royalty free, so that phone companies and operators would have to pay nothing.

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The US mobile phone market has flipped into an immediate recession - with sales of handsets declining 13% - no wonder the major US handset manufacturer Motorola is in such a sorry state right now. The likely implications for Europe could be the same over time as consumer spending falls in the wake of price increases in every sector due to the rising price of oil.

However it is hitting harder and earlier in the US and since mobile operators buy most handsets in the US (and in Europe) due to handset subsidies, handset sales usually suffer when operators are going through a period of uncertainty.

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Following in the footsteps of rivals O2, Orange and T-Mobile, Vodafone has announced that it will be raising the cost of making a call by a third on its pay-as-you-go tariffs.

Vodafone’s 11 million PAYG customers will see the cost of a standard call rise from 15p to 20p a minute as of next month, as the UK's second biggest mobile phone company attempts to claw back some of the revenue lost due to stricter EU regulations on roaming charges and mobile termination rates - charges mobile networks levy on each other and fixed-line operators to call mobiles - which make up about 20% of Vodafone’s overall revenue. Pay monthly customers will also feel the pinch if they use more than their assigned number of monthly minutes. Extra minutes will rise from 12p to 15p.

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In almost every trip overseas there is a moment when you are completely confused. Do the restaurants open on a Monday here? Are the police tough on speeding? Why are the train stations named after places that are not on the map? But if you forget to buy the obligatory “Lonely Planet” guide at the airport, you stay that way - confused.

Which is why we think the Nokia deal to make each of the books downloadable to a handset, is one of those marketing masterstrokes that really makes a difference. Nokia said yesterday that the Lonely Planet content will be available on Nokia Maps.

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