State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

Mobile Internet devices include smart phones, electronic readers, connected navigation devices, media players, gaming gadgets etc. Due to a variety of reasons will see more of these devices around. Depending on the market, the combination of online and offline capabilities of mobile connected devices will present new business models. The success of such offerings is mainly based on the utility of services and whether wireless broadband prices are affordable.

Why will these devices rise in popularity? To name a few reasons: improvements in processors and computing capacity, advances in: hardware, storage, flash memory, battery life and the explosive growth of social computing. Abundant and affordable wireless broadband could be another factor but there is still plenty of room there for improvement.

Challenges abound as well. Problems with user interfaces are still a major issue with many portable devices which connect with Internet. One of the main reasons why Apple has emerged a winner is because it provided a slick solution to the common user interface problems. Sony is an example of a large brand which used to be poor performer in user interface and lost market share. Over the years Sony has improved on usability.

Other problems include lack of standards, proprietary OS and incompatible applications which make it hard to share data and force users to duplicate efforts. Of course there are business reasons behind these which can take up many posts but for an end user this is a major headache.

Device convergence and context-relevant advertisement are the potential killer areas. Cell phones claim that they are the one gadget which can absorb everything else but that’s not how it has worked out. Apple’s iPhone has done the best so far by including iPod in the iPhone. Admit it, for a while there will be multiple devices. Cell phone has made its way into third world countries, breaking the first and most important barrier. This presents an interesting opportunity for various adaptations of technology  for commercial and even NGO purposes.  How will the new crop of mobile Internet devices interplay with the two established platforms of web and mobile phones? Will there be a clear distinction of how youth uses these devices?

An excerpt from Forrester Research about the mobile Internet devices:

Mainstream consumers are now using digital photographs and downloading music — and are even starting to download and stream digital video. Unfortunately, they confine much of this activity to a home PC — or at least use a home PC to load up or “side load” mobile devices. Being able to connect mobile devices directly to media and communications services like photo sharing sites and music download services gives consumers, content owners, and service providers far greater freedom.
 

Must see video. Saw this at All Things Digital. As they say this is the price of success!

The iPhone Dev Team, the folks responsible for the notorious iPhone jailbreaks, have cracked iPhone 2.0–before the software has even shipped. After decrypting the version of 2.0 included in the recently released iPhone SDK, the Dev Team jailbroke it so that it will run most any application 

Jehan Ara wrote an interesting post about her successful but stressful struggle to activate her personal iPhone and then taking it to Telenor to realize that “Telenor Smart Mail did not support the iPhone”. That led me to the question which I pose to all of iPhone fans in Pakistan: which mobile company is best for iPhone users in Pakistan?

Till recently iPhone did not support the corporate email but here’s a video which shows that Apple has aggressively addressed this shortcoming and also added some other missing but highly in-demand features such as calendar, address books. Watch the game demo too. And hey, there’s the $100 million dollar fund to create some more cool apps. BlackBerry - watch out!

WIRED magazine has a great story about how Apple created iPhone despite initial setbacks and shook the wireless industry. It is a fun read and I found the background to have many lessons - as one example, the first phone which Apple came up with (ROKR) was a dismal failure and the first prototypes were also disappointing. The main take away here is that there was a strong desire to innovate and change the basic game. Hats off to the team which pulled it off.

For those working on the iPhone, the next three months would be the most stressful of their careers. Screaming matches broke out routinely in the hallways. Engineers, frazzled from all-night coding sessions, quit, only to rejoin days later after catching up on their sleep. A product manager slammed the door to her office so hard that the handle bent and locked her in; it took colleagues more than an hour and some well-placed whacks with an aluminum bat to free her.

But by the end of the push, just weeks before Macworld, Jobs had a prototype to show to the suits at AT&T. In mid-December 2006, he met wireless boss Stan Sigman at a suite in the Four Seasons hotel in Las Vegas. He showed off the iPhone’s brilliant screen, its powerful Web browser, its engaging user interface. Sigman, a taciturn Texan steeped in the conservative engineering traditions that permeate America’s big phone companies, was uncharacteristically effusive, calling the iPhone “the best device I have ever seen.”

Technology blog site Engadget is creating waves with stories of complete unlock of iPhone. It first reported iPhoneSIMFree’s success in unlocking the iPhone — a project that’s been ongoing since the late June launch of the smart phone — and confirmed that the hack works. Engadget said the unlock remains intact even after applying the most recent firmware update, and posted a short video demonstrating the iPhone connecting to and making a call over the T-Mobile network.

The post claims that iPhone software unlock is legit, and we have proof. “We can confirm with 100% certainty that iPhoneSIMfree.com’s software solution completely SIM unlocks the iPhone, is restore-resistant, and should make the iPhone fully functional for users outside of the U.S.” said Ryan Block on Engadget.

Too good to be true? Nope — the iPhone software unlock mentioned a couple days ago is legit. As what seems like teams of people worked on various avenues to unlock this thing, the iPhoneSIMfree.com group was silently plugging away behind the scenes. Our own Ryan Block got together with them and demoed their wares and reports back with some detailed findings.

There’s also some talk that certain sites will offer unlocking services for a fee. Too good to be true, just rumours or a limited opportunity? The situation will be clear in the next few days. Who knows, I might go for one of these iPhones.

From Technology Review Magazine. Also see this related posts from the past here.

Last week, researchers from a security company found a flaw in iPhone software that allows it to be remotely controlled. The weak spot was in the Safari Web browser, software that’s also used on Apple’s computers. “It’s a good example of how flaws in PC software show up in a similar guise on cell phones,” says David Wagner, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Cell-phone viruses have been around for nearly a decade, but many experts believe that serious threats could become a serious problem in the next couple of years thanks to the gadgets’ growing computing power and complexity. “I think a large part of this is that cell phones are becoming miniature computers,” Wagner says, “and as a consequence, they are starting to inherit some of the same problems that we face with PCs.”

Many cell phones are scaled-down computers, and they can take advantage of some of the existing efforts to make personal computers more secure, such as using antivirus software. But cell phones have their own set of problems. For instance, mobile devices are easily lost or stolen; they are accessible via a number of methods, including the cellular network, Bluetooth, and, increasingly, Wi-Fi; and they have a limited battery life and constrained processor power. Researchers have only recently started to grapple with the implications of designing cell-phone security systems that encompass these and other challenges.

Read more »

The trend to store more and more digital info and entertainment  — such as video, music and digital photos – on the handsets is creating a demand for more memory storage. Apple’s iPhone, with 8GB memory available, has accelerated the race. Flash memory is the term for chips that can store data even if a device is off (also called non-volatile memory). Flash memory is commonly used in usb drives, digital cameras and mp3 players and has replaced bulky and expensive solid-state drives.

The demand for memory in Pakistan is also high. A common use of such memory is to swap content offline. The word from blogistan (Pakistani blogosphere) is that this is how most of the “entertainment” circulates, either from person-to-person or from the street vendors.

According to iSuppli, a market-analysis company, the amount of available memory in cellphones is expected to surge tenfold in the next two years. This puts handset manufacturers in a difficult situation as they struggle to keep the costs down and profitability up. This is less of an issue for high-end phones with better margins.

As recently reported by Wall Street Journal: 

Flash is a popular option for handset makers because its thin profile and low power consumption make it ideal for increasingly smaller phone designs. The demand for more memory, however, leaves handset makers a few unsavory options, such as eating the costs, raising the product’s price or making consumers buy their own removable flash cards.

To keep costs down, handset makers have gone with the third option of making consumers buy their own removable flash cards. The companies argue the external memory is more flexible because users can swap out cards with different data.

Read more »

How much would an unlocked (or liberated as some call it) iPhone cost in countries like Pakistan? Expect to pay around Rs.75,000 ($1250) or more. Ridiculous, to say the least, in a world where 2.7 billion people live below 2 dollars a day. Now that I’ve finished my rant, lets talk about the availability and technical stuff.

Apple intends to make the phone available in Europe in Q4 2007 and in Asia in 2008. Even though official distribution channels for the world outside US may take a while to be established but the phone (and its clones) will be available soon, depending on how soon hackers unlock it. Most probably consumers in Pakistan will not have to wait long for iPhone. Unlocking is not going to matter a lot as the original network related features of the phone were not state-of-the-art to begin with. Let’s see when the 3G version of iPhone comes out.

Why would iPhone matter? There are two main areas: one is the breakthrough interface and design. Other is the data features which require a network such as WiFi.

In my opinion, iPhone makes sense for:

Leaving the details to others I’ll just mention one thing: iPhone runs a full version of safari browser, which has recently been introduced for windows as well. The safari browser is an important piece here as it allows developers to create apps. According to fiercewireless at the WWDC conference, Apple CEO Steve Jobs told developers that they didn’t need an SDK to write apps for the iPhone–they can start building Safari-based mobile Web 2.0 apps now. But beware: The Safari browser in iPhone supports neither Adobe Flash nor Java.

On a related note RSS is being touted as a killer application for iPhone but in reality its not the first phone to offer RSS – Flurry already offers RSS on majority of the phones.

Reviews and Further Information:

As mentioned at macworld: For a product that hasn’t even been released yet, there’s sure a lot of information out there about the iPhone. To name a few: Apple’s 40-plus minutes of marketing videos, early reviews and at USA Today, and Newsweek.

I’ll finish this with a quick review of how competitors are handling this threat from Apple.
- pointing out iPhone’s shortcomings
- touting their better network features
- introducing their own rival phones: - See this WSJ article
- Nokia was forced to do a whole re-organization due to iPhone!