The Hindu Business Line : Buzz at Barcelona

The portable phone is emerging as the central device in people’s lives. Anand Parthasarathy was at the cellular industry’s biggest annual event, the Mobile World Congress, to catch its latest trends.

After cameras and FM radios, it seemed, location sensors would turn out to be the Next Big Thing to go into the mobile phone in 2008.

Anand Parthasarathy

Clockwise from top left: Using the Nokia 6210 Pedestrian Navigator to reach Barcelona’s highest point; At fingertip: Video chip for mobile phone allows images to be blown up on a large screen. It had key contributions from nVidia engineers in Hyderabad; SiRF Technology India’s MD, Ashutosh Pande, shows, in Barcelona, a portable media player reference design fuelled by the SiRFprima location engine designed in India; Nokia’s Vice-President, Alex Lambeck, holds up entry-level phones for India while a volunteer unveils versions of Spice’s People’s Phone.

“At home, at work and at play, we will be in tune with our surroundings — and we will adjust accordingly”, says Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo. “New services will touch time, place and location — and they will take our mobility into a new realm of possibility. In the process, they will redefine the Internet itself, free it from the desktop, making it more personal, more context-aware…. in the end, context is the key.”

Kallasvuo is President and CEO of Nokia, the Finnish player whose products straddle the world of portable communications: four out of every 10 phones sold worldwide is a Nokia (this is more than the combined sales of the next three top-selling brands). It is, therefore, inevitable that Nokia’s corporate vision of the mobile world’s direction, in some ways, sets the agenda for the entire industry.

Agenda is one thing — implementation, another. The GSM Association’s Mobile World Congress is the premier gathering of the cellular phone business, attracting 1,300 players, over 55,000 visitors — and 230 company heads. And this year’s event held in Barcelona, Spain, in mid-February, was proof enough that there were many exciting and different roads (and not a few unexplored byways) that the portable communications industry is taking to reach a common destination.

Together, it seemed, governments and corporates could deliver on the promise of connecting the world’s 5 billion people who remain untouched by any kind of communication technology.

After cameras and FM radios, it seemed, location sensors — mainly harnessing the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite navigation network — would turn out to be the Next Big Thing to go into the mobile phone in 2008. GPS navigation is nothing new: Garmin, Nuvi and Tom Tom are recognised brand names in the car navigation business. But GPS-enabled phones, which have been a costly niche item, may soon crash into the mainstream. Why? Because semiconductor designers such as CSR, SiRF and NXP have succeeded in creating GPS system-on-a-chip solutions, squeezing all associated electronics on a single slab of silicon while sharply reducing the power requirements. The result: adding GPS navigational functionality to a mobile phone adds less than $3 to the cost.

At Barcelona, the Cambridge-UK-based CSR demonstrated its e -(for enhanced)-GPS silicon, a single chip that combines GPS with the company’s traditional Bluetooth offering. Fuelled by technology from its Noida, India development base, SiRF unveiled its multifunction location platform, SiRFPrima combining 2D and 3D graphics, multimedia processing and compatibility with both GPS and the upcoming European Galileo system.

SiRF India’s Managing Director, Ashutosh Pande, showed this writer a reference design for a portable media player with the SiRFPrima chip that a few China-based original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) were currently turning into products for release this year. The chip was also going into digital still and video cameras, Pande said, adding context and location to every photo or clip.

The Philips-founded NXP showed the GNS 7560, claimed to be the smallest, lowest powered GPS solution. NXP and Sony jointly developed the Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, for contact-less information exchange over a few cm and both have created mobile phone solutions marrying NFC to cellular functionality, creating a new and interesting device category.

Fuelled by compellingly priced chips like these, handset makers have already begun offering GPS-enabled phones that have enabled the service provider to add value by tying up with local map providers.

In a canny exploitation of the mobile phone’s primary role as a personal device, Nokia used the Barcelona event to preview what it calls pedestrian navigation: putting GPS into an upcoming handset, the 6210 Navigator, even while it optimised its Maps 2.0 offering for use by a walker rather than a car driver.

The difference may seem small — it is, in fact, palpable and significant, as I found out when I borrowed one of these new phones and used its navigation features to locate and reach Barcelona’s highest point, the Miramar Hotel, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, from the Congress venue in Placa Espanya. The 6210, interestingly, adds a compass (in an electronic avatar) to the GPS receiver. This is useful for a pedestrian, since the screen orients itself constantly as one zigzags over the road, guiding you back to course, if you head in the wrong direction. I did the return journey by TukTuk — the name they give in Europe to the autorickshaw that was brought over from the Netherlands specially for this event. The 6210 works equally well in a vehicle — except that the software, unless re-primed, will assume you are on foot and will ignore ‘no entry’ and other vehicular restrictions.

GPS phones are likely to remain relatively higher priced items to start with, with price tags of $300 and more; but what about the ‘bottom of the pyramid’? India is to the global mobile phone market, what Nokia is to handsets, a giant. If the world buys 30 million new phones in a month, 7 million of them are sold in India. An interesting bit of statistics published during the Congress by Informa Telecoms and Media, UK, showed that India is now the world’s largest mobile phone market, going by net additions every year (China, Pakistan, Indonesia are the next three). Significantly, India is the world’s only market that is expected to notch up more mobile sales (estimated at 89.83 million) in 2008 compared to 2007. That is because penetration is still only around 17 per cent and there is lot more room for growth.

That makes aggressively-priced entry-level phones an important category for handset makers looking to sell in these high-growth countries. The single chip phone solution is old news now and has been used by mobile manufacturers to address the mass market in India with Rs 2,000 handsets.

At Barcelona, Nokia unveiled two new entry-level phones targeting India — the 2600 camera-FM radio phone priced at Rs 3,499 and the 1209 bringing colour for the first time to an entry-level offering at Rs 1,800.

They were not alone in aiming for the broad base of first-time users: One of the surprises at the Congress was the huge glitzy presence of Spice Telecom, an operator whose map in India covers just two States: Karnataka and Punjab. In Barcelona, Spice launched the People’s Phone, a radically simplified India-designed product that dispenses with a screen for those who just want to talk and send text messages. An interesting variant of this $20 device is one with a Braille keyboard for the visually challenged. The market for Spice, says its Chairman, Dr B.K. Modi, is from Iraq to Indonesia.

Maybe the same market might also lap up the other Spice offering: the Movie Phone with a 2.8 inch screen; 3.5 hours of video content storable on a tiny disk, and a TV-out connection to view the contents on a larger screen, if required. And to help entry-level users move up the value chain even further into the ‘connected’ world, a consortium consisting of Singapore phone maker Jurong Technologies and distributor Brightstar; German chip maker Infineon and Israeli mobile software provider Tjat Systems has come together to create the Sirius Smart Entry Phone (SEP), bringing the benefits of Net connectivity to the cost-conscious market. Tjat’s Chief Product Officer, Oleg Golobrodsky, explained that the browser-based client-less messaging solution will enable music and picture downloads for the first time in an under-$25 phone. If all these seemed to have India in their sights, Indian innovation seemed to traverse the reverse path to global markets: Shyam Telecom is now a regular presence at such events, with a steady market for its signal enhancement offerings. Bharti Telesoft, strengthened by its recent acquisition of mobile instant message specialist Jataayu, had a string of offerings that helped networks make the transition from 2G to 3G and beyond in a painless manner. Indiagames and its global arm IG Fun tied up shortly before Barcelona with Canadian Magmic, to bring games based on the hit Anglo-US serial, ‘The Office’, to a world audience.

FlyTxt, a UK player with strong development muscle based in India, used the Congress to expand the reach of its slate of mobile marketing and advertising solutions under the Neon brand. And Airtel — whose founder-chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal was honoured with the GSMA Chairman’s Award — saw its mobile billing and recharge solution, created by the Bangalore-based mChek, recognised as the world’s ‘Best Billing and Customer Care Solution’.

Elsewhere, the Congress was the launching pad for many of tomorrow’s exciting mobile extensions: Dolby Labs launched Dolby Mobile, ‘surround sound on the move’ with high frequency enhancers and a mono to stereo converter for handsets so that the mobile TV experience had the sound quality of a theatre.

Also in the TV arena, Alcatel-Lucent with handset maker Sagem and satellite operators such as Eutelsat, demonstrated the first ever transmission in the S band of satellite mobile TV using the Digital Video Broadcast DVB-SH standard. Channels like CNBC, Nicleodeon and Canal 300 could be seen, direct via satellite, on a hand-held phone. Visual computing specialist nVidia showed what it called “the world’s lowest power, high-definition computer-on-a-chip.” The APX 2500, which allows 3-D and HD TV and video on Windows Mobile phones, saw ‘significant development work’ at the company’s Hyderabad campus, says the Product PR Manager, Varun Dubey. I saw a clip from an nVidia-fuelled mobile phone retain stunning video quality even when projected on a 36-inch LCD screen.

And in the undeclared race with WiMAX, mobile players such as Ericsson demonstrated the next step beyond 3G and HSPA (high speed packet access): the LTE or Long Term Evolution. This has download speeds of a typical 100 MBPS and a maximum of 300 MBPS, though Ericsson has successfully achieved 160 MBPS. Which emboldened a writer in the daily Mobile Congress bulletin to ask: WiMAX: Catching on — or False Dawn?

A billion mobile phones were sold in 2007. A million are sold everyday worldwide. Twenty years after 15 telecom operators came together in Copenhagen to create a global standard for portable cellular telephony, the goal of a mobile planet is still some years away.

But in Barcelona this month, it seemed a doable goal.

Stay tuned

Anand Parthasarathy

A feel of the Barcelona Congress.

The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona saw a number of new buzzwords bandied about — at least some of them likely to fuel tomorrow’s telecom trends. Here is a help list for those who want to appear well cued in matters mobile:

Voice Dialling (also known as Voice to Screen). Text messages will soon be spoken, says Steve Chambers, President of Nuance. You will soon be able to say ‘Search Web’ to open a phone browser and then say your search term. Voice Dialling will be welcomed by car owners who can now dial a number by the owner’s name, speaking it out, and never touch the keypad.

Geo tagging: Taking a photo with your camera phone, then having the GPS receiver ‘tag’ where on earth you took it.

V2IP Voice plus Video on Internet Protocol; interactive two-way real-time multimedia on the phone (‘VOIP is so ‘yesterday’. Now I have V2IP’.”

On-device Portal; A browser resident on your mobile. Companies such as Surf Kitchen are making this happen, caching a lot of content to reduce online time.

‘3-Screens’: A new jargon for the large economy size on your wall; the medium size on your desktop and the small size on your phone — all sharing the same digital content.

Tridget: A device that is dependent on the network for all its data as well as its controls. The Apple iPod is the archetype tridget.

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Buzz at Barcelona