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The smartphone marketplace is heating up and its not just because Apple has the iTablet on the way. 

The carriers are working hard to find the right device to catch the growing market, but I am not sure that anyone knows how to catch our attention.

Palm has the Pre being marketed with and without Sprint, but last years CES darling is not exactly looking to build a ground swell of community.  Which is a shame since they still have a lot of loyal palm customers.

Likewise HTC is making an effort to support their customers with commercials.

The reality is that social networks maybe the best way to communicate to the most likely customers. 

The Fan Clubs of the devices on Facebook maybe the best place to reach early adopters. 

Its clear the carriers are anxious to avoid another breakout by rivals.

It may be that ATT is good as it gets with the iPhone.

I have already commented on the fact that Telefonica is not having the same dramatic impact with the iPhone as ATT (Verizon [ NYSE: VZ] announced a 30% drop in earnings and slower growth than ATT ).

In China the Nokia E71 has a good following (I am still an N95 fan) and the  cost of the iPhone is equivalent to a $1,000 US dollars over there.  The discussion of Nokia's efforts to protect patents Apple may have violated seems late, but I suspect it will work itself out like many of these do before the court has to make a decision.  IMHO, It probably has more value in the EU to show market / thought leadership than financial value.

More importantly as China continues to manage the operations of their end users the ability to use WiFi has been disabled.  Like the issues of Skype via TOM in China, a closed iPhone with only the carriers network is not as interesting as an IPhone with WiFi.  However, it allows the state to know what it wants to know.

Of course in China if you capture less than .001 of the market you are still busy, so the iPhone success is pretty much a guarantee.

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from our latest quarterly report on all things Clearwire, the CLEARWIRE NTK OCTOBER 2009 (need to know) report, available now for the low low price of $4.95. In this excerpt we talk about how Clearwire's on-time, on-target market launches in Atlanta and Las Vegas, as well as a host of smaller cities, have kept the company on target with its ambitious 2009 rollout plans. For the full report, order online here. Report excerpt follows:

Vegas, Atlanta and Silicon Valley - but where is Chicago?

Easily the most positive sign for Clearwire during the hot months was its on-schedule rollout of services in Atlanta and Las Vegas, the two bigger markets Clearwire had said it would launch during the summer -- and did. Perhaps catching many WiMAX watchers by surprise was Clearwire's August/September launch of an additional 10 markets for its new, mobile WiMAX services -- a list that included several small Texas towns like Lubbock and Abilene, as well as Boise, Idaho, and Bellingham, Wash.

The quick addition of the smaller markets was a pretty easy strategy to figure out if (like us) you had studied Clearwire closely. Since Clearwire has said many times that the hardest and longest task of launching any new market is getting its towers sited, approved and constructed, it stands to reason that any market where the company already had a tower position could be converted to the newer mobile WiMAX service pretty simply, with maybe an antenna change and some new networking gear on the back end.



At the end of September 2009 there were already reports surfacing about Clearwire quickly upgrading pre-WiMAX customers in some of its remaining 40 old-school markets, and on Oct. 1 the company "lit" two smaller markets (Milledgeville, Ga., and Salem, Ore.), while also making services available in Philadelphia.

Not as meaningful from a subscriber number but worth its weight in market influence was Clearwire's quick launch of its planned "testbed" network for developers in Silicon Valley, with separate clouds covering the campuses of Google, Cisco and Stanford University. Though some saw the testbed launch (which was announced back in May) as a public-relations stunt, from a business standpoint it seems to make perfect sense to put the service in front of folks who make up what is still arguably the world's foremost center of technological innovation and investment.

According to Clearwire, it will offer select subscriptions in Silicon Valley for free, while allowing any other developers in the area to sign up by joining the company's developer program, and then purchasing approved client gear for $50.

In commercial markets, Sidecut Reports was fortunate enough to be on hand, in person, for the "official" launch of services July 21 in Las Vegas, where we learned the following lessons: 1) Clearwire is going to be intensely local with its promotions going forward, which means that national roaming is not going to be a big selling point; 2) The company seems to be putting value ahead of mobility, which we think is a smart move since without a smartphone device,WiMAX isn't as sexy as, say, an iPhone 3GS or a Palm Pre; and 3) the company is going to enlist as many resellers as possible, from the very big (like Comcast and Sprint) to the very small (single-owner shops and mall kiosks) to help get the word out.

To get a feel for how this will roll out, consider the Clearwire sales footprint in the greater Las Vegas metro area: According to Clearwire, it only plans to operate five "branded" outlets in Vegas, including two storefront operations and three mall-based kiosks. The balance of the company's contracts will be sold by a list of 80-plus authorized resellers, including sales locations inside six Vegas-area Best Buy stores, 24 Radio Shack locations, and the rest independent resellers. The key for Clearwire is that all contracts will be with the parent company, and not resellers -- so no matter who signs a customer up, Clearwire will own the billing relationship.

For all the Clearwire knowledge you NEED TO KNOW for the latest quarter, order our CLEARWIRE NTK OCTOBER 2009 report today for just $4.95 -- that's right, less than five bucks for a lengthy take on Clearwire market launches, device plans, business news and more.

It's game of inches as they say. 

I have been looking at the reporting about Verizon's App Store activity and find the perspective of some pundits troubling.

As I reported when I went to the Verizon Developers Conference, the goal Verizon has is very different than being the equivalent of the iTunes AppStore.

Lets be honest, how many of us have looked at all 65,000 apps, and how many of us really want to.

Verizon announced a partnership with Vodafone, China Mobile and Softbank to deliver applications their way.  Very specfically Verizon was looking to open the interfaces for location, billing and trust (security).  I noted that their strategy was associated with a API that masked alot of the behind the scenes OSS work. 

Carriers and cellphone vendors have procedures for turning on the phone that represent over 100 steps in provisioning and configuration.  Verizon has tried to make the network valuable without having the carrier's internal OSS stifle the developer.  The one requirement is work within a framework. A lot of the companies that are on the iPhone do not like this framework, and it shows in in the blogosphere.

So Vodafone makes its announcement about their efforts to build Vodafone 360 which to me is a another strategy in keeping with the alliance, but is not getting the anger yet.

I think the reason maybe be that Verizon is in the California footprint and the developers are asked all the time "Can I use it on my phone" and since VZW is big in California, the answer frustrating.

It will be interesting to see what happens next, now that the Korean Communications Commission has okayed the importing of iPhones and Blackberries. 

Korean has a very saturated market, so I would not expect a fast migration.  However I would expect to see improvements from Samsung in software strategies, including an adoption of Android in the states.

It has been interesting to observe Kanji based cell phone users, They have a phonetic use of the alphabetic keyboard that makes their sms messages happen quite quickly.  I am not sure the soft key boards on a screen are going to add any value to most users.

Additionally most games in Asia have found their way through existing solutions, so I am not sure how much additional value the app store will bring to the table.

Of course on a sheer numbers market perspective the adoption will probably be astounding, but like Telefonica, I think the more interesting question is what impact it will have on carrier adoption.

As my regular readers know, I am Apple user but not and Apple fan.

As so many of my friends around me are using the iPhone and telling me how cool it is, while never making a call with it.  I decided the best AV tool I could use to get my points across was an iTouch.

I bought the iTouch paid extra for the microphone headset and gave it access to my Verizon MiFi.  I then downloaded skype with an outbound international dialing service.  What are the points I am trying to get across?

1) the iPhone is a gadget not a smart phone.  The best application I have seen on the iPhone that is telecom related is Calliflower, but even that is just as good if not better on the web. It really is a gaming device that you can by virtual cartridges at the app store.
2) the App Store has nothing to do with the 3G.  When spectrum was ransomed with the hope of new services, the apps and the network were suppose to be a blend.  We have still yet to find a purpose to be married and the app store is little more than a WAP gateway of control.
3) the Apps are in the store, because it is a gateway.  For all the talk of the 65,000 plus applications, It is nothing in comparison to the Internet itself and the value of Internet is repackaged within the store.
4) the network is the Internet, no offense to ATT.  The ability to deliver worldwide connectivity can not be over emphasized. The iPhone / iTouch are beautiful devices, but it would be a wrong to consider them valuable as a network device.

As you should have expected its a poor concession speech, but its a beautifully designed device.

There was a little cold-water type reality splashed on the audience at the morning panels here Thursday at the 4GWE conference, specifically around the notion of 4G network and device testing -- a relatively non-sexy topic that may nevertheless slow down the delivery of all the new devices promised for the 4G networks of the future.

The problem, as outlined by the panelists, is that with the increased bandwidth and increased functionality of the mobile devices of the future comes exponential requirements for testing to make sure the devices and the applications residing on them work as promised.

There was some deep-dive material that we're not going to get into right now (check this space for an update when we post the panel presentations) but on a simpler plane panelists like David Gehringer, VP of marketing for Fanfare Software, noted that things like the IEEE standards, say for mobile WiMAX, are really just the starting point for delivering a working device.

"It's nice to have a standard, but it's really just the ante," Gehringer said. After you meet the baseline standard specs, he said, "then the real testing starts."

Fanny Mlinarsky, president of octoScope, said that in the past testing mobile devices was relatively simple, since they typically only had one radio inside. Now, multiple radios -- different cellular bands, as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth -- are a given, as are multiple applications, sometimes from third parties outside the carrier's own operations.

The complexity, she said, makes testing devices a much harder task these days. Even Apple's iPhone, which all panelists agreed was an extremely well-tested device from the manufacturer's standpoint, has attracted a wide range of add-on applications, some of which perform better than others -- especially when it comes to battery usage.

"That's why iPhone users stay close to the power plug," Mlinarsky said.


 

Two afternoon panels Tuesday at the 4GWE conference here in Los Angeles made it clear that software developers, and not carriers, will drive innovation when it comes to 4G wireless applications of the future. The big, unanswered question is if, how and when two very different camps -- developers and service providers -- will work together in a fashion profitable for both camps.

There was more than a little animosity on display during the panel talks, and perhaps it was a good idea to keep developers on one panel, and service provders (and their large-equipment vendor partners) on another. Francisco Kattan, who is newly signed on at Alcatel-Lucent as senior director of the company's developer ecosystem, said that while in the past developers "had to beg" to get on any provider's mobile application "deck," with the iPhone and its revolutionary App Store, "the tables have now turned and competition for developers is at an all-time high."

But while device manufacturers (Nokia, RIM) and large service providers (Verizon) are trying to catch up to Apple by establishing developer programs and appliction stores, developers aren't so sure that the old guard are the best leaders for the 4G app development future. "Maybe operators shouldn't be running an apps store," said Shai Berger, CEO of Fonolo, which builds applications that allow users to bypass automated dialing systems. "It's not really in their core competency."

Operators and their providers, however, seemed more willing than ever to work with software developers, including talking about plans to open APIs into network knowledge (billing, presence, location) that developers might use to build even more useful 4G applications. But Kittur Nagesh, Cisco's director for service provider marketing, said that developers have to remember that partnerships can be much more successful than attempts to build products that only work over the top of provider services.

"Operators are not used to thinking that application developers can be part of a new revenue stream," Nagesh said. Developers and providers, he said, "should jointly develop over the top services and share the revenues."

 

Development Tools for 4G Hardware and Software, Part 1 (4G4-01)

Wednesday - 09/02/09,  8:30-9:45am

The mathematical theory often associated with wireless and mobile physical layer algroithms are complex and require a lot of thought when looking for new solutions in the wireless network. OFDM and MIMO are at the base of these algorithms. These sessions provides an intuitive and straightforward view beneficial to a wide audience of engineers and project managers. After an overview of the discussion about how to design a 4G device from Frank Schirrmeister of Synopsys, Frank Vincze of Steepest Ascent talked about the library software. The Library from Steepest Ascent deals with issues of channel optimisation, MIMO, and other LTE device management charteristics. Operations that are needed to manage the development of the device in a set of libraries that take you through the OSI stack.  Frequency Division Duplexing and the transciever functions are all within the library.  The library has prebuilt models that represent some standard models of design.  This allows product differentiation to be done in relation to some standard sets that include test scenarios.  All of this done within the Math Kernel Library within System Studio. Frequency is the subcarrier which makes up the orthogonal portion of the  OFDM strategy. LTE uses a number of channel coding techniques in LTE. The channel that makes the bitstream is controlled with a blended data channel and the control channel.  All this signal processing equates to the throughput of the device.  The algorithm in the MLK are put into the parameter blocks represented in software to enable the developer to manage the design through a GUI tool. In LTE there are a number of reserved spaces in the packet format of the signal. The blocks are the Scrambler, Symbol Modulation,  Layer Mapper and Precoder.  After your precode is completed it gets added to the LTE reserved signalling formats. By using the libraries you get the benefit of testing against real data. So your can develop in short time frames. The point of the Libraries "Don't Sweat the Math" TenSilica not surprisingly is looking at how to move the design to silica. After taking the libraries and developing your strategies you are to think about what goes on silica. There is always a trade off between the energy savings of moving to silica and the flexibility of software.  This is the complex integration that a developer faces in designing the device. Performance can be achieved in a number of ways with both hardware and software. TenSilica has built a LTE Reference Architecture including some new techniques in turbo processing. The speed of LTE's data path (150 MB/S) requires intense computation. The issues that a designer faces in moving to LTE. - is looking at existing legacy 3G design. Do they intend to be computational in design. - to what extent does your exist model stand up to the new efficiency requirements. - the DSPs embedded in their design may no longer be valid The implications of the business decisions is the carrier is looking for dual design systems, with and expectation that the efficiency of LTE will compel a single design in the future. Tensilica's focus is on the data plane processors hardware cores with software that supports the solutions to enhance performance.  This represents a blend of DSP and CPU functions to support the performance. TenSilica has a compatiable foundation that controls the system.  It in effect provides backward compatiablity.  The silica has further system functions embedded in the format.  The user defines the rest of the design using TenSilica Instruction Extension [TIE] Language.  TenSilica offers a wide range of Silica models from single MAC to 16 MAC design. Tensilica enables processing with four domains, Signal, matrix, softbits, and control. Presented by:   Frank Schirrmeister Director, Product Marketing, System-Level Solutions Synopsys, Inc   Chris Rowen Chief Technology Officer Tensilica   Frank Vincze Region Manager, Americas Steepest Ascent

The panel here at 4GWE on Mobile Social Applications picked up a theme from Brough Turner's earlier presentation -- that there is a big potential audience for applications that make use of mobile data owned by the provider, such as a user's location, their status, etc., especially when linked in a sharing fashion, such as on Facebook or Twitter.

Troy Cross, head of sales at voice-recognition supplier Vlingo, said that mobile access to social networking applications "allows you to connect to your friends faster," a "significant behaviorial change" as opposed to updating Facebook only when you are sitting behind a PC or laptop.

Shoshana Loeb, executive director and chief scientist at Telcordia, said there will be personal tradeoffs that will determine how successful mobile social media devices and applications will be -- such as cost for perceived value, and whether or not people feel comfortable allowing personal data like location to be shared.

"The technology allows you to lose your privacy much more easily" than in the past, Loeb said, guessing that governments everywhere will soon look more closely at the privacy concerns of mobile customers. Vlingo's Cross also predicted a "tsnuami" of regulation related to use of mobile data while driving, as consumers go on beyond simple "texting while driving" to trying to update a Facebook page while behind the wheel.

Nokia's Timothy Jasionowski opined that the industry now is at the state of "throwing rocks at each other," but that widespread availability of GPS-enabled phones has "opened up a giant laboratory" for experimentation. One unanswered question from the audience: How can corporations make use of mobile social networking technologies? Ideas? Leave 'em in the comments section below.