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RSS feedsCan Microsoft do to Nokia what it did to Netscape? That certainly seems to be the plan. This isn't the mobile and PC worlds converging, this is a collision course. Microsoft has a definite corporate view of extending the desktop through the server to mobile devices. A phone in everyone's pocket, running Microsoft software, if you like.
But it won't be quite so easy. For a start, Nokia isn't Netscape. And Microsoft faces a bigger problem: it is American, and Americans just don't 'get' mobile phones. Walk from the Personal Computer World office to the nearest bus stop and you'll see a dozen people on their mobiles. Spend an entire day in any US town and you won't see nearly as many.
Europe 'gets' mobiles, and it isn't just that the nearest bus stop is in Oxford Street. In Bournemouth or Brighton, Munich or Milan, mobile phone use is heavy and as much a part of everyday life as cars or newspapers.
US mobile penetration rates are about 40 per cent, or two-thirds of that in Europe, but many are fixed car phones. Quite a lot of people have more than one phone to cope with the poor coverage and competing technologies, and so usage is low. Worse, penetration of devices that can exchange data with one another is dreadful. This shows in the strength of the pager and the lack of text messaging. In Europe, the pager is an old technology we once used, like the telex or typewriter. In the US it's a vital business tool.
So, Americans are venturing out into the mobile world unprepared. They see the mess of standards (which is peculiar to the US) and think the rest of the world is like that. To bring order to the chaos they see the solution as being a new, all-embracing set of standards - those we use on the internet. It makes sense in that the computing standards then embrace every technology - CDPD, i-mode and WML - and convert them to a level playing field, one which is Microsoft's home turf.
The problem is that most of the world - 500 million of the globe's 700 million phones - is GSM, and GSM has mobile internet standards of its own; standards that have been chosen because the usual internet ones don't do a very good job over a slow connection that is likely to drop. So, what we see from the GSM world looking into the US, rather than the American view looking out, is (in the nicest possible sense) a nation trying to change our standards to those they know and understand.
Security issues
A great example of this is how to handle security. The problem is that mobile devices use Wireless Transport Layer Security (WTLS) as a secure protocol. The fixed internet uses Secure Socket Layer (SSL). So, when you type a message into a Wap phone with your password, credit card number or customer records in the text, it goes over a secure WTLS link to the mobile operator, where it gets converted into SSL and sent on to a corporate server.
This sounds fine until you realise that somewhere in a computer buried inside the mobile phone network the sensitive information is held in plain text as it passes between security models.
Since one of the main markets for mobile data solutions is the banking community, you can understand why this might give their security people the shakes.
One Microsoft solution to this is to have separate accounts for mobile and fixed connections. This means that the mobile account has lower privileges and so is less useful. The better Microsoft solution is to put SSL on the mobile device - that is to say, something running Microsoft software.
That's a fine thing to do if you are starting with a clean slate. (Well, fine if you ignore the way mobile protocols have evolved to suit the environment and think it will work.)
The mobile world would look at the fact that this isn't a clean slate: there are many millions of 9210s, R380s, 9110s and Wap phones with WTLS support already out there, and there is no way these can be made to support SSL. A better solution is to put WTLS on the fixed network.
There is no good reason not to do this except, of course, that it favours people using Nokia hardware rather than discriminating against them and leaving the field open for Microsoft. Indeed, Nokia has the Nokia Activ Server, which does just this. You'll find details atwww.nokia.com/securenetworksolutions.
The battlefield then becomes the hearts and minds of the people running the networks in companies that have large corporate bases of mobile phone users. It's telling that the first client for MMIS was Vodafone, because if Americans don't 'get' mobile phones, they certainly won't get connected communicators.
The history of mobile phones has shown that evolution goes through three stages: coverage, tariffs and value-added services. So, to take the UK in the mid-1990s - the stage most of the US is at now - as the new Orange and Mercury One2One networks came online, they had worse coverage than the established networks and so had to be cheaper.
Orange launched with 50 per cent of the UK population covered, Mercury One2One just within the M25. Then, as coverage became less of an issue - sometime in the late 1990s - the battle grew over tariffs. Today, we've reached something of an equilibrium on tariffs, with Virgin rocking the boat a bit, and the battle is over value-added services - free Wap calls, text messaging, voicemail, traffic services and HSCSD vs GPRS.
The US isn't just behind Europe, it's being left further behind because there is not enough competition to drive coverage up and tariffs down. This means they don't have the usage to move on to the value-added services stage we are entering with GPRS.
So, the battlefield will not only involve those few corporate IT managers, but those corporate IT managers in Europe - people who already support WTLS services.
Can Microsoft do to Nokia what it did to Netscape? It will depend on whether Nokia can get to those individuals first.
Blackberry in a jam
The US view that what works well over there will work just as well over here isn't only held by Microsoft. The Blackberry pager has been a big success with US rich kids. For $400 and $40 a month, you get a very cute pocket device that gives you constant access to your email and schedule. It uses the Mobitex pager network - 30-second latency, 8kbps packet rate - but unfortunately on a different frequency to the Mobitex network in the UK.
The Blackberry is available in the UK, but at around £400 plus £40 a month - with a minimum of five for a company - and using the BT Cellnet GPRS network. It works brilliantly, but BT Cellnet has become carried away with this, ordering 175,000 of them - almost as many as there are currently in use in the US.
Over there, it had no competition - nothing else gives coast-to-coast coverage - but here it will have to compete with other GPRS devices such as the Motorola A008, a slew of CE devices, and smart phones such as the Ericsson R520. They will add £8 a month to existing mobile phone tariffs, do a lot more and cost a lot less than a Blackberry.
9210 meets C64
One of the things that made the Psion great was that it came with a programming language, OPL. This means a development community grew around the machine and so there is heaps of Psion shareware. Developing for the Nokia 9210 isn't as straightforward. There are no tools with the machine, but anyone can register on the Nokia website and be sent a 9210 emulator for the PC.
There are over 50,000 registered developers and we are just starting to see software appear. One of the best programs to be ported to the 9210 is Frodo, a Commodore 64 emulator. Originally written for the Amiga, it turns your 9210 into a Commodore 64 with a 1541 disk drive.
I was surprised how much I'd forgotten about the Commodore 64, a machine I once programmed commercially. Simple things such as cursor movements in quotes being recorded rather than acted upon. The emulator sent me scurrying up to the loft to find some of my old programming books. All tests made this look and feel like a C64.
The C64 had a special character set which is replicated, and some special keys such as the RUN/STOP key, which loads and runs the first program on the tape or disk. These are mapped to key combinations on the Nokia.
A trawl on the web (www.c64.com is a good place to start) will yield a collection of disk images that can be loaded in. Commodore floppy disks had a capacity of 171kb, and so that's the disk size. Today it seems hard to believe that a disk could have less capacity than a modern processor cache.
The emulator is available as source code, so if you have the Nokia developers' tools you can compile it yourself, or you can download the emulator from a mirror site: www.edmund.roland.org/e32frodo and the best mirror I found was www.my-communicator.com.
When I looked at the emulator there was no sound, but Alfred Heggestad, who has written the port, is hoping to have sound finished by the time you read this.
AOL: one step ahead
One of the smartest things AOL did was buy Tegic, the software company that does predictive text input (T9). Tegic software has been licensed by every major mobile phone company, except Alcatel. OK, so Motorola only uses it in one obscure phone and Ericsson has only just started using it, but you are much more likely to have a phone with T9 than without.
One of the reasons the acquisition was so good was that AOL did it before it was clear what a runaway success T9 would be, but better still is the strategic benefit. Just as Microsoft wants its software in every pocket, so does AOL, except AOL is already there.
Text messaging's days are numbered. Paying 10p for less than 160bytes is a gravy train for the networks, but new technologies are looming. Chat over GPRS is going to take over. When you are always connected, services such as AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ and MSN Messenger start to make a lot more sense, particularly if you can communicate with many people, some of whom are on a PC and others on a mobile phone.
Instant Messaging is new to mobile phones, but there is no need to wait for a critical mass of users as there was with SMS. That mass is already there, using the existing messaging platforms. AOL is working with Motorola and Ericsson to put Instant Messaging into mobiles. Microsoft will have MSN Messenger in Stinger phones. What the world needs is a bridge between the two, but it's unlikely that we'll get it.
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All Mobile Technology
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