Tag Archives: Mobile

UK’s CMA Scrutinizes Mobile Ecosystems of Apple and Google

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The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced that they have launched a market study into Apple’s and Google’s mobile ecosystems over concerns they have market power which is harming users and other businesses.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is taking a closer look at whether the firms’ effective duopoly over the supply of operating systems (iOS and Android), app stores (App Store and Play Store), and web browsers (Safari and Chrome), could be resulting in consumers losing out across a wide range of areas.

The CMA is describing “mobile ecosystems” as a variety of products, content, and services such as music, TV and video streaming, fitness tracking, shopping and banking. They also include devices such as smart speakers, smart watches, home security, and lighting (which mobiles can connect to and control).

The purpose of the market study appears to be to determine whether the ecosystems of Google and Apple are stifling competition. CMA will also examine the effects of Google’s and Apple’s market power over other businesses, such as app developers, who rely on either Apple or Google to market their products to customers via their phones.

9to5Mac reported that the CMA views Apple and Google’s ecosystems as a “duopoly”. 9to5Mac also pointed out that the CMA’s investigation comes after a preliminary ruling from the European Commission that Apple’s mandated 30% cut of In-App Purchases unfairly diminished competition in music streaming.

Personally, I think it is probably a good idea for the CMA to investigate the Apple and Google “duopoly”. They may find that the situation is not really a problem after all. Or, they could discover reasons to induce changes in how both companies do things. Those changes might turn out to be really good for consumers.

Wander the World with the Fonebud W at CES 2018

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Mobile data charges abroad can be prohibitively expensive and tethering for wifi burns through the phone’s battery. The new Fonebud W wireless hotspot solves this problem for over 80 countries worldwide. Don chats with Dixon about the features of this new device.

Using your home SIM while in a foreign land typically ends with a large bill when you get back, though seasoned travellers will have a pocketful of SIMs for local telcos. Mind you, it’s still a pain making sure that your smartphone is unlocked and forwarding your calls to your new number (unless you have a dual SIM phone). A much better solution would be the upcoming Fonebud W personal WiFi hotspot which works in over 80 countries, particularly in Asia and China. The 10,000 mAh battery will run the Fonebud W for well over a day and can be used to wirelessly charge a smartphone. Yes, it has a wireless charger built-in, though you can still charge with a cable. The small LED screen shows details of connectivity and battery life.

The Fonebud W will be available in Q2 2018 and will cost US$129-$169 including 24 GB data which is valid for a year.

Don Baine is the Gadget Professor and gives lectures at TheGadgetProfessor.com.

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Samsung DeX

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The Samsung DeX Station converts a Galaxy S8 or S8+ smartphone into a desktop computer. Plop the S8 in the DeX, plug in a keyboard and mouse, hook up a TV, and you’re set with Android on the big screen. That’s the theory, what about in practice? Let’s take a look.

The DeX hardware is circular device, about 10 cm across, with a top surface that sweeps smoothly back and up to reveal the USB C connector for the smartphone.

Around the base are two USB 2 ports, a full-size HDMI socket, a 100 Mb/s network connector and a USB C for powering the DeX.

Getting setup is simplicity itself. Connect all the hardware up and slot the phone in. There’s no additional software to add as it’s all built-in to the S8 and the DeX itself. I used a wireless keyboard and mouse combo connecting to a USB transmitter. The TV connected to the HDMI port with a cable and I used the WiFi on the S8 for networking.

When the S8 is placed in the DeX, a prompt appears asking whether to start DeX or to only mirror the S8 screen. Choosing the former gets the DeX desktop in its full HD glory and it looks convincing. But what’s it really like?

  

Let’s start with the positives…the DeX desktop is what you’d expect an Android desktop to be like, using familiar apps in a windowed world. It’s fast and all the apps on the phone are available through DeX. Google Maps works and it’s perfect for YouTube and web browsing. Samsung promotes DeX-optimised apps via its app store.

  

But while many apps seemed to be quite happy with DeX and run in both full screen and windowed modes, some apps don’t like DeX and display as if they are on the S8 in portrait. This is frustrating and while this could be expected for games like Monument Valley, it seems odd that Netflix can’t cope – surely this would be seen as a “must have” by Samsung? Some apps don’t have all the necessary controls either – it’s tricky to pinch-to-zoom with only a mouse pointer.

  

Of course, games players and movie watchers aren’t the target audience for DeX. Samsung see this as a tool for business and promote the benefits of Microsoft apps and Office365 in the literature. For example, instead of a lugging a laptop for a presentation, take DeX, plug it into the data projector and you’re sorted. Need to do a quick bit of editing? Steal a desk, connect up DeX, fire up Word and you’re working.

Where DeX also scores well is with VDIs (Virtual Desktop Infrastructures) like Citrix. Connect through to your office backend to run a virtual Windows PC and you can be working as if you are at your own desk. From that point of view, it’s slick. While DeX isn’t going to replace a laptop on an extended business trip, it makes sense for a short visit when you want to travel light.

Pricewise, the DeX station has an RRP of GB£129, though it’s already discounted by £40 in several online stores. It’s still a percentage on top of the S8 and S8+.

Overall, DeX does what it sets out to do and the key question here is not about the technology. It’s whether Samsung’s vision and the DeX Station match your way of working. YMMV, as they say.

AT&T Launches Stream Saver for Mobile Data Customers

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AT&T logoEveryone wants more data. Especially mobile users. The obvious solution would be for telcos to just give everyone unlimited data. But, they’re not ready to do that just yet. That’s why AT&T launched its new Stream Saver program for mobile video:

Stream Saver allows you to watch more video on your wireless devices while using less data by streaming content that it recognizes as video at Standard Definition quality, similar to DVD, (about 480p), so you can enjoy more of what you love on your smartphone or tablet. You will have control over which lines on your account use Stream Saver and can turn it off or on at any time once AT&T activates it.

(Why anyone would turn Stream Saver off is beyond me.) Stream Saver is automatically available for most AT&T customers:

Stream Saver will be added to existing and new customers on many of our postpaid rate plans that include data. It will be included on AT&T Unlimited Plus, Mobile Share Advantage, Mobile Share Value, and Mobile Share plans, the prior AT&T Unlimited Plan, the AT&T 1GB Tablet Plan, AT&T 1GB Car Plan, our Unlimited Data plan, and other select plans. Some specific plans such as select connected vehicles are not eligible.

AT&T also notes that Stream Saver will be available to GoPhone users with existing data plans. However, the service may not be available on all business accounts.

Stream Save is available at no extra cost to customers. I’m guessing AT&T implemented this plan in reaction to aggressive freebies offered by competitors like T-Mobile. I also wonder if Stream Saver allows AT&T to shape this video-based data in some way that makes it more efficient on their end. Either way, if you’re an AT&T mobile customer, you can now watch the latest season of your favorite TV show without it eating thru your data plan.

Link Mini NAS and Wireless Hotspot from Fasetto at CES

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Fasetto are making good on their promises from last year’s CES with the announcement of the Fasetto Link, a palm-sized pocket NAS and communications hotspot. Building on the Fasetto’s cross-platform cloud storage, the Link is a 2″ by 1″ cuboid, packing in a maximum of 2 TB of storage and a range of communication technologies, including WiFi, Bluetooth and LTE. The modular design is powered by a Linux-driven Samsung Exynos 7 Octa 7420 2.1 GHz processor.

The Link is designed for an adventurous life from the start with a water and temperature-resistant shell that should protect the owner’s data from the frozen tundra to the odd cycle in a washing machine. It’s water resistant to 45 ft (IP68) with an expected battery life of 5 hours going full pelt but there’s no detail on operating temperature. There’s an optional battery pack that clips onto the Link for additional time. The Link can be discreetly attached to D-rings and or kept out of sight inside a bag.

“Link combines the most powerful commercially-available hardware with an incredibly sleek, but tough, design,” said Coy Christmas, co-founder and CEO, Fasetto. “In Link, we now have a living storage and communications device and platform that lets you stream, store and share all of your digital files through one secure location that can survive almost anything.”

In addition to the physical protection, Link has “custom-developed reform security software, user permissions and multiple layers of hardware and software encryption giving users a high degree of security and control over their data.” That’s reassuring given how much data could potentially be stored in in 2 TB.

If you are wondering what you might do with this, imagine that you’ve taken loads of digital photographs but you are in the back end of nowhere. Rather than try to transfer or backup all the high quality digital photos across non-existent LTE, the photos can be stored more quickly on the Link’s storage via wifi, and then made available to other devices in the local area. That’s a fairly tame example as the octacore processor has plenty of power to record extreme sports or stream multiple HD video feeds.

Fasetto Link was named a CES 2017 Innovation Awards Honoree in four categories, including Wireless Handset Accessories, Computer Hardware and Components, Software and Mobile Apps and Computer Accessories.

GNC and CES followers will recall that Luke Malpass from Fasetto was interviewed as part of the coverage last year and Link availability was expected for Q4 2014. This is has been revised to Spring 2017. Prices start at US$349 for a 256 GB version up to US$1,149 for the 2 TB version. More details at Link’s shop where pre-orders can be placed.

If you are attending CES, pop in to see Link in action at the Las Vegas Convention Center, Central Hall, stand 16734 from 5-7 January 2017.

The Future of the Smartphone, a Pocket Appliance

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Apple MicrowaveThere’s an article that has been making the rounds the past couple of days or so stating that the smartphone will be a dead product category within five years. The premise of the article seems to be based on a consumer “study” that consists of interviewing a bunch of consumers and what is on their personal technological wish lists.

The smartphone as we know it isn’t going away any time soon. As an ultimate and matured convergence device, the vital functions smartphones are now being used for cannot and will not be replaced by some vague “machine learning” unspecified magic technology that will somehow suddenly appear and take over. At risk of being a stick in the mud, the real world doesn’t work that way. Forms can change, but basic needs that those forms fulfill remain stable.

For one small personal example, I frequently have to send business documents to my company. Back in the old days, this involved putting paperwork into pre-addressed, pre-paid postage company envelopes and dropping them into a mailbox, ultimately hoping they did not get lost in the mail. Later on, it evolved into companies that would overnight the paperwork back to the office. The next step in the evolution involved scanners hooked to computers with data connections. The final step in this evolution involves smartphones. I simply use a special dedicated smartphone app that takes a picture of each document, automatically corrects for the inevitable skewed image distortions, and turns the document photo into a black and white image that you would swear was scanned in a traditional scanner hooked to a computer. It packages these documents together, asks for a bit of additional identifying numbers, and then instantly sends the documents off to the company. I get an instant email receipt notification on the same smartphone letting me know the documents were successfully delivered to my company. This sort of functionality cannot and will not be replaced by some sort of pie-in-the-sky neural interface or voice-activated clothing. Let’s get real.

I recently purchased a new kitchen range that cost about the same amount as a high-end smartphone. Kitchen ranges have been around forever. They have had multiple doses of technology applied to their functions in an attempt to reinvent and reinvigorate the product category. Even with this injection of microprocessor technology, kitchen ranges are still appliances. Millions of people have to buy them, and they come in a wide variety of forms, from the low end to the high end, as fashionable and as expensive as you want. But they are still appliances. When was the last time you got excited by your microwave oven? Thought so.

Smartphones are rapidly in the process of turning into pocket appliances. They are extremely useful, and almost everyone you see has one and is constantly interacting with it. Nonetheless, it is turning into just an appliance.

Home appliances have varying lifespans that can kick out to 20 or 30 years depending on the quality of the item. As a pocket appliance, smartphones are under a lot more physical stress and need to be replaced much more frequently than refrigerators, cook stoves and washing machines.

It turns out that always having a high-quality internet-connected camera/computer in one’s pocket is incredibly useful. “Machine learning” isn’t going to replace that camera, nor will it replace the constant necessity to look up people, places and things and interact directly with them in real time during the day.

Five years from now, smartphones will still be around in very much the same forms they are today. It is likely we will be on average be keeping them longer. No longer a novelty, they are just a necessary appliance that will require periodic replacement.

Time to get those clothes out of the washer and put them in the dryer.

The Mobile App Gap

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The history of mobile applications dates back to simple games such as Snake, Pong, Tetris, and Tic-Tac-Toe included with candy bar phones.

As phones became “smarter,” Windows Mobile phones of the mid-2000’s and others included the ability to install third-party software, both paid and free.

Next came the era of the high noise level platform app stores that we know and love/hate today. There are tons of both free and paid apps. Some apps are useful to accomplish very specific, pointed tasks with high efficiency. Others apps are arguably less than useless. The good and the bad, the useful and the useless are packaged together in a cacophony of brightly-colored graphics and flowery sales language, all on equal footing and demanding attention. App discovery is often painful, unpleasant and risks device app bloat.

Mobile device ownership and management requires a learning curve. In phase one, the mobile device novice is at high risk of downloading seemingly every app encountered, while actually making use of very little of that which has been installed.

Phase two of the learning curve is typically marked by out of storage memory errors.

Phase three requires the user to decide which useless apps should be deleted so that the mobile device can continue to be updated and/or functional. When deleting apps, there is a tendency for the user to hang on to installed apps if there’s even the most remote of chances that the user might conceivably use the app.

The key test to determine whether a particular app should simply be deleted is to ask yourself whether or not you would reinstall it after a factory reset.

It should be noted that apps that the user has paid for will tend to have a higher psychological value placed on them, regardless of whether they are actually useful or not.

In this noisy mobile app jungle, where crap is right alongside cream, people are trying to squeeze the most out of their mobile devices, to extract the maximum productivity.

Mobile devices make great content consumption devices. Proof is all around us. At any given moment when people are around, how many of those people are absorbed with their mobile devices?

As mobile devices become ever more powerful, the next step in the evolution of the mobile device usage learning curve is revolving around increasing demand to accomplish real-world productivity tasks. While some productivity tasks can be accomplished, others are difficult or impossible – not because of computing power limitations – after all, today’s mobile devices often have quite powerful processors – no, because of software limitations.

Mobile device operating systems have grown larger and more sophisticated along with the more powerful processors. However, there is a problem plaguing both iOS and Android in the form of an app gap. Apps are wannabe pretenders when it comes to genuine software sophistication. No mobile device apps can compare on equal footing with desktop computer software. Both major platforms – iOS and Android – suffer from this problem.

There is nothing stopping software vendors from developing highly sophisticated mobile software, other than the fact that it’s typically just not worth it. For whatever reason, mobile device owners have a pervasive “it has to be free or very low cost” mentality. We are willing to spend upwards of a thousand dollars or even more for a high end mobile device, but balk at the idea of having to pay more than a few dollars for single apps.

If you have ever tried to push a mobile device to better take advantage of its powerful processing capabilities, you quickly run into a problem. Go beyond a certain level of task sophistication, and the apps typically fall flat very quickly. The ultimate test for mobile apps is to take a mobile device and plug it in to a 1080p or higher monitor. Attach a keyboard and if it’s an Android device, attach a mouse or trackpad. Try to use the mobile device and the installed apps like you would a full computer. For example, try to push the experience to its limits by editing a long, complex video and see how well it goes. The mobile software will play back high resolution videos without any trouble at all, but try to do something really productive and things quickly fall apart. The problem isn’t the processor, but the software.

The mobile app gap situation doesn’t look as if it will improve anytime soon. In the meantime, as mobile device owners and users there are a lot of questions we should be asking ourselves.

How much are you willing to pay for mobile device apps? What has been your experience? Have you ever paid for an app and then realized later that it was a waste of money? What is the most you have ever paid for a mobile app and why?

Why are people willing to pay sometimes hundreds of dollars for sophisticated commercial desktop class software without batting an eye, yet close their wallets when it comes to paid apps for mobile devices? Do people perceive mobile devices to have as big of a potential payoff as a desktop or laptop? If mobile computing devices don’t have the same payoff potential as a desktop or laptop, then why not? What is the difference between the two systems? What can be done to increase the potential payoff value of mobile computing devices?