In an earlier blog posting, I had commented on the smartphone OS market. Since then, Symbian Foundation has transitioned to a licensing body and Nokia has taken full ownership of the Symbian OS. Today, very few other handset manufacturers use the Symbian OS in their products. However, recently, Nokia released some smartphones based on the Symbian OS (such as N8 and C3) that seem to be doing very well in the market.
I continue to believe that, in the long run, Android and iPhone OS will triumph in the marketplace. The iPhone OS relies entirely on iPhone sales. Android, on the other hand, runs on a variety of phones from different handset manufacturers. As a result, in the long run, Android will be the No.1 smartphone OS in the market. Windows has a good product in WP7, and there are rumors that Nokia will OEM MIcrosoft's WP7. However, it is unlikely that WP7 will take away any market share from Android and iPhone OS. In the long run, there will be only 2 OS running on smartphones - iPhone OS running on all iPhones, and Android running on all other smartphones.
3GPP is responsible for defining the specifications for a number of wireless standards such as GSM, GPRS, UMTS, HSPA, IMS, and LTE. 3GPP specifications are organized and issued as “Releases” – Release 99, Release 1, Release 2, etc. However, each Release and, in many cases, each specification within a Release, includes changes and updates to multiple standards such as GPRS, UMTS, IMS etc. For the average reader, this is confusing and it is sometimes difficult to ascertain which section(s) of a specification or which update applies to which standard.
For example, the Release 8 March 2009 version of the 3GPP specifications is considered to be the first stable reference release for all LTE commercial products. This is not necessarily obvious to an average reader. Subsequent LTE releases are all expected to be backward compatible with this release. In fact, Release 8 is the first 3GPP release that defines the LTE specifications.
Release 9 builds on the functionality specified in Release 8, and includes a number of enhancements. These include enhancements to Home Node B (also called Femto Cells), definition of the requirements for LTE Home Node B, Emergency Calls for VoIP, MBMS (Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service), LTE Self Organizing Networks, among others.
Release 10 introduces “LTE Advanced” which is expected to provide true 4G speeds at 100Mbps peak. This is achieved by aggregating spectrum for better bandwidth. This release is expected to be available in March 2011 and will be backward compatible with the previous releases. Release 10 is expected to be a “major” release – any operator deploying Release 10 can apply the trademarked label “LTE Advanced” to its network. Release 10 is expected to provide full support for LTE Home Node B (LTE Femto Cells), as well as fully specify LTE Self Organizing Networks (SON). SON is important in LTE due to the flat nature of the network in which Node Bs interface with each other over the X2 interface.
LTE specifications are expected to support both Voice and Data, contrary to popular notion that it only supports Data. Support for Voice is enabled through a series of updates to the 3GPP specifications, such as the support high quality VOIP encoding in Release 7 (to match the quality of circuit switched voice calls), support for IMS emergency calls in Release 7, and updates to the radio and core network in Release 8. Support for Voice in LTE will be based on IMS, and is being specified in conjunction with a GSMA initiative called “Voice Over LTE” (previously called OneVoice).
At the 2010 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the three largest CDMA operators in the world, Verizon Wireless, KDDI, and China Telecom, announced that they were joining the GSM Association. Qualcomm, considered by many to be one of the leading proponents of the CDMA technology, is also an associate member of the GSM Association. This then raises the larger question: should the GSM Association drop the word “GSM” and re-label itself as Mobile Association or something similar? With both CDMA and GSM/UMTS operators deploying LTE in the next several years, the differences between the 2 sets of operators are starting to blur. The GSM World Congress realized this trend and renamed itself to Mobile World Congress some years back. It may now be time for the GSM Association to follow suit and re-label itself as well.
The smartphone market is growing exponentially every year. Some analysts estimate that smartphones account for 25% of all mobile phones sold today. This is likely to increase significantly over the next several years.
The battle for dominance, and in some cases, survival in the Smartphone OS market is reaching a decisive stage. Android and iPhone have the momentum at present, followed by Blackberry, Symbian and Windows Mobile. Linux is fast losing traction in the smartphone market and may eventually be a non-player in this market segment. And, of course, one cannot dismiss the Palm OS which has received some good reviews, and has a strong presence in the US smartphone market. In the US market, RIM holds the No.1 spot in the smartphone category, followed by iPhone.
iPhone is the most popular OS platform for third party application development today. However, it is a semi-closed system and Apple has not licensed its OS to other device manufacturers. Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile, on the other hand, are open OS platforms that have been licensed to a number of device manufacturers. Mobile devices based on these OS platforms are available from a number of vendors. On the other hand, Blackberry OS is available only from RIM.
Symbian leads the worldwide smartphone market today with 40% to 50% market share, but its market share has been steadily declining over the last few years. Symbian dominates in Europe, but has limited presence in the US. Symbian is an OS that has been designed and optimized specifically to run on mobile devices, and has undergone a lot of changes over the last several years. Until recently, there were multiple variants of the OS; UIQ, S60 and MOAP. Today, Symbian is owned by Nokia and there is only version (S60). The Symbian OS is open source and is freely available to interested developers. The current version of the OS is v3, which corresponds to S60 5th Edition (actually Symbian v1 corresponds to S60 5th Edition). Symbian OS uses a microkernel architecture, which contains a minimum set of OS functions. This is supported by a set of servers that provide other required functionality (networking, file system mgt, telephony services, etc). Symbian programming is done in C++; developing prototypes and demos is easy and efficient in Symbian.
Windows Mobile, which some pundits had initially predicted would take over the smartphone OS market (ie., a repeat of Windows’ success in the PC OSmarket), has been losing market share and momentum to Android over the last year. In an effort to reverse this trend, Microsoft introduced a completely redesigned version of the OS called Windows Phone 7 at the Mobile World Congress in February. This new OS is based on the Windows CE 6 kernel. It has a completely new UI, Outlook and Office support, and Zune and Xbox support. However, this OS has stringent hardware requirements for third party device manufacturers such as large WVGA screen with a single aspect ratio, accelerometer, FM radio, WiFi, AGPS, 5 (no more, no less) specific hardware buttons, including one for Bing Search. Mandating a specific button for Bing is an aggressive attempt to promote its search engine (over Google’s search engine). The first set of smartphones based on Windows Phone 7 are due to be released towards the end of this year. The jury is still out on whether Windows Phone 7 will salvage Microsoft’s standing in the smartphone OS market. So far, Windows OS has not generated the level of excitement and interest among the application developer community that we have seen for iPhone and Android.
Google’s Android OS is based on Linux. It was developed by Android Inc, which was acquired by Google. Android supports third party application development using Java, and the Android SDK includes a number of Java libraries. However, Android uses a non-standard version of Java (not the standard Java ME), thereby making applications written in standard Java incompatible with the Android Java environment. The Android OS is available as open source to third party developers. There are at least 20-30 phone models on the market today that use the Android OS. This year is expected to see an exponential increase in the number of Android based phones in the market.
Palm OS, which has received positive reviews from industry experts, is based on Linux and has incorporated many of the Web 2.0 functionality. It has a limited market share and is not expected to be an important player in the smartphone OS market.
The Blackberry OS is a proprietary multi-tasking smartphone OS developed by RIM for Blackberry devices. RIM provides a set of APIs for application developers. This OS runs exclusively on Blackberry devices, and occupies the No.1 spot in the US smartphone OS market.
There is another smartphone OS worth mentioning – Maemo. This is a Linux based OS developed by Nokia. However, at the Mobile World Congress in February, Nokia announced that it was merging the Maemo project with Moblin (Mobile Linux developed by the Linux Foundation) to create a new smartphone OS called MeeGo.
As the smartphone market evolves, it is very likely that the top 3 OS platforms will be iPhone, Android and the proprietary Blackberry. iPhone and Android platforms are expected to attract the largest number of third party application developers. Symbian and Windows may continue to see market share erosion, and some level of consolidation can be expected in the smartphone OS market in the long run.
Ever wondered why the GSM mobile standards community keeps changing the RF technology with each evolution? The original GSM standard is based on TDMA RF technology. When GSM evolved to UMTS (3G), the RF technology was changed to spread spectrum (WCDMA). The RF technology once again changed with LTE, the 4G evolution of the standard, to OFDMA.
TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) was chosen for the original GSM standard back in the late 1980s/1990 to make more efficient use of the radio spectrum by enabling higher capacity to be supported in a given radio spectrum (bandwidth) when compared to the previous 1G analog RF technology (FDMA). In GSM, the 200Khz carrier frequencies are time division multiplexed between different users, with each user using the carrier frequency for 1/8th of the time (0.577ms).
WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) was chosen for UMTS to meet the requirement for higher data rates, for higher capacity and to perform well in dense areas (city centers, etc). Carrier frequencies were allocated in chunks of 5MHz. TDMA technology could not meet the performance and data rate requirements specified for UMTS.
LTE, the 4G evolution of the GSM technology, uses OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) for the downlink and Single Carrier FDMA for the uplink. OFDMA was chosen for multiple reasons:
Flexibility in spectrum allocation. OFDMA can be deployed in spectrum ranging from 1.5 MHz to 20MHz. WCDMA, on the other hand, required spectrum in multiples of 5 MHz.
Requirement for higher bandwidth and data rates. In UMTS, 5 MHz spectrum allocation limits the maximum achievable data rate.
Lower latency with OFDMA.
Better tolerance to multipath fading and interference.
What will the RF technology be when the GSM technology evolves to 5G in several years? We’ll just have to wait and see …
Recently, there has been a lot of discussion in the US about Distracted Driving. Recently, the US Department of Transportation sponsored a summit to understand the risks related to Distracted Driving and discuss potential approaches to addressing the problem. In fact, just this week, the US Government issued a blanket ban on texting by commercial trucks and buses.
Distracted Driving essentially deals with the use of mobile phones while driving, specifically to receive or make voice calls, and/or read or send text messages. Suggested solution approaches range from making vehicles a “mobile free” zone by jamming the signals to slapping huge fines on anyone caught using the mobile phone while driving. However, a smartphone application can be designed to intelligently disable certain capabilities of the phone during driving, without any user intervention. Using the GPS capability, the application can determine the speed of the vehicle. If it is over a certain speed (such as 10 mph), it can disable certain communication features on the phone.
In the US, states enact their own laws on Distracted Driving. For example, in some states, both texting and voice phone calls are banned while driving, whereas in other states, only texting is banned. An intelligent application will take these variations in laws into account. Using location coordinates and mapping capability (maps can be stored locally on the phone), the Application can determine the state the mobile device is in. A static table containing the Distracted Driving rules for each state can be created and maintained by the Application. By querying this table, the Application can determine which features to turn off/on for a specific state. For example, if the vehicle crosses a state border, the Application can be triggered to automatically query the table and decide if it has to turn on/off any of the Distracted Driving features (incoming voice calls, incoming messages, sending messages, making voice calls). Changes in Distracted Driving rules for a state can be pushed to the phone over the air. This can be achieved by sending an SMS to the phone with a link to download the new version of the Application.
One of the technical challenges that a Distracted Driving solution needs to address is to be able to determine if the user is the driver or a passenger in the vehicle. Passengers should be allowed to freely use mobile phones without any restriction. One of the approaches is to automatically enable specific Distracted Driving features (based on the regulations in the state) for all occupants of the vehicle initially when the Application determines that the speed is over the pre-set threshold. A message can be displayed on the phone screen indicating this. Distracted Driving features can be manually turned off by pressing a complex sequence of keys on the keyboard. This procedure must require the use of 2 hands, and should be sufficiently difficult for the driver to execute while driving. This ensures that only passengers can disable the Distracted Driving feature. A timeout interval can be introduced whereby the Distracted Driving feature is turned off automatically when the vehicle is below the speed threshold (say, 10 mph) continuously for 10 minutes or so, indicating that the user is no longer in the vehicle.
This is not a fool proof procedure and a driver who is determined to work around it can do so. However, this procedure should prevent most drivers from turning the feature off while driving.
Mobile Health Monitoring requires the collection of health data using various methods. Some types of data can be manually entered (for example, a person's weight or calories), other types of data can be collected through a wireless zigbee or bluetooth interface from body sensors. And then there are other types of health related data that can be collected using the accelerometer capability that is available on some of the smartphones these days. For example, the iPhone has a built-in LIS302DL 3-axis accelerometer. The accelerometer measures the vibration or motion of the phone; this data can be collected and transmitted to a server for processing and analysis.
One of the interesting health monitoring applications using the accelerometer is that of remote pregnancy monitoring. A pregnant female may require periodic evaluation of her physiological condition, as well as the in-utero fetus, during pregnancy. Under normal circumstances, this monitoring will require visits to the physician's office. A mobile phone with built-in accelerometer can be used to remotely monitoring some of the conditions and report the results to the physician's office, thereby reducing the number of visits to the doctor's office. The phone can be placed on the exterior of the patient's abdomen and record some of the internal movements using the motion detection capability provided by the accelerometer.
