First, the T-Mobile 4G HotSpot is a ZTE data-only device (it might look like a phone, but it’s not). It connects to T-Mobile’s data network at up to HSPA+ speeds and then acts as a Wi-fi hotspot for up to 5 devices (I’m not going to get into whether T-mobile should be calling its HSPA+ device 4G or not).

Overall, I’ve been happy with it, for my purposes. Here a few high points:

• Easy to set-up and use, no software or hardware dongles required
• Battery life is good
• When the speed is good, it’s really good (you forget you’re on wireless)
• Pre-paid, no-contract options
• It’s small and travels well

The only downside I would cite is that it can be slow at times (sometimes speed drops for no apparent reason). The cost and data-caps might also be a concern for some, but it hasn’t been a major issue for me. Coverage, so far has not been an issue for me either. I’ve been able to get a signal everywhere I’ve wanted one. But it is T-Mobile, so check their maps to see if it looks like they serve the areas you need.

I wanted a no-contact option because I wasn’t sure how often I’d use it and I didn’t want to get into a long-term monthly bill for something I wasn’t using. This meant I had to pay more up front for the hardware, $130 ($119 at Amazon Disclaimer: affiliate link) instead of $60 with a contract. It also meant the buying experience was, um “challenging” – to be kind. Because the incentives are different, T-Mobile runs the prepaid/no-contract and subsidized/on-contract businesses separately. The T-mobile stores don’t carry and don’t support the no-contract devices or service. I ended up getting the device at Bestbuy and that was comical because if I didn’t have a smartphone with the Bestbuy website up, showing the SKU and that the store I was physically in sold the product and had it in stock, the “expert staff” would have sent me away saying they don’t even sell that product. I had to explain to them that I could click “Buy Now for in-store pick-up” and walk over and pick up the device, so it’s in the store somewhere. I finally found a manager who actually looked and found the item “in the back” (and they had many of them of course).

Bestbuy also sells the prepaid cards to activate data service; or you can purchase online, using the device itself. T-Mobile offers a $30 recharge providing 1GB data or a $50 recharge with 3GB – both options are active for one month and allow up to five simultaneous wi-fi connections.

When we stay in a hotel that charges $20 per day for wi-fi, it often makes more sense to just buy a month of the T-Mobile service, which we can then use with all our devices at the same time and the performance is often just as good – and we could, if we wanted, use it in more places (like at the airport when waiting for flights etc.)

I also wanted a device that was independent of the type of device and operating system. I didn’t want a USB modem or something that required software drivers. We’ve connected with laptops, iPads, and other devices at the same time and had no trouble connecting to the T-Mobile 4G Mobile Hotspot. The only problem we’ve had so far was once the device got weird and wouldn’t turn on and I had to pull the battery for a few minutes to correct that problem, but otherwise it has been pretty painless.

I now take it with us every time we travel, along with a recharge card that we only activate if we really need it. It’s nice not to worry whether we’ll find a hotspot or free wi-fi or whether the hotel Internet is going to work etc.

If you’re looking for a no-contract option for mobile data when traveling, the T-Mobile 4G HotSpot is certainly a reasonable choice that I’m pretty happy with.

If I give another such lightning talk, I will focus the entire thing down to one main point. In the above talk, I waste too much time on the “how” (the implementation) without enough focus on the “what” (the result). This is of course because I’m a geek and I find the “how” really interesting. But what is significant about the research I was presenting here is really the “what” – and I failed miserably in getting that point across. In fact, what this research was about was very much in tune with what Lee Dryburgh likes to call intention-based economics:

What we care about with intention based economics is human psychology and behaviour, both individual and in aggregate. … what we need to build for is access to ever more personal information, i.e. about the human behind the endpoint. Privacy does not exist looking long-term. Ever more personal information is the new currency, which underlies intention-based economics, and people will increasingly trade it for free access to services.

… telecom networks receive vastly more human attention coming in from the edges and transit much more “intention data” than Google, in the form of telecom signaling. But it’s latent, not acted upon and thrown away. They actually throw away their most precious asset and plan to continue charging for their long-term least worthy asset (voice transmission).

This research looked at “intention data”.  Instead of throwing away this telecom signaling information, as the telecom companies currently do, this research used the data to study actions of the “human behind the endpoint” to include historical analysis as well as making predictions, i.e. determining intent.

The signaling data of who is talking to who, combined with their locations, recent movements, and so on, can be used to predict future actions (intent). For example, a certain flurry of a certain kind of activity might suggest that a group of friends are probably going to go see a movie together. Advertisers would be interested in such fore-knowledge, one would think.

I think it’s particularly interesting that we were able to do this in the real world, using real  phones available today, and doing so without the user’s active involvement and without the permission or participation of the carrier, i.e. as an independent third-party with no special relationship to the carrier.  We did it by supplying users with modified edge-devices (phones) that provided “ambient awareness” streams. These phones didn’t require GPS – we used cell tower and bluetooth proximity for location data. We didn’t need a very large sample to get meaningful results. Everything we did in this research could be done by the carriers and of course they may be doing it already and we wouldn’t know. This research shows how practical intention-based economics is and that it may not be as far off or as abstract as we think.

This research basically turned humans into “sensors” emitting data about their location and, more importantly, who they are talking to (and texting with), all as a surreptitious side-effect of carrying around a mobile phone and performing their every day routines. In general, besides location, other behaviors are very powerful indicators (behaviors like “what are they taking pictures of?”). A single data point may not provide much insight, but when viewed over time, and in relation to other human actions and behaviors, it becomes incredibly powerful. With this power comes responsibility. As Lee says “Privacy does not exist looking long-term.” This research doesn’t attempt to answer that question. Rather, it explicitly intends to raise awareness that it must be addressed and, given the results we were able to obtain in this research in fairly short time and with relatively modest resources, it needs to be considered sooner rather than later.

<GRATUITOUS PLUG>

We did this research as contract work – if you’d like to learn more or perform similar research contact us here: sales@telEvolution.com

</GRATUITOUS PLUG>

Mobile phones are practically ubiquitous. Everyone carries them and most of them are turned on and connected 24×7. Today’s mobile phones, even the least expensive ones, have sensors, spare cycles, and connectivity. These resources can be applied to a wide variety of Social Telemetry Applications, to powerful, and potentially even troubling, effect. We present findings of a real-world deployment of such a system.

And here’s a sneak-peak of the talk:

eComm presentation Wednesday, March 4, 4:55PM Salon E

I look forward to seeing you there.

As for the 5800 Xpress, a friend of mine recently brought one to the U.S. and after I played around with it for an hour, my response was meh! The touch was OK, just like it’s OK on any other device, but it’s not as responsive as the iPhone. So no, it’s not an iPhone killer, not by any means.

The N97 however, seems, like a worthy competitor… it will be sold in the U.S., where it’s going to cost $650; it will go on sale in June 2009…

I agree with these comments, but I would add that none of these other mobile players, whether carriers or phone manufacturers, seem to understand what battle they are fighting. They seem to think it’s about touch screens and hardware. Even Om emphasizes the touch screen issue:

The very fact that Nokia is only now getting out touchscreen phones shows that as a company it is stuck in bureaucratic quicksand, with a culture of consensus that makes it difficult to respond to new challenges. Nokia — and I have been following them for a while — has become one of those companies that, much like Microsoft, is good with announcements, not so great with the follow-up.

Stuck in a “bureaucratic quicksand” perhaps, but it’s really more than that. Nokia is selling just another piece of hardware. At one time, that mattered, because that’s how the industry worked. Apple changed all that and nobody has really grasped the magnitude of it yet. Apple changed everything about the mobile landscape. It may seem the same, but it’s not. It seems few people really appreciate what happened. That’s good for Apple – bad for the all their competitors.  As long as Apple’s would-be competitors continue to respond in 20th century ways to the new 21st century mobile phone landscape, Apple will continue to run roughshod over the industry.

Nokia is offering a Do-it-yourself solution, where users have to bring their own carrier, service plan and applications. That’s never going to be an “iPhone killer” because it’s not the same market – it’s not the same battle at all.

The problems for Nokia and any would-be “iPhone killer” don’t end with simply realizing the situation they’re in. Once they realize it, they will also realize they can’t compete on the same playing field. Apple owns the hardware, the distribution, and the service plan. (I know people get an AT&T plan with iPhone, but it might as well not be.  It is an iPhone plan.)  Nokia can’t do this. They don’t have distribution or control over the service plans. The carriers can’t do this. They don’t have Apple’s expertise at controlling the hardware. And most importantly, none of them have the App Store.

It’s not about the hardware.  If it were, Apple would already be in trouble. Compared to many other mobile phones, including many of those from Nokia, the iPhone is a piece of junk, hardware-wise. Apple isn’t winning because their phones are better. Apple is winning because the experience is better. People can actually use the iPhone. Ordinary non-technical people are doing things they have never done before on a mobile phone – things they would never do on a Nokia or other DIY solution.

Nokia may do fine in the DIY niche they’re in – but they will never have anything approaching an “iPhone killer” unless they make a bunch of acquisitions and change who there are.

I believe an historic day passed us by last week. Sure, Apple opening up the iPhone App Store received some press, but I haven’t yet read anything that really “gets” the significance of this event. There’s all kinds of moaning and groaning about the quality of apps, the price etc. and while there may be truth to these gripes, the fact most people are missing is that, unless Apple screws it up in some big way, the world changed last week.

I consider it as potentially significant as the effect the introduction of WWW and Mosaic had on the Internet. Last week, Apple changed everything about the mobile phone ecosystem and I don’t think very many people noticed – yet. That world will never be the same, just like the Internet was never the same after HTTP.

The other players, whether device makers or carriers, are not even on the same planet – it seems like they aren’t even aware of the situation. They aren’t even asking the right question, to say nothing of having the right answer. There are hundreds of millions of mobile phones with Java on them – and nobody knows it. Most people have no idea how to buy anything for their phone beyond ringtones (if they even know how to do that). Their phones probably have the capability to run apps – but there is no place to get them. Well, or say in the case of Symbian phones, there are too many places to get them.

Apple is changing all that with the iPhone store. And gripe all you want about the warts of the current apps or the prices or whatever, all that mises the point. Ordinary people now know how to obtain apps (free or otherwise), how to install them – perhaps more significantly, the entire idea of adding apps to a phone is now “normal” – it’s now part of the collective consciousness.

And developers have a place to put them, not “yet another place”, but the place, the one and only place. I always said iPhone was about iTunes from the start.

Of course this is about distribution and execution – Apple has the right capabilities to create this “perfect storm”. Unlike carriers, Apple knows how to build and manage software and services (can you say iTunes?). Unlike other device makers, Apple has their own distribution and marketing – they don’t need to rely on the carriers to market their device.

The future of Mobile is now Apple’s to lose and the rest of the mobile space better be worried.

The SDK is available now, in beta, but not for writing apps that actually run on the phone, if I understand correctly, but just for building apps and testing them (on a Mac, I believe). So they didn’t really make their promised February 2008 for release, but at least there is progress.

I’ll be spending some time with it and I’ll be particularly interested in comparing the software distribution options for iPhone vs. Symbian/Nokia. Could it be that we are actually headed toward a situation where the only open platform is Windows Mobile? How ironic would that be?

There is no intent to prevent long term access. The Symbian Signed infrastructure hit a step change in demand. In periods of overload we have a policy to prioritize the service to ensure professional users can continue their work.

– The problem is shown in this link (i.e. a massive spike)

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/symbiansigned.com

– The underlying reason was posted in our developers forums here https://developer.symbian.com/forum/ann.jspa?annID=36
– Free Developer Certificates *already* downloaded over the past years are valid for 3 years, There are millions and millions of developers who *are* not being impacted by this outage.
– We have been trying to contact the developer of RotateMe to get the app signed (for free) and awaiting response?

If anything, this underscores
(1) How Symbian OS is around an order of magnitude more popular than iPhone or any other mobile OS.
(2) As the smartphone OS market leader, Symbian OS is solving real world mobile developer problems every day, not preaching to the faithful on podiums with powerpoint.

We just ask our developer community to be a little patient

Bruce Carney
Director, Developer Programs & Services
Symbian

Thanks for posting, Bruce.

I’m sorry I missed your call and I hope you are able to call back.

It’s great news that Symbian intends to restore the ability of people to get devcerts. And I understand and have read all the reasons and reported causes for the Open Signed outages.

I also agree that the volume of certs does suggest the popularity of the platform.

However, all that misses the point. The Symbian Signed server being down is just a symptom, as is the load on that server caused by the volume of developer cert requests. People are requesting so many certs because the signing restrictions are broken. The problem isn’t that the Symbian Signed site is down – the problem is that people have to use it in the first place. The problem is that apps need to be signed to be installed and the mechansm for freeware developers, or even small-time corporate or in-house developers, to get certs and manage getting apps signed (and tested and “approved” by Symbian) is defective. It’s untenable.

This is how we end up in the situation where developers release the apps “unsigned” and have the users themselves sign them (and thus, the high volume of “developer” certs). The arguments in favor of the signing requirement are about making phones “safe” and ensuring users can “trust” the apps. However that trust model is antiquated 20th century thinking. Look what they have to go through now to try to get freeware installed (getting a “devcert” and signing the freeware apps themselves). If they are willing to sign it themselves, it suggests that they “trust” the app, even though it has not been “blessed” by Nokia or Symbian. Why? The reason people trust these apps is not because some authority in the sky, like Symbian Signed, gives it a “thumbs up” but because the community provides a powerful degree of trust. Applications that jack around with people would be immediately discredited by the Symbian freeware community – everyone would know about it, and people would avoid the app like the plague. This works with things like Linux and Firefox and it would also work with Symbian freeware.

The current Symbian Signed process creates the opposite effect of its stated objectives. I’d suggest that Symbian Signed apps are actually less trustworthy, in the true sense of the term – it’s more likely for “official” apps that have been “approved and tested” to have bugs than the freeware ones because it takes months to get an app tested and approved (and it cost $$$) so bugs never get fixed; whereas problems with freeware get reported all over the place and they tend to get fixed quickly.

The solution is to release a version of S60 3rd edition that lets those users that are willing to take the risks install unsignd apps and grant the features, privledges, capabilities they wish to the apps, even if this is a “unsupported” “hacker” version of Symbian with “forfeit all rights to support” restrictions or some such – that would still be vastly better than the situation those people have today, where the only officially supported options are to not install the apps at all, ever or switch platforms/phones – and the “unofficial” solution is to overload the Symbian Signed site with “developer” cert requests.

So save yourself some money on upgrading the Symbian Signed server crypto hardware and instead release a simple version of S60 3rd edition. You’ll be happy, I’ll be happy, and users will be happy. And your phone manufacturer customers like Nokia will be happy too, happy that they don’t lose their customers to Windows Mobile, the iPhone, or other alternative platforms.

T-mobile is now introducing a variant of that @Home play called Talk Forever Home Phone. It is an add-on service for T-mobile wireless customers that essentially provides a Vonage-style replacement home phone service. You get an ATA/router with a standard RJ-11 phone jack output to connect to a standard touchtone home phone.

The Talk Forever service is available as an add-on to an existing T-mobile plan and cannot be purchased separately. It is priced at $10 per month. This should put significant downward pressure on Vonage and AT&T CallVantage. But before you get too excited, note that this comes with the usual cell phone fine print and red tape – specifically there is a two-year agreement required and a $200 early cancellation fee! It also has unspecified taxes and fees.

With the advertised $10/month price point, one has to wonder if it might also impact Cable VOIP which has seen strong growth at a $40/month price point.

At the moment the service is only available in Seattle and Dallas. One thing not talked about with this service is international calling rates – if they are the same as normal T-mobile mobile prices, then this service will not be a competitive threat to other VOIP services in that regard.

Standard touch tone home phone

I think this move by T-Mobile of offering a “home phone”-based service shows that T-mobile has discovered through their experience with the handset-only first generation of the @Home service that there is a customer segment out there that is more comfortable using a ‘home phone” in the home, rather than their mobile handset. Here are some possible reasons why:

1. missed calls because the cell phone was on silent or vibrate somewhere.
2. cell phone is turned off to conserve battery power
3. accidentally leave cell phone at work and find yourself without a home phone for a night

T-mobile has no wireline assets in the US, so clearly this is a way to attack Verizon and AT&T for the household user experience. It will be interesting to see if any other pure-play wireless carriers make similar moves.

Rumors are flying as the final days wind down. Some say it will happen next week – others say it will be delayed. One has to hope that Apple doesn’t follow in Nokia’s Symbian Signed disastrous ways. if they do, I guess we all have to become Windows Mobile developers or wait for Android.

Nokia says this is supposed to protect users from “bad” apps. So what is the result? Freeware developers now release “unsigned” versions of their apps and provide step-by-step instructions for users on how to get their own “developer” cert and sign the app themselves.

See the irony yet? Nokia told us that users wanted to be “protected” from “bad” apps, yet what we really see is users going to the trouble of acting like “developers” so they can sign these “bad” apps and get them installed on their phone. They clearly want freeware, whether it’s officially “approved” by Nokia’s “Symbian Signed” or not.

And with all these pseudo-developers requesting certs so they can install these “bad” apps, guess what? Nokia’s certificate creation site “Symbian Signed” can’t handle the load. It has been mostly down for weeks. Here’s what it says today:

Not to mention all the support costs for Nokia and the overall costs to the entire ecosystem (where about 90% of S60 3rd edition discussion seems to be about signing and certs). Hopefully Nokia will wake up and put an end to this ridiculous nightmare soon. Here’s a few reasons why the time has come for enabling users to install unsigned apps on their 3rd edition phones, just like they can on 1st and 2nd edition phones:

• The overhead of depending on Symbian Signed for signing promotes bug-ridden software that is never updated.
• It is destroying the Symbian third-party ecosystem (which is where all the best Symbian software has always come from)
• It leaves the door open for competitors like Apple, Microsoft, RIM, etc. and dilutes Nokia’s significant lead in third-party developer support.
• If plain users, through step-by-step guides, are signing apps, there is really no argument for the “all apps must be signed” restriction

The signing debacle is nothing new, but the prolonged downtime of Symbian Signed is.

Nokia, please. It’s time to close the door on the the Symbian Signed experiment and let us install the apps we want on our phones again.

UPDATE: Monday February 18, 2008:

Today the site says:

Note their words “huge demand for developer certificates”. Nokia doesn’t that tell you something? And by the way, it is Monday February 18, folks, and the ability to get certs is still down.

UPDATE: Weds Feb 20 the saga continues:

So now it looks like end-users and hobby developers cannot get certificates at all, meaning they cannot write code or experiment with freeware on their Symbian S60 3rd edition phones anymore. I cannot tell from the above message whether this the new permanent policy or just more “damage control”.