Entries Tagged 'Mobile' ↓

Industry Canada divulged plans for the upcoming auction of additional wireless spectrum: Government Opts for More Competition in the Wireless Sector. The good news is that they have set aside a good proportion of the new spectrum to new entrants into the Canadian market, as well as mandating things like shared tower space (for antennas). Hopefully this will put some price pressure on the incumbents in the Canadian wireless industry - Rogers, Telus, and Bell.

Update: Thomas Purves has written a post about this at StartUpNorth which lays out some of the implications of this announcement.

The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts).

Lots of words today throughout both the blogs and the regular media about Kindle, Amazon’s e-book reader that was launched today. It’s a testament to Amazon’s juice that anyone’s paying attention at all - e-book readers in the past have been greeted mostly by crickets.

Is it going to keep our attention? That’s harder to say. It seems that the specs are reasonably interesting - long battery life, decent (though not exceptional) storage capacity, interesting (if fussy) form factor.

Beyond that, there’s a huge differentiator - the built-in EVDO magic means that it can be a standalone device that nevertheless has very good access to a potentially very deep well of material.

The devil, however, is always in the details. To do what Amazon is doing requires pretty heavy DRM and very controlled pathways into (and out of) the device. The main comparison has been to the iPod - but there’s a huge difference (one that Gruber’s Daring Fireball also mentioned): you can’t get your own content in there. Other than high-production-value game consoles (and even those have opened up recently), can you think of a single other successful platform that has been tied to a single content supplier?

On the Internet, content may be king… but we’ve learned in the last 4 years or more that a LOT of that content is going to be my own in some way - my own writing, or at the very least, my own collection (or playlist). Along the long tail, the things that I make myself become just as important to me as the things I can buy, and curating all of that is the primary way of interacting with the long tail. If you assume that the long tail (of text) refers only to things that can be bought… I think it’s a vision of the long tail that might seem reasonable but will confound most users.

I just canceled my Rogers data plan. I finally had a come to reality moment, and I decided that a tiny (3Mb) data plan was actually worse than none at all. When you have a tiny plan, you are always conscious of each and every link you click on and email you download - to the point of distraction, really. And since you pay for overages at an even higher rate, a mistake can be costly. In actual practice, what that meant was that I wasn’t using my mobile data at all. So I decided to stop paying the insane service fee Rogers charges - $25 a month. I’d rather save my money than use a premium service whose very design makes it almost unusable.

I would still love to have a data plan, but one that is a lot more useful than Rogers’ current plans. I wonder if I’ll ever get the chance.

Facebook has announced their platform for mobile devices: Introducing Facebook Platform for Mobile. Developers will have the ability to target content directly to the mobile site and to access Facebook’s SMS platform. This is important for a few reasons, but chief among them is that outside of North America, the mobile internet is a primary means of access for many. In many countries, no mobile literally means drastically reduced access to users.

Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg has published a piece on the extremely limiting role that US mobile carriers have forced on consumers in the US: Free My Phone.

A shortsighted and often just plain stupid federal government has allowed itself to be bullied and fooled by a handful of big wireless phone operators for decades now. And the result has been a mobile phone system that is the direct opposite of the PC model. It severely limits consumer choice, stifles innovation, crushes entrepreneurship, and has made the U.S. the laughingstock of the mobile-technology world, just as the cellphone is morphing into a powerful hand-held computer.

As bad as things are in the US, they’re that much worse in Canada, where the same conditions apply - except that here, we get to pay a huge premium for the “privilege”.