| Bloody Mobile Phones - Updated |
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| Contributed by Alan Lewis | ||
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Why can't the mobile phone industry comprehend "standards"... Apologies in advance if this piece is written more appallingly than my usual missives. It is 11.20pm, and I'm annoyed. Very annoyed. With Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson, and Sony. I'm annoyed because I want to do the same things on four different phones, and I need four different sets of leads to do them. Which, if you think about it, is daft. Starters for ten. All the phones need charging. Not a major problem on the face of it, except the Sony charger is temperamental. And as it uses a unique power plug, none of the other power plugs fit it. In fact, none of the phones uses the same plug, they are all different. Where can I get a Sony charger at 11.20pm on a Sunday? Nowhere. So that phone is dead until tomorrow lunchtime. I don't actually use all four - only two of them are mine, I primarily use a Nokia, and take my old Ericcson T28 as a backup when away. But this entails taking two chargers with me, which is a pain in the a***. Nokia is the best selling handset in the world. The power plug has remained unchanged since its inception, to the best of my knowledge, and has become that common it has become a de-facto standard. It doesn't take the brains of an arch-bishop to see that it would be in the global consumers' interest if Nokia acknowledged this, and made it "open technology, allowing every phone manufacturer to use the same AC power interace, and given the commonality of batteries, the same AC charger. Think of how convenient this would be to the mobile phone community. Oh no, that's just waaay too easy. In an amazing case of proprietism leap-frogging common-sense, not only will Nokia not allow other manufacturers to use the same design, but they are [apparently] changing their AC power interface, making it smaller. Now, not only do you have to ensure that you take an AC charger wherever you go, you have to check it is the correct Nokia charger. It's bad enough asking a roomfull of people "anyone got a Nokia charger", even worse when you'll have to ask "the big/small old/new type charger"... I can understand the viewpoint that it is Nokia's design, and they want to protect their market; their is a significant revenue stream from sales of accesories such as chargers, covers, etc, and from licencsing rights to these from third parties. I also understand that there is a significant market in counterfeiting these. But opening the rights can generate revenue (such as a one-off licence payments, based on a fractional percentage per handset or charger made). Counterfeiting is a perennial problem, so unaffected where the design is open or closed. And many people will still want a genuine, Nokia branded, replacement charger and buy as such. In fact, opening - or at least allowing every other manufacturer to use the design, with a very low nominal fee (and I'm talking pence per handset, not thousands of pounds) would generate significant revenue given the number of handsets made per year. But the custmer benefit is enormous. And given it has become a de-facto standard, why shouldn't Nokia do this? All cars use common fuel types, and common sized petrol tank filler tubes. We don't have to fnd a Ford specific petrol station to refill the petrol tank in a Ford, and then a different petro station to fuel up, say, a Rover. What the heck is so different about mobile phones? My second grip concerns data cables. Tonight I had planned to back up the phone contents - numbers for friends, colleagues and acquaintences; text messages; pictures. But accomplishing this is proving hard; each phone uses a differnent data connector, too. I need four different cables, a mixture of USB and serial interfaces. And Bluetooth isn't proving helpful, as the phones with Bluetooth are petulantly refusing to talk to the laptop. I have precisley one cable. For the phone I least need to backup. Again, why can't they agree on a single, universal data connector? The computer world has standard interconnects, as do hi-fi's. I don't need a different cable to hook my Pioneer to my PS2; I don't need a different lead to connect the Sony Jukebox to the Kenwood hi-fi. They all use a standard - device independent - interconnect. You would think the USB connector would be ideal for this. Ok, some predate USB and bluetooth, but even winding the clock back a few years its not hard to imagine the benefits a standard interface would have bought. But no, so it's plug lead into laptop and the phone. Fire up software and establish a connection, get the phone software to talk via that interface... disconnect phone and connect another lead and phone. PITA... Nokia have the lagest market share in the globe, setting the data cable interface as a de-facto standard benefits everyone. Put it this way: if you use a PC, it doesn't matter what brand, the AC power cable is the same. The serial/parallel/mouse/keyboard/USB ports are all the same, regardless of PC brand or manufacturer. If you drive, petrol is petrol is petrol, there is not a petrol specifically for Ford and another for BMW. So why can't Nokia stick with one connection, and "open source" the interface allowing all and sundry to use for the benefit of the end customer?!!! Why don't the major manufacturers sit down and agree a common data cable interconnect? One single, common, standard connection for phone data cables. Maybe its just too good an idea. And stick with it when revising phone models, so one can stick with one cable regardless of how old ones' Nokia or Motorola phone is? The revenue argument is the same as that for the charger lead. It might hurt sales of branded accesories, but given there is no guarantee a user will buy a branded accesory anyway, is this material? If the cable was bundled with the phone as standard (and at a small extra price) then this would recoup a significant amount of revenue. Not only that, but one would make a sale with every phone sold; which increases sales, as opposed to the current situation, where some people buy cables, and only a portion of those sales are of branded products, the other portion being 3rd party/counterfeit/unlicensed products. Bluetooth is not the answer; not every computer - or phone - has bluetooth. And adding a bluetooth conector when using Windows XP is hit-and-miss if it is based on the Widcomm chipset (to cut a long story short, it probably wont work...google on +windows +XP +bluetooth +widcomm). Finally, why is there no basic common standard for software to communicate with a phone? Nokia users have the supplied Nokia software, or Oxygen (a superb product, which I must review at some stage). Oxygen is available for Nokia, and some Symbian phones. But it cannot talk to anything else. Fair enough, writing software to take advantage of every facility on every make and model of phone is an impossible task; even Oxygen doesn't cover the full range of Nokia phones. But a common software access interface across all phones, even just allowing the basic of reading the directory and SMS - and possibly MMS - lists would be a tremendous boon. When you consider that in the PC world, that with a basic null-serial cable, a 9600baud connection, and some very basic terminal software, one can talk to just about any computer going. You might not be able to do much, but basic reading/writing of data is possible. If all handset manufacturers accepted a basic API (programming interface) that provided a standard means to access the phone book and SMS, users' lives would be so much easier. Especially when changing handsets. You upgrade a phone, how do you transfer your existing numbers to the new handset? This is compounded when using a handset tied to a different operator. Sure, you can get a PUK code, but what about the numbers stored on the phone rather than the SIM... Two friends were in this position. Both upgraded from a Nokia to a Sony. Both ended up having to write out numbers and enter them into the new phone. Even exporting using Oxygen, to a text file, didn't help as the provided software wouldn't import the numbers. Compare this to the PC world - it doesn't matter if I use a Dell, Evesham, Mesh, or home-brew PC. I can interchange my mail client's mailbox, my browser favourites, my word documents - all my data - quickly and easily between machines, even when they use different operating systems, my data is pretty much interchangeable from machine to machine. The phone market is arguably bigger and more consumer-oriented than the PC market. The average phone user is more comfortable using their phone, and more likely to upgrade year-on-year, than the PC user (in some cases 4-5 times a year...!) The players in the PC world strive to make systems (hardware, devices, software, and the whole "experience") more user friendly and consumer-oriented. Why not phone manufacturers? Only registered users can write comments.
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