News Archive - May, 2002

Paper phone wins top prize in Sony sponsored event - 2:43pm 28-May-2002

Would SonyEricsson catch on with this idea?

His invention, called PS Call Me, is a folded piece of paper with a circuit, posted as a letter. The recipient can call the sender back by pressing a button.

Read the complete story here.

Bluetooth to be worth USD 2.6b by 2006 - 5:56pm 15-May-2002

Even though the mobile markets are slowing down, it looks like Bluetooth products will be worth USD 2.6b by 2006.

Despite being directly impacted by the effects of a downgraded mobile phone market forecast, the Bluetooth market will be strong, according to a report from In-Stat/MDR. The research firm reports that, despite delays of some very large, planned 2001 chipset shipments from December to the first quarter this year, Bluetooth chipsets will surge from 10.4 million units in 2001 to 690 million units in 2006, a five-year 132% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), with silicon revenue rising to US$2.7 billion in 2006.

Read the complete story here.

Mobile phone radiation products tested - 11:46am 13-May-2002

The Register reports that the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) will release a report on mobile phone radiation products here.

The report also found that under standard exposure tests absorbing devices known as 'buttons' do not reduce mobile phone exposure.

Read the complete story here.

MMS and Java will drive handset sales - 11:42am 13-May-2002

Despite the turbulence of the past eighteen months there is much for the handset industry to look forward to. That is the message from a new report from wireless industry analysts ARC Group. After dropping to 385 million units in 2001, ARC Group expects handset sales to recover slightly this year, reaching 430 million units. Beyond 2002 ARC Group predicts steadily improving market conditions and sales of 880 million units in 2007.

Read the complete story here.

Ericsson technology boosts 3G network performance - 11:37am 13-May-2002

Robust header compression, ROHC, will be used in all 3G cellular systems (WCDMA, EDGE and, CDMA2000), substantially improving spectrum efficiency and service quality for IP services such as voice or video in Mobile Internet.

ROHC has been included in 3GPP specifications and is a new Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) proposed standard, developed to increase efficiency over wireless links by compressing IP headers. For wireless IP services such as voice, the ROHC scheme reduces packet size by 75 percent for IPv6 while still maintaining robustness to transmission errors common on wireless links.

Ericsson has pioneered in this field, proposing a solution and driving the standards process. In collaboration with Lule† University of Technology in Sweden, Ericsson presented the first robust header compression scheme called ROCCO to the IETF in June 1999.

Read the press release here.

Report warns of cell phone pollution - 11:08am 10-May-2002

Looks like mobile phone disposal will soon be a problem. This gets you thinking of what you would do to your old mobile phone when it gets too obsolete for you to sell or even give somebody. <think> <think> I'll just keep mine! {grin}

A new kind of cell phone pollution - and this one is silent. Within three years, Americans will discard about 130 million cellular telephones a year, and that means 65,000 tons of trash, including toxic metals and other health hazards, a study says.

Read the complete story here.

If you do not know what to do with your mobile (besides giving it to me) you should check out the eco-friendly website WorldWise which has a section called Recycling Cell Phones.

US govt launches cell phone website - 10:51am 10-May-2002

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have together launched a website called the Cell Phone Facts which explains how cell phones work, safety standards and issues for base stations, radio frequency energy and phone SAR emissions.

Read the complete story here.
Or the official joint press release of the FCC and FDA here.

Updated the Links page - 6:31pm 9-May-2002

Updated the Links page. Now the "Configure your WAP via SMS" should work properly.

Do you have a favourite WAP or Web site? Do tell me and if I like it, I'll put it in my Links page (which needs a re-work).

MMS upgrade for T68m push to week 21 - 6:09pm 9-May-2002

The T68 FAQ on the Sony Ericsson website now shows the MMS upgrade for the T68m to be available only in week 21 (the week of 20-May-2002). This was originally supposed to be on week 20 (the week of 13-May-2002).

SIM cards can be hacked in minutes - 2:42pm 9-May-2002

Looks like some guys from IBM have discovered a way to clone your SIM card within minutes. Cool technique used too.

IBM Research says that it has discovered a new vulnerability in GSM SIM cards, and has developed technologies to protect them from hacker attacks. The IBM Research team is the first one to illustrate a new class of side-channel attacks, called partitioning attacks, which extract secret key information from SIM cards by monitoring side-channels, such as power consumption and electromagnetic (EM) emanations. The attack can get the key information within minutes. This is much easier than either breaking the cryptographic algorithms used by the card or using intrusive attacks to extract the key from the microchip. The team has also developed a new technique to protect SIM cards from such attacks.

Read the complete story here.

Location based maps now available for MMS handsets - 2:39pm 9-May-2002

A company called Webraska now offers location based maps for MMS handsets.

Recognizing the importance of traffic information for people on the move, Webraska now enables applications to dynamically generate maps to customized zoom and scale, overlaying real-time traffic conditions. Congested routes are shaded in red or black and clear routes are shaded in green. Traffic events such as accidents, lane closures and road works are indicated with icons.

Read the complete story here.

Looks like MMS will take longer to bear fruit - 8:36pm 7-May-2002

At the rate MMS capable phones are being delivered to end-users, I am not suprised that MMS will take a long time to catch on.

Using SMS as a model, the first SMS-capable phones started hitting the market in the very early 1990s, and by the end of the decade SMS had reached a critical mass of users, and grew in popularity massively. Laaksonen suggested that the same model could be true for MMS. This means it could be 2009 or later by the time MMS reaches the current level of popularity of SMS services.

Read the complete story here.