Smartphones get smarter

March 2, 2012
For an informed view on connected entertainment in the UK & Ireland, visit Cue Entertainment 

Mobile data hogs assembled at Mobile World Congress 2012 in Barcelona to claim bragging rights and the outcome could be a three-tier approach to charges on mobile devices.

The 67,000 people who took a winter break in Barcelona last month were not bankers who sought refuge from the world economic downturn but top-level delegates to the MWC 2012. From the crowds on the show floor – 11% up on last year – you would never know there was a financial crisis were it not for the threatened transport strike in the city and the students who protested in the Plaça Espanya.

But it was a great place to try to get a handle on the current state of play for mobile devices.

As Over The Top (OTT) video delivery gains a hold, the attempt by mobile phone operators to control the delivery of entertainment to their previously tethered devices has waned. Only Sony makes a show of entertainment content delivery, with its Xperia range. Newly separated from a 10-year equal partnership with Ericsson, Sony offers what it describes as the “ultimate HD smartphone”, with an 8-megapixel camera, a 4-inch HD display that plugs into a full-size TV screen when needed, and access to the Sony Entertainment Network (SEN).

As with many other Sony-branded products, Xperia users may subscribe to the Music Unlimited cloud services, which delivers “millions of music tracks” to a wide range of Sony devices for a fixed monthly charge. Plus the cost of data usage, of course… They also can access Video Unlimited, which offers “Hollywood’s latest hit movies, select classics and TV shows from every major network”, including Disney’s “Cars 2” and Universal’s “Bridesmaids”.

The Xperia is PlayStation certified with games playable on the move or on any HD screen with an HDMI connector.

As with many of the devices on display in Barcelona, Sony smartphones use the Android operating system. In an hour-long Google presentation, Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said he looked forward to the time when there will be an Android in every pocket. Since they already sell at the rate of 850,000 a day, that moment cannot be too far off.

Thus far, 300 million Android devices have been activated but there are more to come. Schmidt said, “There are one billion smartphone users in the world already. Mobiles will change lives but the digital revolution has not arrived just yet. Only one third of the world’s population of seven billion have access to the internet so for every one person that is connected, two are not.”

For almost 30 minutes, Schmidt faced the international audience alone in an unscripted Q&A session. He defended Google’s position on privacy and said, “Forty countries engage in censorship today, up from just four a decade ago.” On legal advice, he declined to comment on the US embargo on high-tech products, such as Google Chrome, shipped to Iran. “There is no bandwidth in prison!” he said.

MWC exhibitor Bytemobile specialises in optimised mobile networks for video traffic. In the “Mobile Analytics Report for February 2012”, it states that 47% of the total data traffic generated by iPhones and iPads comes from Media Player and the average YouTube session consumes 40Mbytes of data in 8.5 minutes. This compares with the 120kbytes required to access Facebook for the same time.

The company reports that video is now the leading driver of data use, which on some mobile networks accounts for up to 70% of all traffic. This compares with Q1 last year when the average video volume on mobile networks was just 10%. A typical iPad user generates a demand for three times the data volume of a comparable iPhone subscriber.

Bytemobile research shows that smartphone and tablet users migrate to higher quality videos as screens increase in size and resolution. In January 2011, almost 40% of mobile videos by volume were 240-line streams. That has fallen now to just over 20%. At the middle of the scale, 480-line video delivery increased from around 20% to more than 40% in January this year. For the first time, users began to request 720-line near-HD video in 2012 with Android device owners most likely to access these data-intensive streams.

“A five-minute video in high-definition on one of the latest LTE devices could generate as much as 75MB of traffic – five times that of a 360-line video. A subscriber on a 5Gbyte monthly plan could be able to watch just 70 five-minutes videos, rather than 350,” the report says. The latest Apple iPhone supports 640-line resolution while more recent Samsung and HTC phones can display 720-line video.

Bytemobile proposes a shift from the current mobile service provider (MSP) model, which bills users solely on a price-per-megabyte basis, in favour of the tiered prices used by the airline industry. “Gold subscribers would access HD video at an unrestricted data rate under all network conditions, Silver subscribers would view SD video at up to 5Mbps and Bronze subscribers would be limited to mobile broadband access below 1Mbps,” Bytemobile suggests. Silver and Bronze accounts would have the option to pay to move up to HD on a per-hour or a per-video basis, or to access advertising-supported HD content at specific times and locations.

“Data optimization technology ensures that the operator can offer improved quality of service with minimal impact on network capacity and would reduce operating and capital costs. Only when operators can monetise and optimise the data traffic will they own the user experience,” the firm claims.

An approach of this kind might help to reduce “bill shock” – the unexpectedly high charges that Ofcom says mobile contract customers experience more often than broadband, fixed-line or mobile pre-pay customers. In its March 1 call for an action plan, the regulator says that 45% of UK adults had a smartphone by the end of 2011 with a consequent large increase in the use of mobile data. It found that unexpectedly high mobile bills are commonly the result of consumers downloading data.

“There is no clear relationship between time spent using the service and the cost incurred. It is harder to estimate the cost of downloading a video, which is charged per megabyte, than it is to estimate the cost of making a phone call, which is charged per minute. Charges for downloading data tend to be much higher once consumers exceed their allowance,” Ofcom says.

The watchdog repeated its call to MSPs to do more to develop and promote “opt-in” systems so that consumers may choose to set limits on their expenditure. In the action plan it suggests, however, that it might be more appropriate to move to an “opt-out” system of financial caps and alerts in which all accounts would have a monthly limit unless the consumer first opts out.

Nokia Siemens Networks, CEO Rajeev Suri spoke in Barcelona of what he called the “Gigabyte revolution” – trends in mobile devices that fuel the gigabyte revolution. He said, “We believe they will take us to one gigabyte per user per day by 2020, downloaded at speeds more than 10 times those we have now.”

The Nokia 808 PureView, announced at MWC 2012, is a step along that path. The smartphone features full HD 1080p recording and playback with a screen and an image sensor to match. While Sony promotes the 8-megapixel camera in its Xperia, the new Nokia has an astonishing 41-megapixel sensor coupled to a Carl Zeiss lens, which provides sharp and detailed images (pictured) and the ability to zoom, pan and crop photos after they have been taken, with no loss of quality.

The 808 PureView uses satellite surveillance technology to achieve astonishing results and is the first mobile device that genuinely replaces the traditional camera. It also includes Nokia Rich Recording for high quality audio recording and exclusive Dolby Headphone technology, which transforms stereo content into a personal surround-sound experience over any headphones.

The device has the ability to share images and video in compact file sizes for use in emails, messaging and social networks. Gold data account subscribers, however, will probably want to stream video from their 808 PureView at the maximum bit-rate.

Just because they can.