i-mate lets you customise your smartphone, NVIDIA makes you want to
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Toys & gadgets, Windows Mobile, Mobile, Microsoft on
If you get a smartphone from work, you may not get exactly what you want, but at least the IT team will set it up for you and deal with things if you lose it. Buy your own and you’re on your own - usually. Buy an i-mate Windows Mobile phone - I quite like the look of the new Ultimate 8502 as a replacement for my trusty HTC Excalibur as it adds HSDPA/HSUPA and GPS to the QWERTY smartphone - and you get I-Q Services.
I-Q is a free service on the Club i-mate Web site that lets you configure, manage and brick your phone over the air. Unlike some of the meaner handset manufacturers, i-mate ponies up the licence cost for the full apps for Mobile Office, but if you want to add Opera as your browser or a different IM tool you can choose what you want on the site and have it sent over the air to your phone. You can even put the apps into the ROM so they’re not taking up extra space. And if you lose the phone, you can go onto the site and lock it so it can’t be used; if you’re sure it’s been stolen you can shut it down permanently. The feature for that is in ROM so the thief can’t turn it off and they can’t pull data off by turning off the radio and connecting it to their PC - as long as their PC is online, the phone will get the kill command over the Internet. And if the thief tries installing a new ROM image on the phone to get it working again, they’ll be asked for a 15 digit code, without which the boot loader won’t load the boot image.
This is the kind of service a big customer might get from an operator; i-mate is running it for free for every user. CEO Jim Morrison thinks it will sell more phones; if you have the choice of two handsets with the same features and one of them comes with a free management service, I know which one most IT departments will pick.
There’s another security feature that i-mate hasn’t turned on yet. Some of the new models include GPS - Morrison says “every high end phone going forward will probably have GPS in”, because the $12 that it costs to put the chip in is peanuts compared to the value people put on GPS in a phone. And when you have GPS, then you have a phone that knows where it is and can report back. To avoid Big Brother spying, the tracking will only work when the phone has already been locked. The IT team can’t keep a sneaky eye on who is really with a customer and who is down the pub, because the first thing you’ll do if your phone suddenly locks up is contact the IT Team. Eventually, Morrison hopes, thieves would get the message that i-mate devices just aren’t worth stealing…
Everyone has to compare every smartphone to the iPhone (I think it’s an EU regulation or something). I’m fine with that as long as the comparison covers email search (BlackBerry and Windows Mobile 6 tied for equal honours, iPhone nowhere) as well as the stunning interface and graphics on the iPhone. NVIDIA’s Michael Rayfield thinks it’s fair. “We talk a lot about the iPhone not because of the device but because it redefined what’s good enough. It’s a computer that can make a phone call. It’s got a robust OS - it’s got OS X, the whole stinking thing - and that’s necessary, we think, to have that going forward.”
A more powerful OS needs a more powerful processor, better graphics - and the same or better battery life as today’s phones. NVIDIA set the Portal Player team it bought to work on an application processor for phones (think of it as a very low power graphics card) and 800 man years later it’s announcing the APX 2500, a 750MHz ARM 11 processor that does hardware acceleration, 720p HD, transparency and 3D in an ultra low power version of the GeFORCE, so you can have the kind of user interface you get in Mac OS X and Vista (plus HD video playback on screen or through an HDMI connector onto a real screen). Rayfield says a phone using the processor should be able to play 10 hours of HD video or 100 hours of MP3s, so you can get on a plane to the US, watch a movie, listen to music the rest of the way and still have half your battery left for making calls when you land.
NVIDIA is pushing the processor for Windows Mobile phones first and then Linux and Symbian devices. It’s going to take a while to convince manufacturers and who then have to build phones and write applications and integrate NVIDIA’s UI or build their own (and this is far more complex programming than for current mobile phones). Some personal media players and navigation devices will come out using it at the end of this year and then some time in 2009, we could start seeing some really spiffy phones. At which point, you’ll definitely want them to be thief-proof.
-Mary
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Loading ...Comment by Jeff - February 12, 2008 on 10:09 pm
WOW!! Can’t wait to get my hands on one of these!!
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