Nuance is finally bringing out the version of Extended T9 that suggests features on your phone as well as words you’re trying to type. That’s only 20 months after I saw it at Mobile World Congress so you can colour me impatient, and today you can only download it for S60 devices and not Windows Mobile. Before the end of the year Nuance promises to announce a ’significant’ handset manufacturer and two operator deals for T9nav.

The way it works is that you just start typing, from the idle screen of the phone; if you type 258 you might be dialling a number that starts with 258, or you might be calling the Blue Note Cafe in Glastonbury, or you might be looking for ‘Blue Moon’ in your music library, or you might be trying to turn Bluetooth on. T9nav will give you a list of all those options and you can get things done with three or four clicks rather than navigating through menu after menu after menu after menu…

Michael Whers, the VP for evangelism at Nuance also showed me the voice control version, VSuite 3.x, which lets you say ’send a text to Chris Green’ plus a prototype dictation service that lets you dictate the text of the text, so to speak. The voice control runs on the handset, even on a basic feature phone, because there’s only so many commands you need to recognise; the dictation runs on a server in the cloud because you need a more powerful machine to recognise all the words you might want to use in a message. The real barrier to good voice recognition isn’t the phone - it’s the cheap headsets most people use which either have a cheap microphone or worse still, nose cancellation that just filters out the white noise and flattens the signal so much that voice recognition doesn’t work. Another prototype, Voice Search, lets you ask questions like ‘what hotels are there in Palo Alto, California’ and get not just a list of Web results but a list of Google Map links to the hotels.

Wehrs showed that running on an iPhone, although the app isn’t on the App Store for reasons he didn’t want to go into. He also pulled out another unreleased product; the HTC Star Trek flip phone running Windows Mobile Professional, with a Fake Cursor application to give you a mouse pointer so you can use the touch-screen interface without a touch screen on the device. As a dedicated Windows Mobile Standard user (you can have my HTC Excalibur when you pry it out of my hand and replace it with something in the same form factor that has 3G and GPS), I suspect this is a gimmick - the interface is designed for tapping with a stylus or a fingernail, but most of the applications I tried worked surprisingly well with the fake cursor. Don’t hold your breath though; it could be another 20 months before anything like this ships.
-Mary

Never heard of MWg? You’re not alone, but you might want to hunt down the Zinc II. For one thing, it’s cheaper than the HTC Touch Pro or TyTN II although it has much the same features. For another, it’s stylish and surprisingly sleek for a phone with a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

I’ve been swapping between the Zinc II, the TyTN II and my trusty HTC Excalibur (better known as the T-Mobile Dash) in an effort to fulfill my new year’s resolution about always having navigation with me. Google Maps does very well at location on some phones, but on my Excalibur it’s far from accurate so I’m looking for GPS. And while EDGE is OK for quick searches, I want 3G - mainly so I can use the phone as a modem with my laptop. I know built-in 3G is always better, to the tune of 25% better bandwidth, but not every laptop I use has it. I want Windows Mobile 6.1 for two things; threaded text messages and being able to search my email on Exchange Server from the phone inbox. I have a US Samsung BlackJack II which might be ideal - it’s the closest to the size of the Excalibur so far - but it’s very thoroughly locked to its US carrier.

The TyTN II is a great phone - and as the Stella from O2 it comes with CoPilot, which is my favourite GPS tool - but it’s just a bit too big and slab-like for me personally. Plus the tilt action is great for viewing the screen, but it covers the two action buttons on the keyboard. The Zinc II is a little bit lighter, a little bit smaller and a lot sleeker, with a soft-touch easy-grip rubberized coating and a flush screen - it’s a very comfortable handful even for those of us with smaller hands. It also has a faster processor, which means the camera doesn’t make you wait an age to take your snap and it doesn’t get bogged down with lots of apps running in the background.

That’s handy as with the TouchFLO-style Quick Menu launching from what I expected to be the Start button, I found it easier to launch a new app than get back to the one I’d been using. Swiping your finger across the screen to turn between the pages of buttons and tapping to open apps is a good way to work in Windows Mobile Professional; my nails work pretty well instead of a stylus but menus are still pretty tiny. 

The keyboard isn’t going to suit everyone. The keys are almost flush and don’t click down very far, but they have enough action so you know you’ve actually hit the key and not having discrete keys means - practically - that you won’t get dirt, dust and sesame seeds creeping under them. I’m used to the square layout of the Excalibur (and every BlackBerry I’ve ever known) and having the wide rows of keys slows me down until I adjust, plus the central spacebar isn’t quite in the right place for me. As always, secondary keys are distributed around the keyboard seemingly at random so you’re hunting for the dash and the @ symbol; it really is time we had a standard for this. But each key is outlined in blue light which is one, rather cool and two, really helpful in dim light.

MWg used to be O2 Asia’s device arm; they’ve expanded out to the US and Europe, renamed the company as the Mobile World Group and teamed up with gadget specialists Expansys. You’re not going to see the Zinc II on the high street unless they get another distribution deal, but it’s well worth checking out.
-Mary

A comment from Wyse popped into my inbox the other day, criticising the government for using desktop PCs instead of thin clients which are “inherently more energy efficient” (surprise surprise).

David Angwin, director of marketing for EMEA, claimed that “thin client computers give users exactly the same applications and performance as a PC and run on as little a tenth of the electricity.” Certainly, Wyse is one of the few thin client manufacturers who can claim to support a wide range of applications; I know one financial company who had to replace the first batch of thin clients they tried with Wyse kit almost within the week because the others couldn’t cope with video clips. But is that power figure the whole story?

Earlier in the year I was talking to Barry Goodall at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. He’s spent a lot of time and effort greening the council’s IT and although he’s a big fan of server virtualisation, he has a much less positive view of the green credentials of thin clients after he disproved the figures in a Frauenhofer Institute report on green computing. “The report said we could save million of pounds by using thin clients, so we were quite interested in this! We looked at some of the details and things leapt out at us; in particular the power consumption of PCs was markedly higher than ours - we use Dell desktops.”

He was checking his Dells anyway, because Dell was claiming upgrading to model 745s would save as much energy as changing from CRT to LCD screens. “We have an electricity monitoring gadget from Maplin which I highly recommend: don’t trust anything the manufacturers tell you! It’s very easy and you need to measure it yourself.” His measurements showed the model 745s used the same 60 Watts of power as the Dell kit he already had; Dell’s 45 Watt figure assumed energy management features that weren’t turned on by default. “Energy saving features in the BIOS count for nothing unless you enable hibernation in Windows!”

But 60 Watts or 45, it was still a far cry from the 120 Watts that Frauenhofer was assuming for a desktop PC. That’s what you’d expect from a top-end home machine with a high-power graphics card for gaming; business desktops are rather more frugal.

That wasn’t the only place he felt the sums didn’t add up. “Although the report said in the text that they had accounted for PCs being turned on maybe ten hours a day, terminal servers are typically running 24/7. If you tot up the number of hours people work out of the year, even though it feels like you work all the hours God sends, it’s actually about 2,200 and the figures in their tables hadn’t taken that into account. When we plugged in the correct figures they supported the opposite arguments; with the number of clients per server they assumed, it was more expensive in terms of CO2 than a typical fat client environment. Thin client can be more energy efficient but you need to be clever and turn some servers off when demand is low; you have to be monitoring the workload so you can turn some servers off overnight and come the morning, start turning them back on again - though you’re running a little bit of a risk that maybe one or two servers won’t start up and you’ll struggle a little.”

When I talked to Jon Stewart at Cisco about security trends recently, he slipped in a few network arguments (as you’d expect from a network company). “I have a feeling [that] what you’re going to end up seeing is very thin, light application suites that are endpoint based and a very rich experience using massive network build out. It’s already started to happen; definitely BT has gone down this route. You’re basically saying the end point is going to matter less at a computational level. The display and the keyboard and the system that you interact with, is the most valuable. Think about Lufthansa going to wireless on their planes, they’re trying to solve the inability to do work when you’re mobile. Everything about handset mobility, you’re trying to solve work when you’re mobile. But each time it happens, less and less computational necessity exists on the device - you’re just getting the service on the device.”

But do we care less and less about devices? Again, you’d expect Steve Ballmer to favour the PC, but he told his audience at the Partner Conference that actually, all the devices that are getting attention are fat (we just need to make them easy too). “It’s ironic, people talk a lot about whether people want thin clients. And I don’t deny people want reduced cost, and complexity of management. I think we’re all hearing that from our customers. But people don’t want to really give up the richness and capabilities of a rich client. We even see that in phones. What’s going on in phones today? Phones are actually getting richer. That’s what Windows Mobile is, that’s what the iPhone is, that’s what Symbian is, that’s what Android is: all of these things are getting richer, and Windows PCs will be the richest, most capable device that most people ever own.”

Chatting with Peter Biddle, ex of Microsoft and now at UK enterprise social networking startup Trampoline, he suggested that as usual, what matters is both the device and the network. “Think about it; when did you last do any useful work without being online?”
-Mary

But you’ll still need iTunes on every desktop to install applications. Would you put that in your organization?
We spent Friday with Telefonica at their new headquarters in Madrid, a campus laid out around a lake to deal with the climate; solar panels, vanes that push the heat up, a tower in each corner and wide roofs to add shade plus wireless antenna sprouting in the flowerbeds like candelabra. Telefonica has technology plans for the networks it runs as well, which includes O2.

Even Telefonica can’t actually show off the new iPhone yet: O2’s Steve Alder kept his in his pocket and described it instead. What he did show off was the price: free if you pay £45 or £75 a month for the tariff or £99 if you want the cheapest £30 a month plan. Existing iPhone owners get the same deal, although you have to sign up for the full 18 month contract again. None of the plans let you use the iPhone as a modem with your laptop and the price for international roaming is a hefty £50 for 50MB of data.

O2 will finally have a business tariff for the 3G iPhone, including a single bill for multiple handsets. And if you only want Exchange ActiveSync. O2 will be able to set that up for enterprises directly rather than making you put iTunes on each user’s desk to do it. You’ll be able to install apps you write for your own business without iTunes as well, according to Alder, but if you want to buy apps for the iPhone they’ll still have to come from the iTunes store - and you’ll still have to install them to each phone individually, through iTunes.

That’s going to hold back acceptance of the iPhone in the enterprise, which is used to the security and manageability of the BlackBerry. Even Microsoft has got the message, using industry standard OMA DM to control Windows Mobile 6.1 devices with the new System Center Mobile Device Manager using Active Directory. If you want to, you can force files on Windows Mobile handsets to be encrypted, block any application from Facebook clients to pre-installed games or stop users synching POP3 and IMAP email at all, as well as installing and updating apps automatically over the air to specific users or particular AD groups. And the VPN on Windows Mobile now uses IPsec and IKE (Internet Key Exchange) v2 rather than SSL for improved security and better management of mobile connectivity. Apple is picking IPsec too - but Cisco’s proprietary implementation of it.

O2 probably didn’t get the choice about getting involved in installing apps on iPhones; Apple is taking a  generous 30% royalty and doesn’t want to share that with operators now that it has to subsidize the cost of the phone. O2 plans to produce some apps of its own, which fits in with chief operating officer Julio Linares’ view that the future is services - the usual mobile operator to becoming just an Internet pipe. Even iPhone cynics like me have to be impressed by the usability; 80% of O2 iPhone users are actually using email, Web browsing and the other tools that make it a smartphone.
-Mary
 

Steve Ballmer was kidding around with former Mac evangelist Guy Kawasaki at the MIX 08 conference here in Las Vegas, but there was an edge to a lot of the banter. Kawasaki had a MacBook Air hidden amongst his papers and he flourished it, asking if Ballmer wouldn’t like a machine that light and thin. Ballmer hefted the machine and bellowed that his notebook was lighter and a real machine to boot, complete with an Ethernet port. “That thing is missing half the features of a PC. Where is your DVD drive, let me look for that. I’ll have a bake-off with my Tosh versus that thing backstage…”

It’s halfway between good theatre and Ballmer’s enthusiasm, but there’s always a shrewd side to it. When one attendee persuaded him to stand up and do the “Web developers, Web developers, Web developers…” dance, Ballmer followed it up by saying if it was a bet, he wanted half the winnings. And there’s more to his PC than the weight.

If it’s ligher than a MacBook Air and it has a DVD drive, Ballmer’s machine must be the Toshiba Portégé R500, a notebook that’s so light I’ve seen it hanging from a helium balloon. The publicity might cheer Toshiba up after the HD DVD debacle, but it’s also a good way to look at what Silverlight and IE 8 really mean to Microsoft.

Today, most users need a DVD drive - for installing software or watching films on a long flight. In five years time, Ballmer said, “it may not make a bit of difference”. In five years, online applications and services may take over from desktop apps as well (although ubiquitous connectivity is years away - the only decent 3G speed we’ve ever had was in San Diego, home of Qualcomm, whereas travelling in Arizona you can’t get voice let alone data, because Cellular One has no international roaming agreements).

If they do, Microsoft will be ready because Silverlight is designed for applications: Silverlight 1 is video, Silverlight 2 is a cross-platform development platform that you can write for in a range of languages. AOL’s Silverlight mail app will look the same everywhere and be the same code everywhere. Even though it runs on a Mac or a Linux box (with Novell’s Moonlight plug-in), it’s not leaving behind the Windows heritage because Silverlight is a substantial proportion of the Windows Presentation Foundation.

Silverlight runs in the browser, WPF apps run on the desktop (and because Moonlight is based on the .NET clone Mono, WPF apps could come out of the browser on Linux but not on the Mac). Aston Martin showed a Silverlight app in Ray Ozzie’s keynote that lets you look at a car in great detail and pick the colours and finishes that you like, then make an appointment with a dealer; they showed the companion WPF app for the dealer to show you that custom car in true 3D, on a large screen controlled by a UMPC (the 3D model isn’t running on the UMPC, it’s on a high-end gaming PC with an NVIDIA card that the Aston team bought at the local PC shop in Vegas).

Same APIs, same programming model, same graphic files, same controls, same XAML markup. Cirque du Soleil’s recruitment app runs on tablet PCs today and they copy files by hand to review in an intranet application; they showed a prototype of a WPF app to use on the road for assessing performer auditions and a Silverlight intranet app that the Mac users in the office can use to review the auditions that are automatically synchronized.

Internet Explorer 8 gets synchronization too, with local storage for Web sites; so if you’re halfway through a document and you have to leave the office and get on a plane, the Web app you’re writing it in can switch to offline mode and let you save the file. To start with this will be like a big cookie in a simple text file, but the IE team plans to implement a local database for future versions, which will let developers write more powerful Web apps that work offline and on. Making the back button work on Ajax sites - so you can zoom in to a map and click Back to zoom out again - is great for users; the address bar will update as well, so when you get to the right place on the map you’ll be able to copy the URL to send to a friend. But that’s also good news for Ajax Web apps; the app could save your state locally and put you back to where you were last time you visited. A lot of IE is playing catchup, but the team is looking at the bigger picture too.

Silverlight takes Microsoft beyond Windows and beyond PCs. Silverlight for mobile starts with Silverlight 1 and video, so we have to wait longer for the cross-platform apps to go mobile. But Nokia is putting Silverlight on S60 phones - and Moonlight will run on Linux phones. There’s no reason why you couldn’t have a version of Silverlight for Xbox - and at this point you should think of the Mesh service for syncing PCs and devices that Ray Ozzie hinted at in his keynote. Today you need the PC with the DVD drive and the Ethernet port and the full operating system and the full applications. In five years time you might be mixing and matching an app on your phone with an ultralight notebook for longer trips and a full PC back at base - and using Silverlight and WPF on all of them.

My phone knows where I am, and when I flew to Geneva the other week it knew what time it was; the operator pushed a time signal and Windows Mobile 6 happily picked it up. It confused me when I took the phone out to change the time - but it also meant the appointment with the contact number for the taxi driver was up on screen where I needed it. I connected my PC to the Orange World Wi-Fi in the hotel (at the fifth time of asking; if you’re using a mix of numbers and letters as your username and password, please use a font that allows the user to distinguish 6 and G ). My PC sat there stubbornly believing it was on UK time, even though it had a French IP number.

I’m not expecting every PC to have a GPS in, and it doesn’t need to. Never mind battery life, it’s useless inside anything bigger than a garden shed and even in a city canyon it’s impractical; it took my O2 XDA Stellar 15 minutes to get a GPS fix in Covent Garden this week. What I’m after is a utility that uses the location services like Spotigo, Aruba, Navizon, PlaceSite, Skyhook and all the rest that give you location based on your IP address/what wireless access points you can see and when it gets a location that’s different from the time zone Windows is set to, up pops a prompt asking if you want to change it. If you want to be all social networking about it, the utility could upload my location to services like Facebook - or preferably just my timezone, as I’m sure burglars read Facebook too. I could have a widget in the Sidebar showing who’s in the same timezone as me or get an alert if someone I know is in the next street.

I’ve used Navizon on Windows Mobile for the last year to get locations and I like it but the desktop version is a Java applet and although the API supports time as part of the location info I haven’t found a timezone utility for it.

Skyhook’s Loki will do the locating and publishing bit. It’s pretty good at locating too; this is the service used by Google Maps on Windows Mobile and the iPhone and it knows where we live. Skyhook can use a combination of GPS, IP address, Wi-Fi and cell tower to cope with a range of environments.

Navizon uses user-contributed data for Wi-FI and cell tower and is either very accurate or about 2 miles out; Loki (and Google Maps Mobile) are either very accurate or not working at all.

Loki s obsessed with search; that’s because ads you click on make money. Personally, results in the same town as me may or may not be more relevant to be depending on how far ahead I’m planning and I don’t actually want any more browser plugins, thank you. But digging through the options - yes, it will change my timezone for me, or ask if I want to in case it’s wrong.

This would be a good service for tools like Xobni to use; this handy Outlook plugin shows a ‘heat map’ of the times of day a particular person sends and replies to email. That’s pretty useful already - it tells you that you have a much better chance of getting a reply from me between 10.30 am and 7pm or between 11pm and 1am than at any other time. Assuming I’m in the office; the location timezone service could tell you if I’m in California - and if Xobni was really smart and I said it was OK for you to know where I am (cue my usual call for an identity abstraction layer for the Internet), it could shift the heat map to California time. Or better still, it could calculate a different heat map for when I’m in California, when you’ll reach me between 9am and 11am, 2pm and 6pm and 9pm to midnight most days.

At the moment you can look at my Dopplr trips, or my Facebook status, or my most recent personal blog post or the last photo I posted on flickr to work out where I might be - if I’ve remembered to update them and you remember to check them (a friend assumed I’d be in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress this week, and ended up having a night in instead of coming round for dinner). That’s both of us doing extra work that the computer should be taking care of and I’m sure that’s the wrong way round. 

There’s two halves to this. One is that location is a really useful service (see my 2008 Technology Resolutions), especially as more of us work from home, travel around more and run out of time to arrange meetings with friends. And that’s the really big thing. I want computers to start saving me time and getting more done for me, not by making it faster to get my accounts done or by letting me try 90 versions of my Web site in the time it used to take to write one, but by working out the context and giving me opportunities. If my To Do list says I need to get something from the Lurgashall Winery for a friend and I get a message from a friend in Billingshurst needing help with something and a mail from a client in Horsham wanting to talk about work, having my PC suggest that I’m in Guildford on Monday is handy (and we think it’s why Microsoft wants Yahoo!); having it know I’m actually in Guildford today even though I didn’t update my calendar and give me an itinerary for the afternoon is even more useful. And it’s the computer doing the running around, not me. For that, I’ll put up with another browser plugin.
-Mary

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

The latest patent idiocies could put phone prices up and increase your security bill. And only one of the cases would be fixed by my own theory of patents (if you don’t yourself manufacture the item or use the process protected by a patent, I think you shouldn’t be able to benefit from the patent by extorting money from companies that do go to the effort of actually making something).

That would get rid of the patent trolls who buy up IP and sneak it past the patent office. Take the owners of the ludicrous new smartphone patent, which seems to ignore more prior art than I could shake a phone battery at. Read through http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=7,321,783&OS=7,321,783&RS=7,321,783 and you’ll find it’s not Nokia, RIM, Microsoft, HTC, Palm, Apple, Symbian, Sony Ericsson, HP or Motorola claiming to have invented the smartphone; it’s one Ki Il Kim of Minerva Industries, Los Angeles.

Minerva is part of a company called Gigatech, which claims to hold patents on “user-operated cell phones for audio/video and sensor event reporting” - and on air bags and seat belts. The company is also claiming patents for memory cards, connecting phones by USB and putting a mobile phone holder and charger on the dashboard of your car.

Minerva/Gigatech claims that CEO John Kim was 2003 Businessman of the Year - although the link that’s supposed to say who gave him the award reloads the same page and Google can’t find any reference to the honour. 2003 was, however, the year that Kim won a lawsuit against Shell to get royalty payments for those sun shades you stick to the inside of your car windows. Just what the inventor of the smartphone would be working on…

Click on the Products section of the Gigatech site and you’ll find a list of patents rather than phones; the News section is full of the lawsuits the company has filed. Last summer it sued 41 mobile phone companies, and this time the LA lawyers didn’t even wait until the patent came through to sue Nokia, RIM, Apple, HP, Motorola, HTC, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Helio, Sprint, AT&T and a few others for good measure.

And even though Gigatech and its lawyers are based in LA the lawsuits are filed in Texas, in a court that’s notorious for enforcing dubious patents.

Minerva wasn’t even founded until 1996. That’s the year that Nokia shipped its first Communicator - and Philips sold a long-forgotten phone with an Internet connection then as well. By 1996 I’d been using an analogue Motorola StarTac to get online from the train for months (I plugged it in to an HP OmniBook and read my mail on CIX at 2400 baud and 125 miles an hour on the journey from Bath to London).

It’s a little more complicated with Trend Micro and Barracuda. Trend says its patent covers gateway virus scanning and wants Barracuda to take the open source ClamAV software out of its appliances. Barracuda says ’shan’t’ on the grounds that “scanning for viruses at the gateway is an obvious and common technique that is utilized by most businesses worldwide.” You’re not supposed to be able to get a patent for anything that could be classed as specialist subject - the bleeding obvious.  Between then Trend and Barracuda are wading through the US patent system, US federal court and - because some of the software was written outside the US - the import-overseeing International Trade Commission. And while patent lawsuits are two a penny these days, this one raises some interesting issues around open source and patents.

Open source projects that infringe on patents can be hard to shut down, if they’re widely distributed. But it’s easier to take legal action against a company with money and business to lose than against individual programmers. Adopt an open source project that’s not covered by a patent promise and you’re getting a responsibility as well as a resource.

SourceFire acquired ClamAV last summer and its open source background with SNORT means the company will understand that open source isn’t a free ride. Less experienced companies - whether they’re developing or just using open source software - might not realise that one reason you pay more for commercial software is that the software company you buy it from is funding a legal department who can take the time to go to court and building up a patent portfolio of its own. Mutually assured patent claims keep a lot of cases out of court. 

Interestingly, Barracuda is going down the open source route in compiling its case against Trend and asking the community for examples of software that had network virus scanning features before September 1995. Maybe the best thing for patent reform would be a comment page for every patent application where we could point out all the academic papers and shipping products that predate the ‘invention’.

We spotted a blog post the other day claiming that the iPhone set new standards as an open phone platform . Rubbish, Mary said; you can’t install your choice of applications without hacking the pone via an image bug in the browser - and if you do, then you can’t get the updates that come out because they fix the hole and lock the iPhone right up again. How can you call that open? Apple may have an SDK on the way, but the iPhone is as closed as one of LG’s shiny bling machines.

The examples in the article look odd to British eyes, as we’ve become used to ubiquitous high-speed data and unlocked smartphones. You can run Google Maps and get your location from the mobile phone masts? You can do that on Windows Mobile, and you can have Live Search and Yahoo! Go on there too, along with more apps than you can shake a stick at. And you can search your emails properly (once you upgrade to Windows Mobile 6; if your operator hasn’t made an upgrade available and neither has the manufacturer, check the enthusiast sites for ROM upgrades that won’t compromise security or stop you being able to get future updates).

What he means, I said, is that it’s a new level of openness on the part of the AT&T network in accepting a device like the iPhone in the first place. Look at the ill-fated ROKR; it had a paltry capacity for music, a terrible interface and was generally a pitiful excuse for a music phone, because Motorola did everything the networks wanted. Verizon put pressure on Palm to lock down the Bluetooth profile on Treo smartphones so you couldn’t transfer files directly to force subscribers to send the photos they took with a Treo through Verizon’s pay-for picture messaging service. Things haven’t been as open as we’d like them in the UK either, as Orange used to require applications running on its phones to be signed with its certificate before you could install them (though there was a relatively easy official unlock process).

For the iPhone to look like a beacon of openness in this scenario you have to ignore the fact that US operators like T-Mobile have been carrying much the same range of Windows Mobile devices we have in the UK and while they may be locked down a little more, big-name apps like Google Maps still run on them just fine. One thing to note: GSM-derived technologies and networks are still the minority in the US, and  CDMA networks like Verizon and Sprint have the largest market share – but CDMA’s influence is weakening. The plan to switch away from the tightly-controlled CDMA technology in favour of LTE – the successor to 3G/HSDPA/HSUPA – may be as much of a reason for Verizon promising to open up its network as the success of the ‘open’ iPhone.

But Apple tends to punch above its weight. In the last three months of 2007 Apple sold 2.3 million iPhones (and about the same number of Macs). Sony Ericsson shipped almost 31 million phones in the same time; Samsung sold 46.3 million. Motorola – a company that’s doing so badly at phone sales that CEO Ed Zander had to step down – sold 40.9 million phones. And Nokia shipped as many phones as everyone else put together - 133.5 million handsets.

The vast majority of those are feature phones rather than smartphones. Last time I checked RIM only had around 10 million BlackBerry users. But if Microsoft hits its predictions of selling 20 million Windows Mobile phones in the year ending this July (up from 11 million the previous year), that will be around 5 million in 3 months. Selling half that many for a smartphone you can’t even install applications on means Apple is having an impact – and if the networks do see sense in the US, open smartphones from Windows Mobile to Linux will get a lot more useful too.

We’ve been on the road for the last few weeks, doing a round of Stateside conferences and company visits. That’s meant relying on the “free” wifi in motels and conference halls. Consumer hardware really doesn’t cut it when you’re using a couple of Linksys routers to cover a hundred plus rooms - especially when it’s the cheapest motel nearest the CES halls. Every room was probably full of journalists and analysts trying to get online, and the routers just waved their little rubber feet in the air and gave up.

Normally that wouldn’t have been a problem. I’d have dug out a good book and gone cold turkey on my Internet addiction. After all, I didn’t need to read a dozen gadget blogs to tell me what I’d just seen that day. However I had the IT Pro editorial team back in the UK waiting for copy - and lack of connectivity wasn’t what I needed. I could have gone to a Starbucks for some of their wifi, but not many are still open at 1 am, even in Vegas. I could have used a 3G card, but this shiny new HP Compaq 2710P tablet is a Santa Rosa machine, so only has a ExpressCard slot - and my Vodafone 3G card is, yes, a PC Card.

Luckily there was a solution. I had my trusty old HTC TYTN with me, and Vegas is on of the few places in the US with decent 3G connectivity (I’m writing this in the heart of the tech world, in a coffee shop in less than a mile from eBay’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, where 3G is a rare and precious thing). Microsoft has added support for Internet Connection Sharing to Windows Mobile 6 (it’s in 5 too, but well hidden) - which means you can use a Windows Mobile 6 phone as a Bluetooth internet gateway.

Getting it working is pretty easy. You’ll first need to pair the phone with your laptop. The rest is simple. Click the Internet Sharing icon on the phone to start using it as a gateway. You’ll need to choose whether it uses USB or Bluetooth (we’d recommend plugging it in to the mains and using Bluetooth, as that way you won’t flatten the phone’s battery running two radios).

Click connect, and go back to your PC. Right click the taskbar Bluetooth icon (if it’s not there, enable it first). You can then select the option of joining a Bluetooth PAN. This is a Personal Area Network, an IP network running over a bluetooth connection. In the dialogue box that pops up, click to choose the device you’re planning on connecting with.

Hey Presto! You’re online.

It’ll be slower than WiFi, but at least it’s a connection. Of course you don’t need to be in a Vegas motel room to use this - it’ll work in Starbucks (no need to pay T-mobile, unless you’ve got one of the new Web’n'Walk contracts that let you use WiFi as part of your standard mobile contract) or in the park, or on the train, or in even in the back of a taxi.