Protos

The Wall Street Journal has a really interesting story about mobile phones that are also being portable music players.

A few quotes:

The cellphone-music market in Japan has already surpassed the market for music downloaded using a PC, which is often for later use on a digital music player. In the first six months of 2005, total revenue from PC-based music downloading was just $4.8 million, compared with $122.1 million for music — not including ringtones — downloaded to cellphones, according to the Recording Industry Association of Japan.

Well a $122.1 millions is a good start I think.

Certainly, most consumers accustomed to paying 99 cents to download a song to their PC for use on their iPod aren’t likely to want to pay double or triple that to download to their phones, despite the instant gratification. A Yankee Group survey in 2004 found that Internet users’ likelihood of downloading music from a licensed service declined 58% if prices were raised from 99 cents to $1.49, an indication of how attuned U.S. consumers are to price.

True – but the shear ease of downloading directly is appealing. Why sideload if its not needed? When bandwidth becomes cheaper the I-Pod will die. Ohh and so will the new and sexy Sony MP3 Walkman (purple thingy below).

I am very sure that devices like those will not have a place in the market within 3-5 years. Why would the main consumer prefer two seperate devices? I would not anyway…

Australian it news reports that there are know over 2 billion ! !

Nokia last month said it expected the 2 billion mark to be reached in the final quarter of the year and 3 billion to be reached by 2010.

“The total number of mobile connections is now equivalent to nearly a third of the estimated world population of 6.5 billion,” Martin Garner, director at Wireless Intelligence, said in a statement.

Well I wonder how Martin Garner knows – but wow!

Well I guess that Sky also thinks going for ported television content. Yesterday I wrote about Orange offering 50 channels, but Im not sure its clever. Also some reports doubts that there is enogh bandwidth for mainstream adoption of this service…

Sky is targeting children! This is a good move, since children will have difficulty estimating the value of the offer made… :-(

More about Sky on mobile @ The Independent Online

The Register reports that Orange is making 50(!) TV channels available for 3G users there is also the mention of 11 radio channels.

Still it seems that they are only porting existing content. I just wonder if taking a whole television in your pocket is the right way to go, since that really has been an option for a long time. Just think of the Sony Watchman:

I wonder if that will really work – don’t we rather need custom made content for the mobile? I would prefer short kill time content, unless trapped in an airplane, where a whole episode of Simpson’s is nice (but viewed from Flash memory not 3G…).

Otherwise its just the same old story of doing it because we can… that will not create value.

Also some claim that there won’t really be enough bandwidth (@ rcrnews.com)

“Our modeling reveals that the capacity of a typical W-CDMA network could be exceeded as soon as 2007, for example, if 40 percent of 3G users take up mobile TV and video services and consume eight minutes of video per day,” said Alastair Brydon, co-author of the report.

We will see.

The BBC yet again reports on the use of shorthand forms is being used in exam papers by students.

Slang creeps into English exams
English examiners have complained about the use of slang expressions such as ‘gonna’, ‘ain’t’ and ‘shouda’ in GCSEs this year.

Markers for the exam board Edexcel said “almost unforgivable” basic errors were made by apparently bright pupils.

In its annual report on its English GCSE papers, Edexcel said there were “many concerns about elementary errors in the work of apparently able pupils”. Another complaint was the failure to use a capital letter for ‘I’.

The verb forms “shouda”, “gonna”, “ain’t” and “wanna”, appeared with surprising regularity, the examiners said.

Candidates should not use street language or the style used in text messages, they said.

Examiners had more praise for the standard of A-level English Literature.

But they were concerned at the inability of some candidates to spell Shakespeare, in a paper called “Shakespeare in context”.

The thing is that language is plastic and follows the standard “what is most eazy for me”-paradigm – that tends to lean towards short forms: “Got t m8?” This -most likely- cannot be stopped. Sorry old timers…

The mobile phone as a RFID reader is a clever idea. The potential for RFID capable phones are great with mainstream consumers (once RFID is more widely adopted that is).

This feature can be used to get discount coupons, store information, ads, etc. that are sent from reader devices. The received information is then stored in a special “folder” on a mobile phone (read more@ ubiks.net they got it from: itmedia.co.jp)

NTT already has consumer applications like felica being able to read RFID would just make the mobile wallet an even more potent add on.