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The new Blackberrys would occasionally and very briefly vibrate. This should be too short to be mistaken for a message alert but just long enough for an accelerometer inside the device to measure how much it moves. This tells the Blackberry whether it is on top of a flat table, in a person’s hand or stuffed inside a pocket.

On a table, the Blackberry rings loudly to announce a call. Inside a pocket, it shuts off the screen to save power. And while in the palm of a hand, it leaves the screen lit but switches to vibrate when it has a message to deliver.
(newscientist.com)

But that is only one way to guess the situation it’s in. If we call the above vibrate-and-sense method a kind of ‘feeling’, what if we took a look at all five senses?

• feeling: the Blackberry already senses that last time it was used (for the screensaver function). It could also sense the last time it moved. If no movement, it is not carried by an active user, and e.g. should not use the vibration alert. The device could also monitor temperature and humidity to detect presence of a person.
• seeing: a basic light sensor could detect day and night, or out/in a pocket or bag. In the dark, the screen lighting up when a call/message arrives has a totally different impact.
• hearing: just monitoring background noise could tell a lot about the environment: is the user e.g. sleeping, and if so, does he snore. If background noise is > 100dB don’t use sound, only vibrate. If > 120dB, don’t even bother vibrating.
  Another way to measure might be like a radar-sensor: emit a sound of inaudible frequency and see how strong/fast it comes back.
• smelling: biometric authentication! If the user holding the device does not smell like the owner, lock the screensaver.
• tasting: let’s not go there. Oh wait, a tongue sensor that detects alcohol level: if too high, don’t let user send messages to his exes.

Watch out, at some point we all will give names to our mobile devices, and have actual conversations with them.

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Current traffic inspection

The information for Flanders seems to come from Verkeerscentrum Antwerpen. They claim to use (NL) 3 sources of information:

Loops
Loops in the roads can count # cars/hour and/or speed of the cars. The loop itself is lo-tech, but if one wants to collect all that data in real-time, some kind of data transmission has to be installed, which is expensive to support. So this only makes sense on highways and busy roads.

Cameras
Cameras can be used to monitor traffic. The Verkeerscentrum uses some A.I.D. (automated incident detection) cameras to spot irregularities without human intervention, but most of the cameras are probably manned. Moreover, they are used to check for accidents and traffic jams, not to estimate speed at every location. But there is research for doing just that.

Human feedback
Obviously the police has good info on traffic jams, certainly those caused by accidents. But every traffic participant can give feedback on current traffic through systems like Touring Mobilis.

Alternatives

But there are other methods possible:
Highway toll
This would only work in countries like France, where all highways have toll booths when you enter and leave. When you take the travel times of those that probably haven’t stopped in between, you can get a rough estimation of the traffic speed. But the information is strongly contaminated and had an intrinsic delay (if an accident happens and blocks all traffic 45 minutes from the next exit, it might take up to 1 hour to detect this with some confidence).

Speed cameras
What pleasure that would be, to know you just avoided a traffic jam because of a speed camera that is detecting an average speed of 2 km/h and is obviously not making any money. The only issue is that it is not so interesting for the police to put these expensive (manned!) mobile devices at places where there is a risk for difficult traffic. The cameras are not there for information, they’re there for income.

GPS Data
Lots of people have a GPS in their car these days. If all that position data could be aggregated in real-time, it would be the best possible speed estimation/traffic jam detector imagineable. But most of those systems are stand-alone and utterly offline. Maybe if 3G data-transmission becomes affordable, we could imagine the GPS sending a position/speed back to a central service every hour. Maybe some grassroots project: you get the aggregated data only if you send your own. Because someone will have to pay for that transmission!

GSM Data
Mobile phone companies can keep track of the approximate position of their subscribers as they jump from antenna to antenna. This info is sometimes used by the police to track down vilains, but could also be aggregated into speed estimations. The advantage of this is that everything is there: we have penetration of mobile phones of almost 100%, nothing has to be installed in each car, at each road or each antenna. We just need data analysis at the mobile operator.

Of course someone has to pay for this extra work. It might be the end-user, who subscribes for info via SMS (something stubru already offers for the Touring Mobilis data), via email or RSS, it might me an informayio provider who delivers the data through TMC or some other wireless system (GSM? WiMax?) to the GPS devices. Actually, this could be a killer app for mobile operators: it’s their data (so it’s cheap to get at), they have the delivery channel (GPRS, 3G, SMS) and they have the billing system. Why, they could even sell GPS systems (or GPS-capable smartphones) at a discount, because they win it back with the attached data plan. Vodafone (Germany) is already experimenting with it.

Only some years away: your TomTom telling you: “Traffic jam on the E40 only just dissolving, estimated travel time via Gent: 3h30, estimated travel time via N49: 2h45. Wanna stop and see a movie or start a conference call?“

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With the Nike+ footwear connected to iPod nano through the Nike+iPod Sport Kit, information on time, distance, calories burned and pace is stored on iPod and displayed on the screen; real-time audible feedback also is provided through headphones. The kit includes an in-shoe sensor and a receiver that attaches to iPod. A new Nike Sport Music section on the iTunes® Music Store and a new nikeplus.com personal service site help maximize the Nike+iPod experience.
from apple.com

Interesting move! If one needed to guess a while back the type of device Nike shoes would be connected to, the choice would have been between a PDA or a mobile phone. Just add Bluetooth to the shoe, connect both and off you go. The phone had the clear advantage, since it is something people take along all the time, even when running. A runner takes his MP3 player too, of course, but until recently that was more like a single purpose device. Now Apple is positioning it as a convenient storage and visualisation device you happen to carry on you all the time. Key advantage: ubiquitous!

It also shows why it’s going to be hard to displace the iPod from its dominant market position. Apple is capitalizing on the device’s ubiquity to link it to other products and services. And because it’s a proprietary system, every link-up is another lock-in. As your shoes and your car and your stereo and your clothes become iPod-enabled, it becomes ever more difficult to abandon the little sucker.
from roughtype.com

So now there’s an attack from a less obvious contender to that Holy Grail of Ultimate Mobile Device. Let’s take a look at that crowded space:


The axes are as follows:

• the more to the left, the closer a device is to its owner, and the more it is carried by him/her. A desktop PC is far, a laptop is closer, but a mobile phone is the closest. I haven’t included embedded/implanted devices, but that would be even closer.
• the higher, the more functionality. On the bottom we see single purpose devices like a Walkman CD player, a traditional landline phone, going up we see the iPod (music, agenda, video), the PDA that is a general purpose device with smaller horsepower, and on top would be the PC/Mac, that is a fast general purpose machine.

You see all types of devices that used to be single purpose (mobile phone, PDA, MP3 player, digital camera) trying to move up and to the left, trying to get a piece of that so valuable real estate: the consumer’s breast pocket or purse. Most phones can now take pictures and sync with the agenda/email box, some PDAs can be used to make phonealls and store images, and as of recently cameras are getting cross-over features: storage device, Wifi, agenda. MP3 players either expanded to heavy portable media devices (like the Archos) or to enhanced media devices: pictures, movies. The deal with Nike shows that Apple is also aiming for something else: ubiquitous personal connected storage device. Add to that phone functionality, and you have a killer device: the “iWhat?”.

One remark: the four types of devices are not all equally crucial to its user. What is the most painful functionality to lose? I guess for most people it’s this sequence: phone, PDA, MP3, camera.

• It’s OK for most users to have a crappy camera in their phone, but not to have a camera with a crappy phone. We don’t expect to see the individual nostrils of our subject in a 1 megapixel picture, but would hate to have a fancy Nikon camera with a mobile phone that does not allow e.g. texting (SMS).
• A PDA is crucial for those with a heavy agenda, but the base PDA functions (agenda, to-do, contacts) are easily taken over by the phone or the MP3 player. If you ‘re a PDA manufacturer and you only have devices that have no MP3, no Wifi, no phone, … tough days ahead!
• I can see MP3 players adding Bluetooth and Wifi soon. This allows them to add a handsfree kit and a portable keyboard and voila: you have an awesome phone/PDA/email/IM device.
• Cameras have always had less incentive to include extra functionality, although it’s starting. The first Wifi models have already come out, allowing one to empty those 4GB flash drives without taking the card out or connecting a USB cable. It makes no sense for pro and semi-pro camera’s to add stuff like PDA or MP3. Anything with an 18-55 lens will never be an “ubiquitous” device, and if the owner can spend over €1000 for a camera, he’ll already have a phone and PDA if he needs one. For mid-price camera’s, I think that photo-related features (image stabilizer, …) are more relevant than an on-board agenda.

Incidentally, I now use a device that is all 4: my Nokia N91 is not only a phone, it has a 2-megapixel camera, a 4GB hard drive for MP3 and MPEG4 movies, 802.11G Wifi with browser and email and synchronizes with my Outlook. So I can tell you the 4 main issues with universal devices:

1. weight and size: that’s an awful lot to cram into one package
2. stability: you need an OS that can run several applications at once. Apparently, that’s not an obvious task
3. single point of failure: when it fails, you have nothing left. Your phone is gone, your contacts are gone, your music is gone… Back to the stone age. The most common cause of this brings us to the last and most important issue:
4. battery: I pity the battery. It’s surprisingly small for that big phone, and when one uses the MP3 player often, the odds of it lasting longer than a day are very small indeed. And when it dies … (see 3.)

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• serial connectivity with a standard mini-USB cable – brilliant: now I can use the same cable for this phone and my Canon digital camera. One less cable to carry.
• Bluetooth – the evident close-range wireless option
• 802.11g Wifi connection: only for browsing (not for synchronisation) but still impressive. More on that later.

But the first thing I looked at, was the power supply. Nokia was always the brand that never changed its power supply adaptor from one model to the next. I always admired them for that, since every other phone manufacturer seems to suffer from the YAPS (Yet Another Power Supply) syndrome. (How hard can that be? Just tell the designers: we only make phones with this power plug. It’s a concentric 5V adaptor. Deal with it, already!) The bad news is: this time they changed it. The good news is: it’s backwards compatible (they’ve put an adaptor cable in the package). Why they had to make it smaller, I have no idea. Maybe the think they might make devices that are thinner than 3mm.

SYNCHRONISATION
When you insert the mini USB into the phone, it gives you the choice to connect:

• as a portable music player: this makes (in my case) Windows Media Player pop up and synchronize my music files.
• as a smart phone (using Nokia’s “PC Suite” software): this is for synchronising with your local contacts, calendar, … It also gets the pictures and videos from the phone, and allows you to send SMS through your phone.
• as an external disk drive:so you can throw anything on the 4GB hard drive. Some of the folders have familar names (Pictures, Videos), but I guess you could cause some wreckage by fooling around in the ‘private’ or ‘resource’ folder.

I had forgotten what it felt like to have my calendar on an electronic device. I stopped using a PalmPilot 5 years ago and since then I had to trust my memory and a huge paper agenda for my schedule. I now started using the Outlook calendar again and it syncs nicely with the N91.

IMAGE/VIDEO

There is a 2 megapixel camera in the N91. The pictures are quite sharp, although the colours are sometimes a bit off. There are artefacts around sharp colour transitions (due to compression, maybe). The zoom is clearly a digital zoom. But then again if you’re very picky about your pictures, buy a D200 and stop whining. Anyway, the task of taking pictures until your phone memory is ‘full’ is quite hard. It keeps on showing > 999 images left. Even when I started recording movies, which fills up the 4GB memory faster, I never got an indication of running out of memory.
The video camera is also a good feature. I started taping some footage of the Brussels Tango festival this weekend and the result is acceptable, certainly with the little light that was available. When fiddling with the settings, I involuntary switched it over to a smaller size (176×144 – 140Kbps instead of 352×266 – 542 Kbps). What was more surprising is that the file format then also switches from .MP4 (MPEG4 encoding) to .3GP (3rd gen Mobile Video). The small format doesn’t look like much, but that’s probably not the Nokia’s fault (.25 megapixel is not a lot).
In the highest resolution setting, 4GB of disk space gives you almost a day of recording (but only 1 hour at a time), the smaller one gives you more than 2 days of footage.

Next post will be on the musical features of the N91.

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Beause Nokia now has the opportunity to return with a vengeance. I have been asked by the kind people of TheseDays to take the new Nokia N91 phone for an elaborate test drive. A phone with a 4GB hard drive and Wifi (802.11g) built-in, I wasn’t too difficult to convince.

So in the next couple of days I will be posting about my experiences with this 165g of high-tech. I am as curious as TheseDays whether I can be convinced to switch back to Nokia. Just a glance at the contenders: at your left, the Samsung E720,at your right the Nokia N91.

The Nokia N91 will be available in Belgium somewhere next month, the one I have seems to be #3 in the Benelux. Let’s find out if three is the magic number. In any way, a big thank you to TheseDays for qualifying me as ‘an influential blogger‘ and letting me test this fancy piece of hardware.

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Some lessons I learned in the past: WAP at 9600 baud sucks, never buy an expensive phone (my + €400 Nokia 6210 broke down on me after 6 months) and don’t expect a phone to last more than 2 years.

Now, my 5510 is getting rusty and I would just like the following: a nice Nokia phone between €200 and €300, polyphonic ring tones, colour screen, Bluetooth (for the handsfree set), GPRS and if possible, an MP3 player and a camera. There is a SonyEriccson T630, so it’s not impossible.

So what can Nokia offer me:

3650: not really easy on the eyes

7650: no Bluetooth

6600: no Bluetooth

6820: no GPRS, original keyboard but robust?

N-Gage: ain’t I a bit too old for that?

And all of them, expect for the N-Gage are more like €400. You see me running around with a N-Gage? Where do I speak?

Nokia, I represent a €3000 customer over the next 10 years, and there must be a pack of people like me. Is it that hard to make an affordable nice phone with the features above? Bluetooth is mainstream now, and GPRS is not exotic. Your competitors are doing it! Even Russell Beattie, who’s a notorious Nokia fan, is waiting for you to get your design and marketing right. I’ll give it another month and see what new stuff comes out and how your 25% price drop is doing.

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