NOKIA PRESS RELEASE August 30, 2005

Consumers also want to watch TV programs on their cell phone

Espoo, Finland - Results announced today from one of the world’s first commercial mobile TV pilots in Helsinki, Finland reveal the popularity and willingness to pay for mobile TV services, underlining the potential of this exciting new mobile application. 41% of pilot participants would be willing to purchase mobile TV services and half thought that a fixed monthly fee of 10 euros was a reasonable price to pay. Over half (58%) said that they believed broadcast mobile TV services would be popular.

Digita, Elisa, MTV, Channel Four Finland (Nelonen), Nokia, TeliaSonera Finland and YLE jointly conducted the pilot in Finland between March and June 2005 with 500 users accessing mobile TV using the Nokia 7710 smartphone and DVB-H technology.

Content is king
According to the pilot results, pilot participants not only wanted to watch familiar program offerings, but they would also welcome mobile TV content that is suitable for short and occasional viewing. Familiar programs available through national Finnish television channels proved to be the most popular followed by sports and news channels (CNN, BBC World, Euronews). The Ice Hockey World cup games, the San Marino and Monaco Formula One as well as the UEFA Champions League match between Liverpool and AC Milan were among the top 10 programs viewed during the pilot.

Viewing patterns
In general, mobile TV users spent approximately 20 minutes a day watching mobile TV, although more active users watched between 30 to 40 minutes per session. Participants also watched mobile TV at different times than traditional TV peak hours.

Mobile TV was most popular while traveling on public transport to relax or to keep up to date with the latest news although it also proved popular at home for entertainment and complementing participants’ main TV watching.

Pricing models
The potential commercial benefits of mobile TV are clearly evident from this pilot with 41% willing to pay for the service. Pilot members were charged a monthly fee of 4.90 euros although half of those that took part thought 10 euros per month was a reasonable price to pay. Overall, users preferred a fixed pricing model although many were also interested in a pay per view model - i.e. buying access for specific content such as a football match or racing competition.

The pilot results also reveal the key requirements from consumers in order to use mobile TV services:

- Easy and intuitive service usability
- Good technical functionality and reliability
- Content that is also suitable for short period viewing
- Mobile phone functions must not be compromised by the TV application

“The Helsinki pilot reinforces our belief that mobile broadcast TV is a significant opportunity,” said Richard Sharp, Vice President, Rich Media, Nokia. “The message for the industry is clear: for mobile TV services to succeed we need relevant and compelling content, easy-to-use technology and reasonable and simple pricing plans. With these elements in place, consumer demand for mobile TV will follow.”

DVB-H technology allows television channels to be distributed effectively to mobile devices. It provides the best user experience in the mobile environment with excellent, broadcast quality picture, reduced battery consumption and wide range of channels (up to 55 channel are possible).

Additional information:
Finland’s mobile TV project: www.finnishmobiletv.com

This is the ultra-smooth new, ‘Radiden’ handset from SonyEricsson which is set to be released today.

The cell phone features an am / fm radio which can also pick up audio signals from television stations. Unfortunately it can’t display the pictures to go with the audio.

The phone is compact at 11.7cm by 4.9 cm and is only 2cm thick. It features 7 retro style buttons for saving radio frequencies and has a nice classic look. There are also some fancy add-ons like the matching headphones and this desktop charger.

There is a popular role playing strategy game that has been around for ten years in Japan called ‘Front Mission 2089′. Versions of the game have already been ported over to the west by Squaresoft and have proven popular. But the game is really at its prime in Japan and now users here can play the game on their cell phone and battle other users whilst on the move.

The ‘Front mission mobile’ game for Docomo 900i handsets has just been released and lets you build your online, customisable, robot character and then battle them with other players, live and online, using your cell phone. It is a ‘turns’ based game with each opponent having a number of turns to play out their strategies, attacking, defending and retreating as needed and the winner is the one with the most life force left after a battle.



The game costs 525yen ( about $5 ) per month plus packet charges to play which could prove quite expensie for the real heavy user. Every day at 8.00am scores and statistics from the previous day’s battles are shown and at the end of each month the top ten ranking players are announced.

This real-time interaction has proven popular in game play on the big screens, with Xbox live and PC games like the Starwars Galaxies series enjoying massive numbers of subscribers so it will be interesting to see how this works with the new hook up and join in anywhere, anytime freedom that the cell phone gives and whether or not the small screen and limited interface puts players off.

DoCoMo has come up with an interesting an novel way to let its customers pay for everyday items using their cell phone.

A new service in Thailand will allow customers to pay for their online shopping, pay their gas bills, buy drinks at vending machines and more. It doesn’t use anything fancy like the chips in FOMA phones but instead works by issuing the user with a dedicated phone number which the user can call and, via an automated voice system, authorise payments.

The service is provided as a joint venture between DoCoMo, AIS Thailand and mPAY, the online mobile payments system that provides this phone number interface.

Camera enabled cell phones are popular all over the world and Japan, the supposed land of the camera fanatic, is no exception. The latest handsets hitting the market here are now packing 3.2 Mega Pixel cameras so these babies rival some of the dedicated digital cameras out there. Its little wonder then that Japan has a feast of accessories that you can buy to spice up your cell phone picture taking.

The biggest problem with cell phone cameras is that they never have good zoom functions, the physical zooms are limited and the digital zoom that takes over once you reach the max distance of the physical zoom is terrible and distorts the picture beyond all recognition.

So to come to the aid of the needy camera man a few enterprising companies have been producing cheap add-on lenses which you can hold in front of the camera lens or stick over it. These have tended to be toy-like and are easily lost or broken and also the zoom quality you can expect from these cheap bits of plastic is not very good to say the least.

Queue these :

These stylish new lenses look the business and attach to the front of compatible phones using a magnetic rim, they cost 2480 Yen and are currently only available for the AU W21CA and the FOMA F900iT.

They come in three strengths of telephoto for zoom ( 1/2x , 3/4x ) and macro for close up ( 4x ). Apparently they give good results, I have yet to test one myself, but I have heard that there are problems when using the 3/4x telephoto on the W21CA as it shows a black shadow around the rim of the photo.

Of course, anyone who is serious about their photography would probably be better off using a dedicated digital camera with proper lenses, but for those of us with an active lifestyle and a taste for photography these handy accessories would be great to slip into your pocket just in case you find that perfect photo opportunity on your travels.

I have just spent the weekend updating the ‘pixs’ RSS reader with a new feature that I think might be even better than the reader itself - I have added a web page translator tool that will read in any website and re-format it for reading on a cell phone. Which means you don’t have to settle for only reading the cut-down version that websites tend to publish on their RSS feeds.

Sounds good but what is even better is the image re-drawing function that will shrink images in height and width and also in file size so the whole site will display on the cell phone handset.

The code is brand new so the results are a little bit raw and I have seen a lot of areas that can be improved, but I have big ideas for this project and have new features I want to add. The two major drawbacks are that the site only works for XHTML compatible handsets and currently has only a simple re-sizing algorithm for the images.

I am going to road test it for a while longer, which might turn into quite a while longer as I have a new design contract starting tomorrow, so as always if you can try it out on your handset and let me know what results you get I will be really grateful.

Today I am launching the first draft of my cell phone RSS reader service: pixs.jp, and I would be grateful for any feedback you might have if you try using it.

I have been interested in a simple way of implementing a mobile internet site with contemporary content and have found that the easiest way to do this is by formatting the vast amount of RSS feeds availably into a format readable by cell phones. It is a simple idea but so far I haven’t found a site doing it in quite the same way as me.

This project started out as a way for me to get the western content that I like reading onto my cell phone here in Japan. There are plenty of mobile sites here but few that cater for the English reading market so I decided to make my own. Since I made the service, me and my friends have found it extremely useful so I have decided to publicise it with a mind to making it into a bigger system.

The service is free and will remain free. If one day I can find a way to spin money off the top of it then I might do that, however, the content will never be affected as a result so I hope people will find it a useful day to day tool.

If you have any feeds you would like to see on the directory then please submit them, I will vet them of course as I don’t want anything unsavoury appearing on my site, not that I am suggesting that you, my dear readers, would do something like that, but hey, there are plenty of weirdos out there.

And if you have any suggestions or find any bugs, or if the system doesn’t work on your handset then please leave me a comment on this site. I will find it which ever post you choose to make the comment on so please don’t be shy, it will help to grow this into a useful service for everyone.

So what are you waiting for? Point your phone to this address : http://www.pixs.jp

If the beta is successful I will put up a .com and .co.uk mirror to speed up the accesses for you guys outside of Japan.

Thanks for your support.

Marcus.

I have always been intrigued by the potential for e-learning on the cell phone, it just seems to be a perfect medium for taking bite-sized lessons when you have nothing better to do, and I can easily see the day when salary men are swatting up for their MBA whilst taking the train to work or students are cramming for their physics finals on the bus to school.

Well that day is getting closer now, for the Japanese anyhow, as AU have launched a new service on their ezweb portal for delivering lessons directly to the cell phone.

The service is called ‘manabi’ and so far has four lesson packs available which mainly focus on learning English which is a national passtime of the Japanese at the moment.

The packs contain short lessons and quizes to test your knowledge and feature a fair splattering of colorful characters and cuteness.

With a monthly revenue stream for subscriptions this may prove to be a lucrative gap in the market. Watch this space for more details.

If you want to see some very nice concept cell phones that are on the cards from Vodafone then you need to see this nice flash driven site.

http://www.vodafone.jp/designfile/

It is a classy site and the phones look great, my personal favorite is the ‘wallet’, which I think blends the normally hard, high-tech mobile phone into an elegant style accessory.

The flash is a bit hard to navigate but is definitely worth a look.

Hint: If the music annoys you then do switch it off on the first screen before launching the flash.

The D901is has a nice gimmick with its retractable keypad, though when I was using it I couldn’t help but feel that it would break really easily after a few months of use.

This is a common complaint of mine with the cell phones on the market in Japan, they seem ‘plasticy’ and not very well constructed. It might be a personal thing but I like my phones to feel tough.

The slider mechanism is activated by a button and it is pretty cool, that is if you can press the button in one smooth move when pulling the phone from your pocket. You will have to practice this a lot because of the stupid position of the button. Its just not placed where you fingers would naturally land when gripping the phone.

The screen has a nice sharp display and the phone is generally good, however, the buttons are all on the small side ( maybe its because of my large - foreigners fingers ) and the navigation could do with a bit more thought.