“RIM’s OS is more than antiquated, it’s borderline laughable.”

“There’s so many limitations to RIM’s OS, and even RIM’s data network that it offsets all the wonderful things they’ve managed to accomplish.”

“RIM delivers the same tired package in new hardware and people are starting to catch on. App World? Seriously? From every single developer I’ve spoke to, it’s a non-starter.”

“I’m just frustrated that RIM is going through hardware like it’s nobody’s business yet fails to deliver on the things that everyone wants. Screw business people, screw consumers, everyone wants a WebKit-based browser. It’s inexcusable RIM doesn’t get it.”

To be fair, you should read the whole piece.  I’ve quoted some of the most negative things Boy Genius has to say to make a point. The point is that the business of mobile telephony is a software business now, and no longer a hardware business. 

I’ve spent the last couple of days as a guest of Nokia learning about a tremendously exciting project they have under way in San Francisco which I’ll write about in the future. It’s obvious in conversation with the Nokia team here that the company has a tremendous and far reaching vision of what mobile can be about. However, Nokia suffers from a similar affliction to RIM.  Symbian OS is different from BlackBerry OS.  The same as BlackBerry OS, however, it is a maturing design that is now behind the state of the art. 

Both companies are known and respected as innovators.  RIM primarily gets credit for email, while Nokia introduced the world’s first GPS enabled phones, and the best camera phones in the market.  Both are being perceptually eclipsed because others have shifted the basis of competition from handset innovation to applications and the overall integrated user experience.  The basis of competition has shifted to the operating system and a war for developer mindshare.

RIM and Nokia have a challenge ahead of them.  As early smartphone innovators, they created this market.  They are undisputed leaders.   Others, however, are poised to steal the market away from them.  RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis and Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo ought to have an internal “Manhattan project” under way to counter the threat from Apple, Google/Android and Palm.  Perhaps more than any other aspect of that effort they should consider stealing a page from Apple, focusing their efforts on fewer new phones, operating system innovation, and more new software.

Pillow talk, anyone?

This may be the ultimate wireless mash-up.  The photographs below show a wireless interface developed at UC Berkeley, which is implanted in flying beetles. It’s part of an experiment designed to create “cyborg beetles” which can be controlled in flight. The plaque reads, in part:

“The miniaturized thorax-mounted system consists of a neural stimulator, muscular stimulators and a micro-controller. Flight initiation, cessation and elevation control were accomplished through neural stimulus of the brain which elicited, suppressed or modulated wing oscillation.  Turns were triggered through through the direct muscular stimulus of either of the basalar muscles.”

They look gorgeous, no doubt.  Check out this trailer from Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.  Click the full screen button to see the full impact.  It’s really darned impressive.

Don’t expect to see a lot of Canadian high definition content, however.   Not that there aren’t people in this country shooting high definition video, who might have a strong desire to share that video.  It’s simply a matter of bandwidth and usage caps. All broadband providers in Canada, excepting a few small outfits in Vancouver, cap usage at between 50 and 150G of transfer per month, and restrict upload speeds to under 1 megabit per second, except Shaw who have raised their upload limit to a meagre 2 megabits.  We’d be in our graves before YouTube received our videos at these speeds.

Pathetic, no? Even worse, most of the small business offerings from these providers consist of repackaged residential service, with a better service agreement and a higher price.

Does it matter if a few people can’t upload video?  Perhaps not, unless you’re a Canadian culture supporter or Heritage Minister James Moore.  But what about the other impacts of capped usage and restricted upload bandwidth – the economic and environmental impacts?  Applications like VPN, remote desktop, and VoIP are the cornerstones of telecommuting strategies.  Those applications are dependent on high speed upload as well as download.  When telecommuting is impaired, it has an economic impact to business, and an environmental impact on society.  We should all care about that!

So how about it Rogers, Bell, Telus, Shaw and Videotron?  Download speeds have increased steadily over the last decade, but we’ve had upload speeds of under 1Mbs since the dawn of broadband.  Shouldn’t we have better?

Skyhook’s innovation is to augment that with WiFi hotspot locations.  Why WiFi? It can be wonderfully accurate, to within 30 to 60 feet, or 10 to 20m which is roughly the same as GPS.  WiFi can establish a fix within less than a second.  And, WiFi is not vulnerable to overhead obstructions, so it can be used indoors. 

Skyhook’s technology relies on a database of WiFi access points in over 2,000 cities (and growing).  Much like Google, they use vehicles to drive cities, and using a laptop in the vehicle, they chart the location of WiFi access points.  In addition, on iPhone as users use the mapping application, new locations and newly discovered WiFi access points are automatically added to the database.  It’s a kind of automated crowdsourcing, based on usage.

Here’s the coverage map for the Ottawa area, for example.  You can see that there are few unmapped places, except on the outskirts of the city. Theoretically, very accurate fixes, indoors and out, should be available from most parts of Ottawa.

So, how well does it work?

On iPhone 3G, running OS 2.x, the mapping software would routinely place my office (on the left side of the map, pointed to by the red and yellow arrow) in the middle of the Ottawa airport west runway (shown on the right side of the map, with a similar pointer). That’s a distance of approximately 1km, and not very useful.  To be fair, it was more accurate standing outside, since a GPS fix would eventually be found.

Running OS 3.0, however, produced this result.  My actual office is not, obviously, in the parking lot. It’s located at the marker.  iPhone has located me perhaps 50 feet from the actual location.  That’s a significant improvement from a kilometre!

Depending on which access point the software fixes, the location can vary as well.  The following screen, taken seconds after the first screen shot, shows that I have apparently moved to the other side of the parking lot.  I was at my desk the whole time.  iPhone simply triangulated off a different WiFi access point.

The above screen shot is significant for another reason.  Two days ago, when I first received the 3GS, I parked my car in the spot indicated by the blue dot, and asked the phone to identify my location.  What this shows is that the location that the iPhone automatically tagged from my request was added to the Skyhook database within 48 hours. Impressive, no?

As I stated initially, Skyhook is an amalgam of WiFi, GPS and tower triangulation.  In theory, it should be able to work without any mobile service or line of sight to the sky.  So, how well does it work without tower triangulation or GPS?  The following shot was taken from an iPhone with no cellular service.  Notice how the accuracy has diminished, and that my location has apparently moved to the far end of the building.  Skyhook’s algorithms must take into account all forms of location information available, not relying on any specific fix.

I’m personally impressed.  iPhone 3GS with OS 3.0 is a dramatic improvement over prior operating systems and hardware. Most tellingly, in the last two days it has changed the way I do local search. Because of the speed with which a fix can be obtained, I find myself turning more and more to the maps application rather than  the browser to look for nearby businesses. 

I predict many more people will do the same.

The details?

$40 will get you 60 roaming minutes in the US, and $60 will get you 120. 

A $10 charge will allow you to roam data at $1 per megabyte. 

So what does that mean in practice?  Normal data usage for me is around 300M per month.  For my 5 days in San Francisco, if I use data normally, I would expect to pay $70.  I also bought the $60 voice plan, and will use that in conjunction with Truphone Anywhere to avoid long distance charges. 

At $130 it’s still expensive, but compared to the $474 I would have paid for the same service six months ago, it’s a steal.  Moreover, it’s much less complex than my previous solutions – local SIMs and unlocking SIM carriers.

And the best part?  No contracts.  The customer service rep set the entire plan to expire in 30 days.  It’s totally pay as you go.

Take, for example, Apple and the iPhone.  Famously missing 3G in the first release, cut and paste, search and numerous other features through the first 2 releases, iPhone OS 3.0 delivers the goods.  And that’s what OS 3.0 is – the fit and finish release.

Search – not only did the team at Apple finally deliver the ability to search your inbox in this release, they went a step farther.  You can search the entire phone – music, photos, calendar items, business cards, emails and so on.  It’s the best search I’ve ever used on a mobile device.

Cut and Paste – the company that pioneered it on the desktop, finally implemented it on the phone.  ‘Nuff said.

Camera – yes, iPhone 1 and 3G had a camera – with no autofocus, no ability to take video, and the same pixel count as the Olympus point and shoot I bought in 1998.  iPhone 3GS corrects those deficiencies and brings the pixel count up to an anemic 3 megapixels, the same as Nokia’s 2006 vintage N93.  It’s still not close to the two year old N95’s 5 megapixels, or the jaw dropping 8 and 12 megapixel devices coming from Sony Ericsson and Samsung.  And for the price, how about some premium optics and a flash, Apple?

Sharing a contact – yes, unbelievably you couldn’t share a contact without installing a 3rd party application on prior releases of the OS. How long has BlackBerry been able to accomplish this simple feat?  Now iPhone can too.

Speed – not just on the new iPhone 3GS hardware, but also on the 3G hardware, OS 3.0 is much snappier. 

Voice Control – famously missing from a device that is often used in a vehicle and that has no physical buttons. Not just voice dial, however, but full on voice control.  Driving home yesterday I told iPhone to “Play songs by Diana Krall”, and moments later was listening.  As with search, this is the best voice dial I’ve used on a mobile phone. 

There are numerous other enhancements, especially with the 3GS hardware.  Every iPhone owner should install OS 3.0, at minimum. And, although it falls short in several areas compared to the competition, in my opinion the 3GS hardware is also worth the upgrade, if for no other reason than speed.

Third times the charm.  Even for Apple.

How is it that Facebook, with 200 million users, still suffers along with the same broken email client as two years ago.  With no folders, no offline mode, slow search, no forward, no ability to add people to a thread, no archive capability, and no ability to delete multiple messages, it is the worst email experience I’ve ever encountered.  The proxied email message I get in my Outlook Inbox when somebody mails me on Facebook only adds salt to the wound, because I can’t reply to it – without logging into Facebook and using their brain dead email client. That’s the reason my Facebook Inbox is clogged with thousands of messages, and some important messages go unanswered. 

You’d think that an enterprising third party developer might have created a solution to this – a connector to Facebook for Outlook, or a better Facebook email application that can run in the Facebook environment.  The answer is sadly, no. 

Here’s my challenge.  I’ll put up $200 toward a prize for the first Facebook email client (offline or otherwise) that will allow me to effectively manage my Facebook inbox.  If you have a Facebook inbox problem, join me – put your pledge in the comments below.  Let’s see if we can raise $10,000 for some lucky developer to fix Facebook’s email problem.  And if you’re the first developer to deliver a working modern replacement for Facebook’s email, then you hit the jackpot!

Today’s news is that Calliflower is now available in 30 countries, and more than 100 cities around the world.  As of today, we are providing dial-in access to Calliflower in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.  To see the full list of cities, visit the Calliflower website.  In many countries the service is an ordinary local dial call.  However, in some instances we’ve had to deploy a “national” number, which carries a premium charge.

Calliflower’s flat-rate conference call model just makes sense for international calls. For many customers it’s also the most cost effective for domestic conference calling as well.  For details, check out What are the real costs of free conference call services? on the Calliflower blog.  You might be surprised by what you learn.