RSS for 3G mobiles planed by Optus

Dec 16 RSS for 3G mobiles planed by Optus
Found in:Mobile News,

Mobile phones have always promised a lot but, in many cases, been disappointing for technically literate users used to the speed, customization and capacity of a PC.Mobile phones have always promised a lot but, in many cases, been disappointing for technically literate users used to the speed, customization and capacity of a PC.

Optus has launched its high speed 3G mobile network with always-on MSN Messenger for mobile phones and customisable news and info being pushed to mobile phone screens. But the best is yet to come, with the telco letting slip that it has already built the platform for any RSS feeds to be delivered to your mobile phone’s screen.

GPRS was the technology that was going to give you the internet everywhere, until it became obvious that it was far too difficult to hook up to a laptop or PDA for everyone but the most avid tech tinkerers, and it was slower than dialup.

3G has been promising a lot, but in general has failed to deliver except in the PCMCIA data card area, where the 384Kbit/s speed is a welcome improvement on GPRS. On the phone side of things, there’s been next to no interest in video calling, and browsing the web on a 3G phone often involves inexplicable delays of 30 seconds or more while waiting for a page to load. Sometimes the page never comes up at all. The latter problem is typically related to the delay of moving between mobile cells, which involves a ‘handoff’ process. Mobile phone manufacturers are also to blame for making mobile web browsers that don’t detect timeouts and handle them appropriately.

How Optus solved the problem?

Optus has recognised these frustrations with phones and come up with a nice solution: its 3G network keeps an IP tunnel to your phone open at all times and pushes content to your phone’s memory so it’s there and ready for instant viewing when it suits you. That doesn’t mean you will avoid the irritating delays when doing manual browsing - Optus acknowledges them and says it is working alongside the other 3G providers to fix these sorts of quality problems on their networks - but if you are just viewing content that has already been pushed to your phone, it’s an instant thing.

Optus has a selection of non-gimmicky content such as breaking news, top news headlines, different categories of sport, etc that you can switch on or off and your phone’s screen. And … drumroll … there’s also an online web-based interface to configure your mobile phone’s content. Thank God; it took mobile networks long enough to figure out that a mobile phone screen and keypad is infernally frustrating to try to do a batch of customising on.

Coming soon: RSS on your phone

If all of this looks and smells an aweful lot like RSS on your PC, you’re on the right track. Optus says it has already built the platform that will allow people to add their own RSS feeds and have them delivered to their phone. That means you’ll always have the latest Slashdot stories in your pocket. What more could a nerd want, other than mobiletopsoft.com on your mobile phone screen (I’m assured that RSS feeds of the site are on their way).

Optus and Nokia’s symbiotic relationship

Optus has married its fortunes of its 3G service to the success of the Symbian phone operating system, favoured by Nokia. The “Optus MyZooNow” software client that must be running to receive the news and content updates has been shoehorned in to actually replace the Symbian desktop, so it’s always there when you need it. On non-Symbian phones, it must be started as a Java app, which kills off the ‘always on’ experience.

Unfortunately Symbian is a love-it-or-hate-it thing… it is a relatively powerful operating system in mobile phone terms, but it can also be extremely confusing, requiring many clicks to do things that are relatively simple on purpose-built phone OSes. And it constantly asks you whether you want to connect to the internet while using Optus’ MyZooNow software. Optus says it’s aware of the problem and it’s due to the fact that it’s a ‘feature’ of Symbian that it asks for the user’s confirmation before doing anything that could incur a charge on their bill.

The workaround is to open the web browser at startup and leave it open in the background, but it’s a kludgy solution, because it’s all too easy to quit an application in Symbian by mistake by pressing the hangup key on your phone. The upshot of all this is that if you really hate Symbian’s complexity, then the cool features of Optus 3G won’t be available to you in their full glory… you’ll have to make do with a Java app that will only run on a limited number of phones.

MSN Messenger on your mobile

Apart from RSS-type news feeds, the other really interesting thing hidden away in Optus’ range of 3G phones is a mobile version of MSN Messenger.Instant messaging on mobile phones isn’t actually a new concept. A protocol for it was worked out long ago with the rinky-dink name of “Wireless Village”. Lots of handsets have support for it, and if you sign up with a free Wireless Village service such as Yamigo which integrates with existing messaging networks like MSN or ICQ, you can probably do IM on your mobile right now.

The problem is in the associated data charges: the Wireless Village client on your phone has to poll the Wireless Village server every “X seconds”, which adds up to a considerable GPRS bill at the end of the month. With mobile phone networks charging $5 - $20 per megabyte, “do it yourself” Wireless Village has never been viable in Australia.

As a network operator, Optus has dealt with this problem in the simplest, most elegant way it can: it has dropped the price. You gotta love it when a telco realises it has reached the end of the “milk run” and simply dumps the ludicrous data pricing. Also, it’s not using Wireless Village, which is both an inefficient protocol and inconstently implemented between handset manufacturers.

Instead, Optus is using MSN Messenger mobile, a software client that has been given the rubber stamp of approval by Microsoft, and logs in to the MSN network directly from your phone. It costs 95c a day to use (only charged on the days you use it), or $5.95 a month for unlimited usage, which is excellent value compared to the cost of using SMS at 25c a pop.

Rough edges

The software isn’t all that great though. Although it looks and feels like MSN Messenger, the fact that it is running on a mobile phone imposes some disappointing limitations. For example, although you can set it to start up when the phone is switched on, there’s no way to make it reopen if you accidentally quit it. On the Symbian version that runs on the Nokia N70 Optus supplied us for testing, it’s way too easy to accidentally quit MSN Messenger mobile by hitting the hangup button on the phone.

And there’s no T9, so entering messages when chatting with someone is very s l o w. According to Optus you should be able to access a T9 entry mode by pressing the “*” button on the phone, and while this does bring up an additional entry pane, the entry defaults to sstandard multi-press mode for us. There is no obvious item in the “option” menu to switch on T9, but it turns out that if you are a Symbian expert you will know that you have to press the ‘edit’ button (the key on the phone with a pencil on it… go figure) which will allow you to activate T9. This is bound to bamboozle most new users of MSN Instant Messenger mobile.

Other cool stuff

One nice freebie that Optus gives you on 3G is ABC and SBS TV rebroadcast to your phone. They started doing this over GPRS and the quality was so bad it could be hard to make out people’s faces. On 3G, it’s much better, and if you buy a phone with a supplied headset (such as the Nokia N70 we tested), it’s a great way to fill in time on the bus at no cost - unlike Vodafone’s 1-minute long ‘mobisodes’ which cost a few dollars a pop. What a ripoff in comparison!

Optus is also doing location-based mapping, so you can get a map on your phone screen of where you are right now. The network figures this out by triangulating your position between the three closest mobile towers. In our testing, it was accurate to within a couple of streets (at our Castlereagh St, Sydney offices, it said we were actually in the next street down, Pitt St, so it’s not necessarily going to be useful to you if you’re completely lost.) There are also some very useful content partners selling subscriptions through Optus - there’s a mobile version of YourMovies which lets you call up a list of movie times at your favourite cinemas in a couple of clicks, and YourRestaurants which lets you find restaurants in your local area. You can buy a package to have flat-rate access to both of them for a few dollars a month.

Conclusion

Optus’ 3G phones certainly provide the most interesting and non-gimmicky content we’ve seen on a phone yet. And the pricing is fair. The service has rough edges - you’ll be enjoying the full ‘early adopter’ experience - but out of all the 3G services on offer, Optus’ is the most compelling, especially for tech enthusiasts.

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