Nokia's pledge to GPS in all phones & future phone must have's

There was an interesting article over at ZDnet last week in which David Watkins, Multimedia Sales Director Nokia APAC was quoted as saying 'GPS will work its way from niche product to mainstream functionality and will one day be considered as ubiquitous as the cameraphone is today'.

This is great news for the location based content market and for anyone looking at harnessing the new age of integrated sensors.

So a quick question I would like to pose - what is the sucessor to GPS in the line of mobile device 'must haves'? Personally I think it will be a mix of varied user interfaces including ePaper, OLED wrappable screens and sensory devices.

On the sensor side I would have to suggest digital compases (we will talk about these soon) heart rate monitors, motion sensors (see Nokia's 5500 which came out last year - no it wasn't you Apple who were the first to integrate one even though you like to say so), temperature and light sensors (the later Apple does have in the IPhone) are close followers in my books.

Apple's Innovation?

I just wrote a piece on sensors in which I mentioned that Apple has been claiming innovative integration of the motion sensor into its IPhone. I would further direct users to the patent which has been submitted by Apple (patent). It outlines apparently an innovative way to stop theft of their precious IPhone.

I find two points very interesting here, firstly as I blogged about in the earlier piece Nokia's 5500 had a 3d sensor in it last year so Apple don't try and claim your integration as innovative.

Secondly I ran across this interesting web article from Brad written back in March 2004 on the motion sensor for sensing emergencies .... Hmm now I see my phone being stolen as an emergency, don't you?

Someone here is not being honest, either Brad's blog entry for March 2004 is a fake, Apple stole the idea off Brad or Brad had inside knowledge about the patent idea and posted it on his web site.

Something does not smell right here!

Is the IPOD and future IPhone stifling innovation?

So we have well surpassed the 100 million IPOD's shipped globally and we have a week or two until the IPhone is released. Apple is not the only player in the market as we all know and arguably they are not the best innovator however they do own the market. Why because of their amazing ability to make complex processes extremely intuitive and easy to the consumer.

We all love the IPOD's user interface and seamless ability to purchase and transfer content to the mobile device. It serves its current purpose reasonably well however with the upcoming release of the IPhone and the announcement yesterday of third party applications only through the Safari browser it urges me to ask the question - Is Apple's monopoly of the media player market stifling innovation?

The closed even communistic style control which Apple brings to its offering allows it to retain a very high level of quality however at the sacrifice of many other elements. In the IPOD and IPhone space I see this as being innovation, it is innovation which suffers from the closed view of Apple. If the monopoly player locks its platform down no third parties can innovate!

I would love to see our companies future offering on the IPhone, hey I would buy one myself if I could deploy applications onto it (no no through Safari!).

So the question I pose, is Apple's dominance and reluctance to have an open platform stifling our mobile innovation?