New Mobile related terms added in Oxford dictionary

The Oxford dictionary has just added some new words in its dictionary. Here is a summary of the words related to mobiles.

BYOD: n.: abbreviation of 'bring your own device': the practice of allowing the employees of an organisation to use their own computers, smartphones, or other devices for work purposes. Wikipedia also calls it bring your own technology (BYOT), bring your own phone (BYOP), and bring your own PC (BYOPC).

digital detox, n.: a period of time during which a person refrains from using electronic devices such as smartphones or computers, regarded as an opportunity to reduce stress or focus on social interaction in the physical world.

Another term called "Nomophobia" which has unfortunately not yet entered the dictionary refers to as the fear of being out of mobile phone contact. The term, an abbreviation for "no-mobile-phone phobia". According to a recent survey some 54% of Brits have experienced this. If someone is getting affected by Nomophobia, its time they undergo a 'digital detox' to sort their life out.

emoji, n: a small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion in electronic communication.

Everyone using OTT applications would know them well. They are very useful in communicating emotions. I generally think this as one of the drawbacks of SMS that we cant use emoji's. On the other hand OTT apps can be making money by providing extended emoji's for a premium but I havent seen anyone do this yet.

FOMO, n.: fear of missing out: anxiety that an exciting or interesting event may currently be happening elsewhere, often aroused by posts seen on a social media website

'FOMO' is big and I personally know people who suffer from this. In the good old days this was known as jealousy where one would be jealous that someone was going on more holidays, have a bigger house/car, etc. In this connected world where we can get Facebook updates and notifications on the phones and tablets the digital term is FOMO. A slide from Mary Meeker's presentation that I put here shows that a typical user checks their phone 150 times every day and social media is not very far from the top.

internet of things, n.: a proposed development of the Internet in which everyday objects have network connectivity, allowing them to send and receive data.

This 'Internet of Things' or 'IoT' has been covered in the blog more than enough times.

phablet, n.: a smartphone having a screen which is intermediate in size between that of a typical smartphone and a tablet computer.

Earlier this year I put a post here that talked all about feature phones, smartphones, phablets, etc. Other terms like Tabphones and Phonetabs didn't make it.

selfie, n. (informal): a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.

Here is a selfie of me using my phone today to end this post :-)

Stress Testing of LTE devices

Another interesting presentation from R&S LTE Summit 2013 embedded below:

Stressing a LTE device with Typical User Behaviors from Zahid Ghadialy

Connectivity in 'Connected Vehicles'

An interesting presentation from the Future of Wireless International conference about the evolution and options for connected cars and other vehicles

Connected Vehicle - Accenture from Zahid Ghadialy

500 Billion devices by 2030, etc...

Few weeks back in the LTE World Summit 2013, I heard someone from Ericsson mention that internally they think that by 2030 there will be 500 Billion Connected devices on the planet. The population projections for 2030 is somewhere around 8.5 Billion people worldwide. As a result the figure does not come much as a surprise to me.

John Cunliffe from Ericsson is widely credited for making the statement 50 Billion connected devices by 2020. Recently he spoke in the Cambridge Wireless and defended his forecast on the connected devices. He also provided us with the traffic exploration tool to see how the devices market would look up till 2018. Here is one of the pictures using the tool:

In terms of Cellular connectivity, we are looking at 9 Billion devices by 2018. The interesting thing to notice is that in 2017, there are still some 4 Billion feature phones. While in the developed world our focus is completely on Smartphones, its interesting to see new and existing SMS/USSD based services are still popular in the developing world. Some months back I heard about Facebook developing SMS/USSD based experience for Feature phones, I am sure that would attract a lot of users from the developing world.

One thing missing from the above is non-cellular connections which will make bulk of connectivity. Wi-Fi for example is a major connectivity medium for tablets. In fact 90% of the tablets have only WiFi connectivity. Bluetooth is another popular method of connectivity. While its mostly used in conjunction with phones, it is going to be a popular way of connecting devices in the Personal Area Network's (PAN's). So its no surprise that we will see 50 Billion connected devices but maybe not by 2020. My guess would be around 2022-23.

Five Future Technologies (#FutureTech) we may see soon in our devices!

Remember 'Internet of Everything' rather than 'Internet of Things', here is a recent Cisco video explaining this vision:

You can read more on these topics on Cisco blogs.


Next is the self-healing technology:



Spray-on clothes
These will go very well with phones where you can spray paint phone covers and maybe if its possible to dissolve the skin and re-use it, it would be an added bonus.


Just think how the technology used to design Robots can enable flexible phones and other devices.




With sensors becoming smaller and cheaper, more of them are being put in our devices. Many years back people were saying that breath analysers could be available in mobiles but I guess there wasnt a business case for that. Also many of these sensors have come as part of Bluetooth add-ons to keep the cost/weight/size of the device down. Now there is a possibility of whole new range of sensors coming to our devices.

You can read more details on this here.


Finally, there is always one user who would ask me why is there no mention of LTE in the videos above so here is a **bonus** video.

I have to mention that this didnt sound very convincing to me as a selling point. Its like back in the year 2000, 3G was being sold as an enabler to the must have 'Video calling'.

Internet Trends by Mary Meeker at #D11

The last time I posted the presentation by Mary Meeker was back in 2011 but the things have moved on and its amazing to see some of the things that have changed. I think the slide that summarises what I mean is as follows:

Nomophobia and FOMO are a big problem and I see this day in day out working in this industry.

The slide pack which was actually posted yesterday has already crossed 550K as I write this, in just 1 day. So you can understand how eagerly awaited event this has become every year.

To download the above, click on the Slideshare icon and then you can save from Slideshare site.

If you want to watch the video of her presentation, its available on All things digital website here.

Around the World with Mobile Global Insights - via @TomiAhonen

Next month we will reach the milestone where the number of active Mobile devices is equal to the number of people in the world. There are many people with more than one active mobile device and there are others who have no devices so the number of active devices will still keep rising for some time to come.

Embedded below is a presentation by Tomi Ahonen in MMAF 2013, you can see all the presentations from the event on Slideshare here.

Gadgets from Mobile World Congress 2013 (#MWC13)

Finally, if you have enough patience, here is Nokia keynote:



Related blog post:

• Dumbphones, Featurephones, Smartphones, Superphones...
• Videos from the CES 2013
• Future mobile technology with Graphene
• 5 videos showing futuristic technologies that can be used with Mobiles
• Mobile Device Testing and its Path to Commercialization

Google Glasses - take two

Picture source: Guardian

So nearly after a year of my Google Glass post, looks like Google is ready to ship some of these glasses to some competition winners for $1500. Even the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is excited and cant wait to get his hands on it.

There is also this new video showing 'How it Feels' wearing Glass and everytime I go back to youtube, the count increases by 100K. Embedded below:


My two main concerns are that I have to speak loudly to the glass which may not be convenient in public places or in front of others and the other being that when many people will have these devices, my Glass may pickup command from another user.

Sometime back there was a discussion on 'Bone conduction audio'. This will allow the user to hear from the Glass without the need of a headphone or speakers, I guess a similar kind of technology is needed in place of a mic. The Glass can sense that the user who is wearing it is talking instead of someone else. It should also solve the need to speak to speak loudly to the Glass.

Videos from the CES 2013

Gorilla glass (above) is made by a company called Corning that is much more well known for its futuristic video, see here.











Finally, this Sony Xperia Z has got over 2 million hits, not exactly sure why so I have added the video for this as well

Dumbphones, Featurephones, Smartphones, Superphones...

Looks like there is still a lot of confusion in the different types of phones around so here is my take. Please feel free to correct me and I will update accordingly.

Dumb phones: The dumb phones were the original mobile phones whose intention was to allow voice and SMS initially and then later on some kind of data transfer using WAP.

Pic source: iPhaze

A typical dumbphone is as shown above. Dumb phones are no longer available but they can still be used if they are in the working order. Dumbphones were always pre-3G. It wouldnt make sense to have a 3G dumbphone but it is very much possible to have a 2G Featurephone/Smartphone.

Feature Phones: These came next. They allowed more stuff than the basic phones.

Pic source: Gadgetsteria

Featurephones (above) can do much more stuff, for example they may have camera to take photos, they may allow facebook to share the photos, they can have Skype to call, they can even have WiFi for access. Different people have different way of describing the difference between them and smartphones. Some distinguish Featurephones by suggesting that they have a closed operating system (OS) but this may not be necessarily true. Some others suggest that featurephones do not have touch screens while smartphones do, again this may no longer be considered true. There are featurephones available with basic touch functionality. I think an agreeable way to consider a phone a feature phone, in today's terms, can be based on a combination of processor speeds (less than 400MHz), screen size (less than 2inches), presence of physical buttons and pricepoint (less than $50).

Contrary to popular belief, featurephones are still popular and are going strong. See the chart below for example.

Pic source: Seeking Alpha

There is a good article that explains why Feature phone is 'Still the undisputed King' here to interested readers. The main reason according to me is that the reception is much better on Featurephones rather than Smartphones and they consume less battery power in general as compared to the smartphones.

Smartphones: Wikipedia suggests that the term smartphone was used as early as 1997 but what may have been considered as smartphone then is more like a featurephone of today. As per my knowledge, the first true modern smartphone were the Nokia communicators. If you look at the specs now, they may be classified as low end featurephones but they were the foundation for the smartphones.

Picture Source: Droid techy news

The first true modern smartphone that change the mobiles forever is undisputedly the original iPhone. On reflecting back, people had no idea what a phone could do until the arrival of the iPhone. This was soon followed by the iPhone clones and now we have many different ecosystems like Android, Bada, Windows mobile, Blackberry OS, etc. that gives its own flavour to the smartphones.

Superphones: The marketing industry is always thinking of using new terms to sell the products and while there has been terms like smarter-phones, super-smartphones, intelligent phones, etc. being thrown about, I think the industry has now converged on to use Superphones for the next generation devices. Some of the readers may be aware that 'Superphone' is used in Dr. Who series.

Again, there is no defined standards but looks like the superphone should have Quad core and its screen size should be more than 4.1inch. Samsung Galaxy S3 would qualify to be a superphone but its not referred to as one.

Phablets, Tabphones and Phonetabs: So what do you call a hybrid (or a cross between) Tablet and Smartphone? The answer could be any of the terms Phablets, Tabphones or Phonetabs. Again, there is no standard term but people have decided to use whichever term they feel like. Phablet is the most commonly used term.

Pic Source: CNet

Samsung Galaxy Note 2 is a good example of Phablet. One of the suggestions is that to qualify for Phablet, the screen size should be between 5 inches and 7 inches. Some of the users who have braved to buy one of the phablets, swear by it and in most cases vow to never go back to just a phone.

Picture Source: FT

FT has an interesting article that suggests the shipment of phablets could be around 200 million by 2015. It should be noted that according to me, WiFi only devices should not be considered as phablets as the phone part is missing. They are just mini-tablets. In case of 7 inch devices capable of phone and tablet functionality, it is a bit of a fuzzy area in cases where the user does not use the SIM card, thereby making the phone part unusable. For simplicity we can consider a device as phablet as long as the mobile functionality is embedded.

Future mobile technology with Graphene

Some days back I attended an interesting talk where the speaker showed how Graphene will revolutionise the future mobile devices. Here is what Graphene is:



Another version:



A concept phone video from Samsung



And a Nokia demo from the last MWC that uses Graphene as a sensor and also opens the possibility of using other gestures except for touch

Data v/s Signalling Traffic in Dongles and Phones

From a presentation by Peter Zidar in the Small Cells Global Congress 2012.

The above picture shows that even though the amount data traffic carried by dongles is much more than the amount of traffic carried by the mobile phones, the amount of signalling is far higher from the mobiles than that of dongles. This is mainly because the mobiles need to conserve the battery power and for this reason they disconnect from the network as soon as there is no need for exchange of data. Remember the Fast Dormancy issue in the smartphones? If not see this post.

Related posts:

• On Signalling Storm...
• A Twitter discussion on 'Data Tsunami' myth
• M2M and the 'Big Data'
• Understanding smartphone traffic

Mobile Device Testing and its Path to Commercialization

Connected Lighting of the future

This is an advertisement from Philips about their personal wireless lighting system called Hue. This is also the reason why we say that in future everything would be connected and with its own IP address (though this is not the case in Hue).


With Internet of Things (IoT) becoming more mainstream, it would be interesting to see these things becoming more popular and we will hopefully see more interesting apps.

This article makes an interesting reading too.

Speaker Quotes from #MMAF2012

From the Mobile Marketing Association event held in Istanbul 14th -15th November 2012.

Highlights from day 1 of MMA Forum Istanbul 2012 from Paul Berney

MMA Istanbul Day 2 from Paul Berney

Intelligent Devices and Smart Journeys

Couple of days back, I posted some videos that show technology advancements for the mobile phones. Here is a presentation by Peter Whale from Qualcomm in a recent Cambridge Wireless event about how Sensors and Context-engine will make the future devices much more intelligent then they already are.

Intelligent Devices and Smart Journeys from Zahid Ghadialy

A shameless plug for my presentation on the similar topic from the LTE World Summit 2012, that has now crossed 6000 views, available here.

5 videos showing futuristic technologies that can be used with Mobiles

Smartphones Integrated into our daily lives

Very interesting to see how we use Smartphones in our everyday lives

Who do users blame for poor QoE when using mobile devices

An important reminder for mobile phone manufacturers as well as mobile operators.