Saturday 4 February 2012

Adding new dimensions to the future phones - Smell

I am going to be involved in two events in the coming months to discuss about Evolution of Devices in the future. The first of them is the LTE World Summit that I have been going to for years and have recommended to lots of clients, colleagues and friends. In there I will be discussing about 'The Future Device' in the Breakfast briefing. In June I am chairing a session on 'Where Next For Devices' in The Future of Wireless International Conference. As a result I would be discussing some ideas on the blog with the intention of getting some valuable feedback and comments.

Smell has been associated with the mobile devices for a long time. There are two concepts floating around. The first is a phone that can smell the environment for certain odour or harmful gases and depending on what it smells, alerts the user or some authority. An example of this are the phones being developed by US Department of Homeland Security to smell poisonous gases. Another example is the e-nose concept developed by Imec, Belgium. There are other concepts being developed around m-health to help people with Asthma.

The second of these concepts are the devices that can emit smell. The simplest form of this would be like the Sony phones that emit fragrance for a few months and then a new sheet can be inserted for them to keep emitting a fragrance. A while back it was reported that Samsung has filed a patent for something similar.


Nokia had shown years back the 'Scentsory Concept' mobile that can transmit smell based on the environment to the other party who can get the feeling of where the other person is. Since then they have shown other concepts but I dont recall seeing much on smell. The 'HumanForm' concept I blogged about last year showed that we would be able to feel the environment but it was surprisingly quiet about smell part.

There is an interesting TEDx video in which Jenny Tillotson, who would be presenting her latest research in the Future Wireless conference mentioned abaove, is explaining some of these concepts on transmitting smell electronically. Video embedded below:



I would be very interested in hearing more on this topic from the readers.

Wednesday 1 February 2012

The intelligent pipe and next-generation billing


Presented by Marc Price, VP of Technology, CTO Americas in the LTE North America 2011 conference

See also the earlier posts on Policy and Charging here and here.

Monday 30 January 2012

More on Policy and Charging in LTE

Continuing on the Policy and Charging in LTE from the previous post here.




Presented by Erik P. Neitzel, DMTS, Technology Development Group, U.S. Cellular in the LTE North America 2011 conference

Sunday 29 January 2012

Standardisation on M2M at ETSI M2M platform

Presented by Marylin Arndt, ETSI TC M2M Vice-Chairman in the 2nd FOKUS FUSECO Forum 2011, Berlin 17-18 Nov. 2011

Saturday 28 January 2012

Thursday 26 January 2012

Diameter Infrastructure Required for LTE (Data) Roaming


Diameter protocol seems interesting especially since we are moving to All IP Networks. This old post gives a comparison of SS7 and Diamater protocol.

You can learn more about Diameter at the Diameter Learning Center.

Wednesday 25 January 2012

Introduction of HSS in the LTE

Click on the pic to enlarge

Interesting slides from E-Plus Mobilfunk GmbH & Co. KG presented in FUSECO Forum 17th-18th November 2011, Berlin.

Tuesday 24 January 2012

LTE Base station equipment


If interested, more details available in the NTT Docomo whitepaper here.