(keitai-l) Re: CNN: Korea wants to show the world

From: Maria Pienaar <maria.pienaar_at_solidtech.com>
Date: 09/11/01
Message-ID: <00a501c13a55$67b74620$4432a8c0@us.solidtech.com>
So, why could Qualcomm not follow the JAVA standard like any one else -
especially if they claim that

Jay wrote: I have friends at Qualcomm that have helped out Korea Freetel set
up their infrastructure.   So why would be behind ?   BREW is going to be
pretty strong especially for the entertainment side of wireless

  drew.freyman@nokia.com wrote: The Korean mnfs. are about 6 months behind
the Japan in size, battery life,
functionality. They have Java sets, color displays, polyphonic ring tones,
etc. I cannot speak to their RF technology, but I did not notice any
significant difference between reception for Korean phones and Japanese
phones.

Jay

Although your friends at Qualcomm helped KT Freetel set up their CDMAOne
network infrastructure, I am sure they only worked on tweaking the radio
side of the infrastructure to work properly in partnership with the vendor
that provided the actual network infrastructure and the Korean phone vendors
to resolve some initial problems experienced by their phones on the KT
Freetel network. As you know, Qualcomm is not an infrastructure provider and
they also have stepped out of the phone manufacturing game.

I think Drew referred to the Korean CDMA phones offered into the Korean
market by the various Korean phone vendors such as Kyocera. As far as size,
battery life and functionality of these phones are concerned, the current
phones in the Korean market is bigger in size and more limited in features
than the current i-mode phones in Japan. The Japanese are well known to be
market leaders here. It took CDMA phones more than 12 months to scale down
in size to what we see being offered today that seem to stat being more
comparable in size to what is offered else where in the world, but these
phones are still not quite there. Also, none of the network operators in
Korea has actually rolled out 3G services - Japan is at least 6 months ahead
of everyone else. A lot of news services refer to 1xRTT (IS95B) as a 3G
service, where only 1xEV has been officially accepted by the 3GPP body as a
3G service.

As far as BREW is concerned, it will only work on phones with Qualcomm CDMA
chipsets. Although it creates a wonderful platform for developers to develop
applications for these phones, one has to question how many phones in total
will run this because of the potential market share of Qualcomm chipsets in
the CDMA markets. I truly doubt that they will be the only chipset vendor
for CDMA phones in the market. So, although BREW could be pretty strong for
various applications such as the ones you mention, how many phones will be
out there that will support it as opposed to phones that will be supporting
JAVA, which is a more open and accepted standard? At the same time, how many
services compared to JAVA based services will be out there? Qualcomm claim
that the CDMA standard is based on "open Internet IP" standards, so why did
they not look at JAVA as this base for application development as opposed to
bringing out another proprietary standard that only works with their
technology?

At the end of the day, it is not about technology, but about economies of
scale brought by single or a limited number of standards which fuels
competition in the market. This determines a lot of the phone size factors,
features and services we see out in the market. Where there are proprietary
islands, the pricing remains high and the size factor of devices are bigger
as opposed to in an open or "agreed" standards environment.

Maria


[ excessive quoting removed ]


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Received on Tue Sep 11 02:50:13 2001