Nordic Region Blazes 4G Mobile Trail

STOCKHOLM—Almost a year ago Swedish telecom operator TeliaSonera AB launched the world's first super-fast mobile Internet service, and now rivals are beginning to enter a Nordic market that is a pioneer in fourth generation, or 4G, Long Term Evolution technology.

Two weeks ago, TeliaSonera's Swedish rival Tele2 AB, together with Norway's Telenor ASA, kicked off the launch of their own Swedish 4G LTE network, with speeds of up to 80 megabits per second—10 times faster than existing networks—plastering downtown Stockholm with ads for the new service in their push to win a share of the market for high-speed mobile data.

The Nordic region, with its relatively low population density, may seem an unlikely frontier for the very latest in mobile technology, but customers there tend to be early adopters and, as Tele2 Sweden Chief Executive Niclas Palmstierna says, the region is home to two global leaders in the mobile field: Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson, the world's largest network equipment vendor, and Nokia Corp., the largest mobile-phone maker. This fertile ground has also attracted external players who want to test the emerging 4G market. In a blow to Ericsson in its own back yard, Huawei Technologies Co. of China last year won the contract to provide infrastructure for Tele2's and Telenor's new network.

The Nordic region has become a test site for 4G technology that is slowly spreading to bigger markets—Verizon Wireless, the largest U.S. cellular operator—a joint venture between Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group Ltd.—launched its first commercial 4G service in the U.S. Sunday.

As data-hungry smartphones become more widely available and demand for tablets like Apple Inc.'s iPad increases, customers have become accustomed to fast fixed-line broadband and increasingly want the same experience while on the move.

Offering a faster, more reliable service than rivals is what differentiates mobile operators fighting for market share and profit. Other regions are following: in the U.S., MetroPCS Communications Inc. launched 4G services in a handful of cities, including Las Vegas and San Francisco, in the autumn, while Sprint Nextel Corp. also offers 4G in a number of regions. Verizon aims for U.S.-wide coverage by 2013.

In Asia, Telstra Corp. subsidiary CSL Ltd. launched a combined 3G/LTE network in Hong Kong on Nov. 25, the first in the region. NTT DoCoMo Inc., Japan's biggest mobile operator, said this month that it is on track to offer a new data communication service using LTE on Dec. 24.

The market right now is limited to 4G dongles used with laptops and netbooks, as 4G-enabled smartphones and tablets aren't available yet, and Sweden offers an early insight into how the technology performs.

Tele2, which in 2008 paid 500 million Swedish kronor ($73.5 million) for a 4G license, hopes to provide 4G coverage for 99% of Sweden's population by 2012, competing with incumbent TeliaSonera on price.

A number of technical advancements help make 4G networks faster. Data is sent and received using IP, or Internet Protocol-based technology.

That data-centric focus is in contrast to 3G networks that have to handle various kinds of voice and data traffic simultaneously, making them slower and less efficient. 4G networks also have fewer network nodes, which means fewer transmission delays. And, when radio waves travel from a base station to mobile devices, the Long Term Evolution radio technology used in 4G networks makes more efficient use of available spectrum, further boosting speed.

Still, despite impressive performance , few consumers have so far paid the 599 Swedish kronor ($86) a month that TeliaSonera charges for a 4G subscription. The operator, which in the third quarter had close to 160 million customers world-wide , has so far only sold a couple of thousand 4G subscriptions , according to its head of Mobility Services, Hakan Dahlstrom.

In the U.S., Verizon plans to offer subscriptions starting at $50 a month, though with a slower service than TeliaSonera's due to spectrum considerations .

Consumer adoption has been slow in part due to a shortage of 4G-compatible laptop modems, but also because TeliaSonera so far has only rolled out the service in 11 Swedish cities, Mr. Dahlstrom says, with the aim of covering 228 cities by the end of next year.

There are other hurdles to overcome before the market can really take off; 4G networks will need additional spectrum as coverage grows, and as governments free up new frequencies in coming auctions, these could turn out to be costly in markets where several rival operators bid for licenses, leaving less money to buy equipment for the new networks.

As an indication of the value of spectrum, in the summer Germany auctioned off 4G spectrum for the first time, netting a total of €4.38 billion ($5.87 billion) for the government. Network costs in terms of equipment and software are also significant; network gear maker Nokia Siemens Networks in July won an eight-year, $7 billion contract to deploy and maintain a mobile broadband network in the U.S. for newly formed telecom venture LightSquared.

U.K. communications regulator Ofcom expects its 4G auction to take place some time in the first quarter of 2012 with frequencies released by the end of the following year. Spain is expected to authorize auctions by year-end that free up additional 4G spectrum in 2011.

Still, even if the operators get the 4G spectrum they need, the real money won't start flowing in until consumers get a good supply of 4G-connected tablets and smartphones, says Bengt Nordstrom, chief executive at telecom consultancy Northstream.

"Right now it's only about investments," Mr. Nordstrom says. "When the technology gets more mature around 2012 or 2013, you may start to see revenue as well."

The first 4G tablets and smartphones could reach the market next year, Dalhstrom says, adding that TeliaSonera is discussing this issue with a number of mobile handset vendors

How to Run Windows and OS X on the Same Mac

OS X or Windows? Run them both on the same machine without any trouble.

A hybrid engine that runs on gas and electricity. A football star who plays both defense and offense. A politician who understands social justice and capitalistic expansion. These anomalies are rare, but in the world of tech, they are almost unknown entities. For anyone who owns a Mac, it might seem a bit odd to think you can run both the Mac OSX and Windows, and switch effortless between them. Yet, not only is it possible to live in these two universes, it actually makes perfect sense.

One reason is that there are a handful of applications, and even a few Web sites, that only work on a PC. The most obvious examples are enterprise-level tools at work, including some apps from Oracle and Microsoft that do not run on the Mac platform and probably never will. A few Web sites require an older version of Internet Explorer, which is not even offered for the Mac anymore. And, many of the latest games — such as Mass Effect 2 — are not available for the Mac.

Fortunately, Apple offers an application called Boot Camp which allows you to run Microsoft Windows as though it was meant for your Mac all along. A few other virtual machine tools exist as well, including Parallels 5 and VMware Fusion, adding a few features and adding some performance perks. For more industrious users, you can also use a program called Crossover which actually runs the Windows app as though it works on a Mac, even though this approach is a bit hot or miss.

For those who want to run both Mac and Windows, here’s an overview of the advantages to each approach, and a few pitfalls to avoid along the way.

Apple Boot Camp

The free Boot Camp app for Mac, included with every Mac, has one major difference compared to Parallels and Fusion: it requires that you reboot your computer. That’s only a minor annoyance, but Boot Camp does require you to live either in Windows or Mac and switch back and forth.

Boot Camp also supports Windows 7, but you do need the latest Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard version and the Boot Camp 3.1 Update, which you can download using the system update utility or get directly from the Snow Leopard install disc.

The important point to make here is that you will need your own licensed copy of Windows 7 (or a previous version) and, using the Boot Camp Setup Assistant (located in Applications/Utilities), you will need to install the operating system as though you just bought a brand new PC. After the install, you will also need to install the Mac drivers for Windows. (That might seem odd, but this is the step that makes Windows work with the Mac hardware.) Just insert your OS X DVD when prompted. You will also need to run the Apple Software Update utility from within Windows to update the drivers.

Then, to use Boot Camp, you just hold down the Option key when your Mac boots. You will see an option to boot into Windows or the Mac. Select the one you want and you’re off.

Now, about performance. It’s obvious that a Mac is designed for the best performance with OS X. Running Windows, you will notice the speed is mostly adequate, but not that comparable with a brand new laptop from, say, HP or Dell that is designed (and thoroughly tested) for Windows.

VMware Fusion 3.1

While Boot Camp is a free utility, Fusion 3 costs $80 and is an extra app you need to purchase and install. However, it offers several distinct advantages. One is that the app runs in a window, so you do not need to reboot your Mac to use it. This means, when you do need to run the Windows version of Microsoft Office, or that one pesky Web site that uses ActiveX controls and requires the Windows version of Internet Explorer, you can just run Fusion and start using the apps you need.

The obvious downside here is that your Mac will take a performance hit. In most cases, though, you will find that the virtual machine actually runs smooth enough for most apps. Fusion actually uses a powerful graphics driver to support the latest Windows 7 features, such as the Aero interface that has the see-through windows look and allows you to flip through windows as large panels.

Loading Fusion 3 works a bit like Boot Camp. Once you run the app, you do need to install Windows 7 — it is not included with the app. However, since you do not have to reboot, the process is actually smoother and does not require the extra driver updates that you need to do with Boot Camp.

Now, you might wonder: what about games? For most Mac users with a recent laptop or desktop, game performance is actually fairly good. Fusion 3 supports OpenGL 2.1 and DirectX 9.0c Shader Model 3, so recent games such as Aliens vs. Predator will run almost as smooth as they do on a PC.

That qualifier “almost” is important. There are times when Fusion slows to a crawl, presumably because of how it runs in a window. You also can’t run any other apps in the background, and virtual machine instances are highly dependent on your RAM load — in fact, if you plan to use Fusion (or Parallels, for that matter) routinely, you might consider adding an additional 2GB of RAM to your Mac.

Parallels Desktop 5

Parallels also runs in a window, supports Windows 7, and costs $80. So what is the main difference between this tool and Fusion 3? One is that Parallels does run a hair faster than Fusion, although VMware did address speed issues with the Fusion 3.1 release. Parallels loads in the same way as Fusion — it requires that you use the Windows 7 installer disc and does not have the same driver install steps as Boot Camp. Once loaded, Parallels can run in a full-screen mode as though you booted from Windows.

Parallels also adds a few extra features. One is that you can actually add Windows apps to the dock and start them as though you have the Windows app loaded on your PC. Granted, this still loads the virtual machine and then starts the app, but it makes the process a little faster. Parallels adds a unique “Mac theme” option so you can change the Windows desktop to look more like a Mac.

Parallels has a slew of minor enhancements as well — some you may never use. For example, you can configure the virtual machine to load every time you start your Mac, a tool for transferring files between the Windows virtual machine and the Mac, and speech recognition features. I’m not sure Mac users really want to use these extra options, since most will likely just do what they need to do in Windows and go back to Mac, but they do add to the overall value.

Codeweavers Crossover

One last option if you really need to run Windows apps on your Mac is CrossOver Mac, a program that uses the Wine toolkit. CrossOver makes it look like a Windows app runs natively on your Mac, mostly by loading just the required application framework. So, for example, if you want to use Microsoft Office 2007, you can load CrossOver and then install the app and run it in a window, without actually loading Windows at all.

When CrossOver works, it works wonders. The app supports popular mainstream apps like Microsoft Office and Outlook, but not any of the major Adobe products. A separate app called CrossOver Games lets you play a small number of older games, like the first Call of Duty games, but not recent titles.

CrossOver is a good idea, though, if you just need to run basic apps and don’t want to bother installing Windows itself. And, the costs just $40 so it is half the price of a virtual machine app.

VirtualBox

These dual-boot, multi-platform tools do solve a common problem on the Mac: at work or at home, there are times when you really need to run a Windows app. The Mac might be your preferred platform, but with a few extra software tools, you can also live in a Windows world — if temporarily.

Like VMware Fusion 3.1 and Parallels Desktop 5, VirtualBox is a virtual machine that allows you to run a full version of Windows within a window on your OS X desktop. Unlike either flashy commercial variant, it’s also free and open source.

Since it’s not focused solely on emulating a PC from a Mac, the consensus seems to be that it’s not quite as refined, but it will do the same job if you’re patient. For instance, after installing Windows, you’ll want to add “guest additions” that will make the cursor stutter less and a special feature to intelligently resize the native Windows resolution as you stretch and expand the window it’s in.

VirtualBox can also run other operating systems like Linux, OpenSolaris, OpenBSD, and DOS (useful for those classic PC games you wish you could run!). You can even run a separate installation of OS X from within OS X to, for instance, test out buggy software without messing up the clean installation you use every day.

Although you’ll have no one to call if you run into installation problems with VirtualBox, like most open source software, VirtualBox provides fairly active forums with plenty of helpful users

Nokia N8 Review

okia's N8 has a fantastic camera and crisp screen, but its slow processor and Symbian operating system hold the device back from mainstream success.

The N8 is Nokia’s big stab at fighting the iPhone and Android onslaught in premium markets like Europe and the United States, much as the BlackBerry Torch is to RIM. On paper it looks like it has a fighting chance: The N8 has a high-quality 3.5-inch touch screen, 12-megapixel camera, 16GB of internal memory, and looks fairly slick. Unfortunately, like the BlackBerry, it is weighted down by an operating system that is showing serious age, and an underclocked processor. With a price tag in upwards of $500 (no U.S. carrier is subsidizing the phone), this isn’t going to be the beacon of hope Nokia needs to regain footing in premium markets.

Design

The N8 looks like a solid touch device, albeit smaller than some of the more recent Android devices. A single button sits at the bottom of a 3.5-inch AMOLED multi-touch screenand a front-facing camera and light sensor sit up top. Surrounding the screen is a thin, raised border and a gray casing with silver end pieces on the top and bottom of the phone. On the left is a microUSB charge slot, and covered slots for a microSD card and SIM card for GSM carriers (the phone also supports CDMA). On the right side is a volume toggle, camera button, and an unlocking slider – a feature common to Nokia devices, allowing the user to wake the phone up from sleep by pulling down on a spring-loaded switch.

Like the iPhone, the N8 has a unibody shell that doesn’t allow access to the battery. You would think that such a shell would make for a better product, but the phone didn’t feel particularly solid in our hands. The abundance of plastic and metal that feels like plastic is a downer, and the seams in the plastic suggest sliding parts that don’t actually slide.

Bottom line, the N8 does not feel as solid as other devices in its category, or look as sexy as the iPhone 4 or many Android devices. Despite Nokia’s best attempt to streamline its design, the N8 does not stand out from the competition.

Features

The N8 is loaded with great features: It has 720p HD video recording, a mini HDMI slot, 5-band global 3G, Assisted GPSnavigation, HSPA 10.1 data speeds, Bluetooth 3.0, 16GB of internal memory, a microSD expansion slot so you can add up to 32GB more, and support for fast 802.11n Wi-Fi networks.

Unfortunately, two things make all these fancy features next to worthless: a slow 680MHz processor and Symbian v3, the archaic operating system Nokia refuses to abandon. The processor should be a snappier 1 GHz chip and the OS should be something that modern phone users will understand how to use.

Stuck on Symbian

Recently, Nokia announced that it is sticking by Symbian, but we can find few reasons why it should. Symbian v3 is outdated, clunky, and overly complicated. The Finnish company wants its OS to look different than the competition, but such a wish is only worthwhile if Symbian looks and works better. It fails on both accounts.

The version of Symbian on the N8 has three homescreens and each is customizable like Android, but they only support rows of horizontal widgets, six per page. If you’d like to add shortcuts to your downloaded apps, better luck somewhere else. Symbian hails from an era before apps became the big thing, and it shows. As a sign of the times, Nokia just launched the Ovi Store, its best imitation of the Android Market and Apple App Store.

Downloading apps isn’t particularly difficult, but finding them on your phone might be a challenge. Unlike Android, there is no on-screen place to find apps. Instead, you must press the physical wonder-button underneath the N8′s screen. This button performs a lot of functions. Often, we used it to escape back to the main screen when we were in an app or menu that has no visible escape. However, from the home screen, pressing this button will open up a three-by-four grid of hand-picked applications on a black background. To reach apps that don’t appear you’ve installed, you must click on the ‘applications’ icon. Inside ‘applications,’ there are more folders to dig into, only they don’t look like folders; they look like apps. Basically, your apps are split between multiple levels and folders of app pages. It’s the Inception of app screens — you have to keep digging deeper to find the app you’re looking for. Some may even appear in the “tools” subfolder, which has an icon confusingly similar to settings.

Eventually, you’ll figure out how to move apps between these folder levels, but the confusion is unnecessary. Why not let users make their own folders, should they desire? Like many aspects of the Symbian, it is possible to do what you want, but it isn’t intuitive. Before the iPhone, Symbian started the smartphone revolution, but more than three years into the touchscreen movement, it just can’t compete with Google and Apple. Devotees will likely love it, but Nokia won’t win many new fans.

Besides the glut of third-party Symbian apps, many built-in features don’t stand up to peers. For instance, Nokia has turn-by-turn ‘Ovi’ navigation, but it doesn’t feature actual maps, and often misses turns, its performance is almost pathetic compared to Google Navigation on Android devices and paid apps on the iPhone. We cannot recommend it.

Multimedia

The N8 has a beautiful 360 x 640 AMOLED multi-touch display. Video is gorgeous playing on the device and the mini HDMI slot easily lets you hook the phone straight into an HDTV. Even better, a full-size HDMI adapter is included in the box.

Finding content to play on this powerful phone is more difficult. There is a YouTube app, and the radio works well enough, but Nokia’s Ovi Store has a limited selection of videos and podcasts to download. The phone comes with Web TV, but its selection is also painfully limited. Our device came loaded with CNN, E! Online, National Geographic, and Paramount movie trailers. On the Ovi Store, you can download a few more channels like Al Jazeera, Bollywood, and India Today. Clips in available channels are low resolution, and choppy. Hopefully these issues will be ironed out in the coming months.

Sound Quality

Since the Ovi Music Store is not yet open, we connected the phone via USB to Windows 7, which recognized the phone instantly and allowed us to load songs with the Windows Media Player – a nice touch, though not everything transferred with correct album info or art, which could be a Windows or Nokia problem, perhaps both. Sound quality from the one speaker on the back of the N8 is pretty standard. Few phones offer great external sound, but Nokia didn’t skimp.

Call quality is solid with earphones and without. We had no trouble adjusting the volume of calls or hearing others, who all reported that voices came in quite clearly on T-Mobile’s network.

Phone Functionality

The bottom of the home screen has a dedicated call bumper button. On the calling page, the number pad is smaller than many phones, which is odd since about a third of the screen up top is unused black space, but it works well enough. Texting is not so fun. The vertical keyboard is not QWERTY like most phones of this type. Instead, it has a telephonekeypad, meaning that you’ll be back texting much like you did on your flip phone some years back. The horizontal keyboard is QWERTY, luckily, though the buttons are on the small side. Recent calls and contacts have their own apps and can be found on the default home screen. They are also buried somewhere in the apps menu, should you care to hunt them down.

Web

With Symbian comes Symbian’s web browser. Not only is it difficult and inconsistent to use, it doesn’t load pages well, either. Many Websites with mobile-optimized versions (like Digital Trends) did not load correctly in the N8 browser. Other sites would not load at all, or stopped midway through the process. Typing URLs using a vertical telephone keypad was also a tedious exercise. If you have the N8, we recommend downloading Opera Mobile from the Ovi App Store. It is a night and day improvement over the built-in browser. Opera also includes its own vertical QWERTY keyboard. Problems solved.

Web-based widgets were also sluggish to update their stats. Sometimes, we would have to enter a widget to get it to display fresh tweets or stories. This is likely an OS issue, not a Web issue, but it is annoying.

Camera

The N8 comes equipped with some fancy camera technology. At 12 megapixels, it’s a step above the 5-to-8-megapixels that most current smartphones offer, but that’s not all it has cooking. The phone has a second, front-facing VGA camera, auto-focus, a xenon flash, and Carl Zeiss optics. Carl Zeiss AG is a German optical company that is mostly associated with high-end optical lenses. Nokia signed a deal with the optics company in 2005.

The camera handles most lighting conditions well, and takes crisp, clear photos. The flash is also one of, if not the best, flashes on a mobile phone, meaning that it actually does its job. (Using the flash does tend to wash out the image a bit, but not badly.) Without the flash, the camera does a great job reducing graininess in poorly lit areas. Outdoors, it works wonderfully. The only trouble we had was with two different kinds of light sources in the same room, but multiple light sources still pose a problem for the best cameras. Sometimes the little things count, too: Nokia’s camera “snap” sound is, by far, our favorite of any handset manufacturer.

Video quality is equally good for a smartphone. The phone can record at 720p and videos look good displaying at 720p. No complaints.

Battery Life

The N8 has average battery life. Call time on a single charge is a little over five hours and standby time is supposedly up to 17 days. With moderate use, you’ll have to charge the phone every night, but it shouldn’t drain before the day is up. Our device did seem to discharge faster than expected on standby. Without interruption, it died after about a week, though it wasn’t quite at full charge when we left it.

Conclusion

We often root for the underdog, and hoped Nokia was ready to re-enter the big leagues, but the N8 isn’t the device that will help the Finnish handset maker stand up to the Android invasion or Apple’s persistent threat from the iPhone. Four years ago, the N8 would have been a game changer. Today, even though features like its camera are amazing, it’s still a relic of the past. At $500, it’s an expensive relic at that.

Highs:

• Vivid 3.5 inch AMOLED touchscreen
• 720p video capture with HDMI output
• 12-megapixel camera is fantastic
• 16GB internal memory

Lows:

• $500 price tag
• No battery access
• Slow processor lags sometimes
• Symbian v3 OS can’t compete with Android or iOS
• Poor built-in Web browser
• No vertical QWERTY keyboard