Sony Ericsson challenges developers to come up with an irresistible program for its P800 phone. Analysts say it’s a sign that software development for smartphones is in the doldrums. Read the news at News.com. Our Take: This is so unoriginal. There is only one application that can be re-created easily, to match a phone’s requirements, that is completely a must-have for a phone/PDA that has internet access: A Watson replica. Even Apple had to copycat it for its new Sherlock, and even we asked for it. Watson just rocks, and it is extra useful when you are “on the go”.
Wanted: Killer App for New Smartphone
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Also note that this thing is not free ! It’s costs you $500 to be able to participate in the competition. If you’re still interested here is a link to the participation page :
http://www.sonyericsson.com/codetocash/
I was talking to a friend on his cell phone yesterday and was able to hear about every other word he said, because he kept breaking up.
Why are companies so anal about video and ‘killer applications’ when they can’t even get the voice part right?
actually sherlock was released pre watson, thus watson was “unoriginal” because it borrowed from ideas that were already present in sherlock. Watson just took it to the n’th level, it’s a very impressive app, but not entirely original.
actually sherlock was released pre watson, thus watson was “unoriginal” because it borrowed from ideas that were already present in sherlock.
Dude. That’s what Eugenia said.
Still, Watson for a webphone would rock.
I was talking to a friend on his cell phone yesterday and was able to hear about every other word he said, because he kept breaking up. Why are companies so anal about video and ‘killer applications’ when they can’t even get the voice part right?
They’re probably looking for a killer app because they can’t get the basic voice service right. Gotta compensate, ya know. ;^)
Anyway, I always thought that cell phones ought to handle lousy connections by switching to store-and-forward mode — that is, your phone buffers up all the audio it receives, until the other person finishes their sentence, and only then does it play back what the sentence, all at once. This would allow for resends of dropped audio packets, and so on, so that you could actually hear what the other person said (eventually, anyway).
Yeah, the latency might be annoying, but it’s better than not understanding a word the other person says.
Is on the fly AAC encoding possible through hardware? With all this internet connection mumbo jumbo, what you could do is have your standard signal and then, you have an AAC stream to your phone that fills in gaps and quality problems. And you wouldn’t need all that much bandwidth to make it possible. Mp3 sounds good (to my ears) for vocals down to about 64 kbps. So with that you get 8kB a sec. And with AAC you can roughly half that. With a few tweaks the companies could get it under 3kB a sec.(possibly lower) and make it very feasible as a way to improve quality. And it wouldn’t have to consume outrageous amounts of bandwidth as long as they figured out a way to use it as an augmenter for the existing signal.
Please feel free to correct me if i got anything at all wrong. Peer review is good 🙂
And you wouldn’t need all that much bandwidth to make it possible. Mp3 sounds good (to my ears) for vocals down to about 64 kbps.
If I’m not totally mistaken, GSM phones have about 9.6kbps at their disposal.. So it’s pretty compressed. And it’s some weird form of compression that’s custom designed for spoken language.
– Mikael
Do not think that testing and ensuring mobile phone quality is easy. It’s more of a day to day job for the network operators than the phone/antenna makers.
To guarantee voice quality at a certain place you more or less have to test quality at that spot. Also it’s dependent on what is actually said, so you should test with different signals, phrases and languages.
It’s very fun working with though, it usually involves driving around like a maniac…
An iPod mixed with a T800 at the price of a cheap MP3 player. Oh, wishful thinking….
Anyway, Eugenia, there is something on Windows like Watson/Sherlock 3 – Coppernic ( http://www.agents-tech.com )… But I don’t know how it compares with Watson.
The compression algorithms are already quite good at what it does. Problems are more error correction handling with the signal bouncing of buildings, background noise, shielded environments and such. Concrete buildings are quite good at reducing voice quality for instance.
Copernic is just a front-end for a number of search engines. Watson and Sherlock literally leach information from a number of *different* online services and they accept plugins to add more functionality. Copernic, no matter how “corporate” their web site tries to present it, is a joke compared to Watson or even to Sherlock when it comes to functionality and feature-set.
“This is so unoriginal. There is only one application that can be re-created easily, to match a phone’s requirements, that is completely a must-have for a phone/PDA that has internet access: A Watson replica.”
I won’t argue that a Watson clone would be a cool application for a cell phone/pda. Me? I think Watson is pretty useless, but I know lots of people like it.. But to say that it is the ONLY must-have is pushing it…
Copernic is just a front-end for a number of search engines. Watson and Sherlock literally leach information from a number of *different* online services and they accept plugins to add more functionality. Copernic, no matter how “corporate” their web site tries to present it, is a joke compared to Watson or even to Sherlock when it comes to functionality and feature-set.
Okay, whatever you say. Never used Watson nor Sherlock 3. Plus, I uninstalled Copernic because Opera already have all the search features I want (and I only use Google). Maybe this weekend I would go to the local Apple reseller and check out Jaguar and Sherlock 3. :-p
Is on the fly AAC encoding possible through hardware?
Depends what you consider “on the fly”, and if you’re talking about MPEG-2 AAC. The short answer is that codecs which are designed for voice are truly designed to work “on the fly” (that is, interframe codependency is greatly reduced in order to eliminate latency)
With all this internet connection mumbo jumbo, what you could do is have your standard signal and then, you have an AAC stream to your phone that fills in gaps and quality problems.
Umm, no? It just doesn’t work like that. The current method being utilized is peelable bitrates, i.e. when signal quality diminishes, certain parts of the signal can be discarded.
And you wouldn’t need all that much bandwidth to make it possible. Mp3 sounds good (to my ears) for vocals down to about 64 kbps.
This is an inordinate amount of bandwidth for a cell phone.
So with that you get 8kB a sec. And with AAC you can roughly half that. With a few tweaks the companies could get it under 3kB a sec.(possibly lower) and make it very feasible as a way to improve quality. And it wouldn’t have to consume outrageous amounts of bandwidth as long as they figured out a way to use it as an augmenter for the existing signal.
Existing codecs are superior to MP3/AAC for coding voice both in terms of quality and in terms of bandwidth consumption.
[rant] with good battery life THEN I’ll get one. I still get calls about how fortunate I am to be one of the few chosen to get some crappy phone (not iSync/GPRS compliant BTW). I always tell them what is the monthly flat fee and how much is the cell gonna be up with that one charge in weeks. This always shuts them up.
[/rant]
Killer app? Give me a killer Cell Phone, one that will replace my MP3 player, PDA, Digital Camera, and Cell Phone, that allows text-messaging (SMS), supports GMS and actually has a good reception instead of making one sound like their taking from the bottom of a toliet.
Mick
You wouldn’t have to (and in fact probably wouldn’t) implement it anywhere near what I outlined. But, there is still fact that voice quality is not always wonderful. I simply was wondering if it would be possible to add some redundancy to it by sending the data through two different mediums, thus allowing each to fill in gaps in the other.
In the discussion of a free Watson-like app written in C++ for Qt, I mentioned wanting to work on such an app for Squeak Smalltalk. One of the reasons for this is that it’ll be a part of Dynapad, my PDA OS/environment being written in Squeak. (http://dynapad.swiki.net/1) Since a lot of PDAs aren’t connected to the ‘net constantly, you’ll be able to build up a stack of requests- for instance, I’ll be on my way home from school/work, and wonder about movie times. Until I get richochet (i wish!), I won’t be able to get that info right away, on the bus, so I’ll enter the request, and when I get home, I’ll connect my PDA to my home’s ethernet network or dialup to my school’s modem pool, and it’ll get the data, so I can have a look at it while bussing to my friend’s house.
Look for a preliminary version of this app in the release-after-next of Dynapad, R0.3. The upcoming R0.2 will feature some architectural enhancements, see the page for details.
It’s already redundant. Not over another medium, but it’s redundent over time. Every packet has some information about the previous packet. Sorry, but I don’t remember the details. I think you would be quite impressed over how GSM is implemented.