ABBA, The Cardigans, Ace of Base and Roxette to name just a few – there’s no doubt Swedes have always known how to pump out pop music. So, it should not be a wonder that, once again, it took the Swedes to show how to bring music to the masses in the form of Spotify.

However, in a modern home, the other problem with music is that today most people have their music inside their computer – which, more often than, is a laptop instead of a bulky desktop and anyway probably not stationed anywhere near one’s stereo setup. There are many solutions to this problem, Apple has its Airport Express but it only supports playback from iTunes out of the box. So, if you want to stream Spotify from a bigger set of speakers and without cables this is not a good solution.

For a long time, I was looking for such a solution – no additional cables or stuff to just play audio from my Mac to my living room. I did find a bunch, but most of them were complex and riddled with lots of strange limitations (like cost). I was sure that there had to be an easier way to enjoy Spotify further than 2 meters from my laptop. Many A/V manufacturers sidestep the issue by adding a WLAN, Ethernet and/or USB capability to their hardware, so one can play music out of a shared hard drive but this rules all streaming services, like Spotify, out.

Maybe in the future Spotify might be inside our radio tuners and televisions. The latter is possible already in Sweden and Finland, where you can get Spotify on your digital television thanks to the Swedish-Finnish ISP and mobile operator TeliaSonera. Changing my internet and cable operator just for Spotify sounded a bit too complex solution so that wasn’t for me. But it might be a nice setup for one’s parents – if they weren’t just fine with their CDs, probably. Is it really this difficult to just stream arbitrary audio from one’s laptop to speakers wirelessly?

So, more Swedes to the rescue. The good folks at the hi-fi spekaer company Audio Pro have come up with probably one of the simplest and cross-platform solutions with their wireless offering. But, it’s an USB dongle. Aren’t there enough wireless transmitters inside my MacBook Pro to do the job? Well, thanks to yet another Swedish company, Ericsson, and their Bluetooth technology (with AD2P-profile), streaming audio wirelessly should be simple. So, why not just add Bluetooth inside a radio and then things should work with no wires or restrictions, right?

However, this, like many other Bluetooth applications, hasn’t really caught on. Sony has some setups with Bluetooth, but I went with Audio Pro Radio One. Sure, it looks like any Tivoli Audio’s radio and Tivoli Audios are really nice, but the only “modern” one with any connectivity (and radio presets!) is NetWorks and that one costs an arm and a leg – and even that one can’t stream music from a computer in a simple way. Radio One, on the other hand can, because the smart folks at Audio Pro put a Bluetooth receiver in it.

And so, with Radio One, Spotify and a Mac things are quite straightforward. Because the Radio One acts like an ordinary output device which means you can stream any audio to it. No need for Airport Express or Airfoil, things work even simpler than that. Setting up a Windows-machine should be equally easy as long as you have correct Bluetooth-drivers that have the A2DP profile. Connecting your iPhone – or any other mobile phone with BT – to Radio One? Thanks to Bluetooth, really easy. However, because there’s no iPod or USB dock in Radio One, you’d better watch battery usage or use a stereo cable instead.

So, thanks to a bunch of ingenious Swedes, I can finally stream music from my laptop to my living room. The only limits are that Bluetooth’s range is relatively short and it does consume battery. But no artificial limits like with oh so many other solutions. Aren’t standards and simple solutions a fun thing?

A sidenote: Americans and other developing mobile countries take note, Bluetooth does not mean a wireless headset. Bluetooth can do a lot of pretty cool stuff, but unfortunately introduction of cheap mobile broadband and before that Nokia’s and then Apple’s reluctance to actually support any interesting profile (without crippling them beyond any recognition) on their handsets have meant that Bluetooth is not in the spotlight anymore and is mostly in hands-free headsets and wireless keyboards and mice.

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This year, I had the chance to visit CeBit 2010 for the very first time. It was an anticlimactic experience. Being raised with reports of CESs and Macworlds, you can’t help but hope to stumble on the next big thing, but what I was confronted with what had the air of a dusty town ripped out of a Western movie after all the gold diggers left for fairer grounds. In this case, the gold drought is the recession, and the aftermath (to me) appeared as a number of very empty spaces and the remainder seemingly under-budgeted, not “2010 innovative” but 2007 innovative, and with a big sticker on their back saying: “I’m under-confident, please buy something!”

To me, the most interesting technologies were 3D and a massage chair that took me under for 20 min. The biggest news story, however, was USB 3.0, a sad state of affairs if 2010 is marked by a tiny, soon to be in every computer, plug (no matter how fast that damn thing is).

Ignoring the massage chair, which I can’t recommend enough, 3D was the hot topic, inspired by, of course, Avatar. Everybody, from Nokia to Nvidia, appeared to have something related to 3D. They mostly had excuses for it—Nokia was pimping its high bandwidth infrastructure for 3D content aimed at TV & telephone providers; Nvida was pimping its 3D shutter technology for consumer PCs; Frauenhofer Institut was pimping its glasses-less 3D technology; and more and more and more—but my end-conclusion, also after trying to explore the potential for a revolution that was Avatar, was that 3D is an excellent gimmick that will draw a crowd to your stand or cinema, but will leave you disappointed 2/3 times.

Ironically, Nokia had the most impressive display of 3D, showing it off on a 15,000 euro JVC flatscreen. When asked for details, however, all they could tell me was the price of the TV and that their bandwidth technology was not for sale to the “likes of me.” Very arrogant, those Nokia folk and it wasn’t just the 3D guy either… Nvidia’s shutter glasses also worked well and I see a real potential for 3D gaming. Frauenhofer’s glasses-less 3D-TV… pah! The problem with 3D is that it’s so easy to do it badly and 3D without glasses is far from ready. 3D with glasses is far from ready!

I don’t get the obsession with not wearing glasses either. First of all, they’re roomy, which means that you can wear them over existing glasses, they won’t make the claustrophobic more claustrophobic, and they’re disposable. Putting on glasses in the living room is kind of like turning off the light when watching TV.

Last, but not least, I liked lcReflex, which developed an interesting, if not very portable contraption, that makes applications on a computer screen three-dimensional. It involves something they call a Stereomonitor, two screens joined together at a 90 degree angle (one front-facing, one on top facing down) and a semi-transparent mirror in the middle. Put on glasses and you can manipulate an image of brain in 3 dimensions, which should be very interesting for, eh, brain-scientists and playing 3D Tetris.

What’s fairly clear is that we are very close to having 3D in our living rooms, whether it’s for playing games or for watching (selected) TV-shows and movies. But 3D has the same problem that HD-DVDs and -TVs have, which is that it’s insanely niche. You can’t play everything on it and you need some pretty expensive equipment to play it. That combination doesn’t justify much of an investment in it.

The best chances for success belong to companies like Nvidia, which produce consumer-priced solutions for consuming content. Add to this that it is (relatively speaking) fairly easy to convert digital content from 2D to 3D. I very much see the next stage of gaming to becoming 3D.

I’m much more bearish on video-media. Great that cinemas have found a new revenue stream to subsidise their troubled existence. Great that 7 out of 10 filmmakers are considering to make their next film in 3D. I don’t think cinemas have to worry about living rooms competing with them on that level anytime soon. While the need for a big screen to enjoy 3D is a myth well-worth breaking (and it soon will be in gaming), it is still a powerful way to experience a movie and something you can sell at €/$ 15 a pop. Home-entertainment still has the expensive technology problem and the fact that BluRay DVDs simply aren’t selling to anyone except Playstation 3 owners.

As mentioned, 3D’s gimmick power is strong, but that will wear off after having 3D technology in your living room and hardly any media to consume on it. It’s much better off in cinemas where the growing few pay a few bucks more to see space debris floating above their heads, or on consoles where the price of a 3D add-on is hardly more than buying a Guitar Hero guitar.

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Judging from Vincent’s latest post (and the comments!) about why he thinks Android will suck, there are many misunderstandings about global smartphone markets. First of all, they are a small subset of all handset market – just about 10%. There are many who are blinded by their US-centric power-user views. The echo chamber of blogs doesn’t help much, especially because most blogs are also U.S.-based. This smartphone market share graph by Volker Weber is one of the best to illustrate that North America is totally different than other markets. The differences do not limit to smartphones, there are huge differences in mobile usage also.

The other thing to note is that the dominating player right now with more than two thirds of the market is Symbian, which is backed by, among others, the number one mobile manufacturer, Nokia. Both have summarily dismissed iPhone and Android as nothing more than niche (“iPhone is nice, but that’s about it”, “Just another Linux phone”?). They are also both usually missing from all reporting concerning Android and iPhone. Not taking them into account is like talking about PC industry and forgetting about Windows and Dell.

It’s always a good reminder that Nokia is also the world’s largest MP3 player and digital camera manufacturer. They also have more than half of the smartphone market. From a U.S. perspective this might not be so visible, because in the U.S. market the best selling smartphones are Blackberry Pearl, Motorola Q and Apple iPhone. If these are your idea of smartphones, do yourself a favour and familiarise yourself with Nokia’s Nseries (for consumers) and Eseries (for enterprise).

In the Open Handset Alliance’s FAQ, the alliance says that the benefits of an open platform for operators and manufacturers are lower costs and flexibility to offer services. For consumers, they promise cheaper prices, but given that most phones are given free by the operator or that it doesn’t actually make any business-sense to do give phones on a discount without a reason, this is probably a joke. Also, do not read too much into the “partnerships” in OHA, as many of those companies are also involved with Symbian and many other mobile initiatives.

The business model of your average mobile carrier is to make money out of you by offering you value-added services. The problem in the marketplace is that most people are just fine with voice and SMS. In the EU, many people feel that mobile data is still too expensive to the extent that the EU will probably mandate some price limits. Seriously, this is an industry that thought WAP and walled gardens were the future. Open competition is an anathema for them.

What the carriers with their monopoly mindset didn’t see coming was that internet is everywhere for far more competitive price and experience than what they can deliver. A surprise hit in Finland is a USB-device with 3G connection with gives you mobile broadband to your laptop with fixed monthly price. Why not just use your mobile’s Bluetooth instead is something a more technically oriented guy would think. But that’s why this guy can’t understand either why Google sees more search activity from an iPhone than from other handsets.

Many ISPs have started to adopt the mobile operators’ tactics now that the basic service is so low-margin. Of course, they can’t go as far as they’d love – you can’t imagine your ISP mandating what kind of computer you can use to connect to the net. In part, this is what the net neutrality discussion is about.

Google reported some time ago, that iPhone is by far the most used mobile user-agent. You can take this as a success story to Apple (and AT&T), but you could also see the sorry state of internet on mobile. A device with a tiny market share dominates internet usage? This is of course good news for iPhone carriers, who would love to have more customers like that. The question is, is the reason that using the web is so easy on an iPhone or because the iPhone owners behave differently? A little bit of both is always the easy way out, but whatever, the bottom line is that it brings more internet traffic revenue to mobile carriers. One point of warning, though, one reason for iPhone’s search dominance to keep in mind is only hinted in the article – the default search engine for many mobiles isn’t Google, but Yahoo! or even an operator’s own.

Then there’s the talk about the open platform of Android. One problem when talking about iPhone SDK and Android is that, right now, neither are “real” in the sense that so far all we have seen is hype. As a Symbian boss said, “We take [Android] seriously but we are the ones with real phones, real phone platforms and a wealth of volume built up over years”. In 2007, 141 different models and 77,3 million Symbian phones were sold. The fight between Android and iPhone SDK is pointless if you don’t include Symbian in it. It is open (to an extent), it’s free, there’s no AppStore (which is good and bad), there’s digital signatures (which is good and bad). And there are almost 9,000 third-party applications.

Want IM and VoIP on your smartphone today? Here’s a Gizmo client for Symbian S60 -platforms by Nokia (See the site for other cool apps if you happen to have a compatible phone). Do not forget the power mobile operators have over their networks, even that app can’t use VoIP on 3G, just on WLAN. Apple and Google are not mobile companies and that’s why they try to change the rules more to the their liking. This is a good thing, but history has proved these efforts have so far been very futile.

This Wired article on Motorola ROKR couple years back is a good reminder of some laws of the mobile market. Of course, the article didn’t age that well (which seems to be quite common at Wired), but the middle part with Nokia’s Vanjoki is worth a second read, especially now that Nokia is busy with Ovi.

PS. I’m a low-profit customer for my mobile operator, I have a simple SonyEricsson K610i with Opera Mini that I use web with like three times a year. I tried to use mobile internet while “outside the grid” (e.g. WLAN or DSL), but because I happened to be outside a major city (and 3G connectivity), the experience sucked a lot. We wanted to see a YouTube movie but were unable to. And this was 2008.

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Many Apple fans are salivating over the rumored launch of Apple’s long-awaited mobile device in Europe. These fans (who put ”fan” in ”fanatic”) are reading the American echo-chamber-blogs and are certain that Apple will not only introduce iPhone in Europe this year, but it will be also revolutionary. As a card-carrying Nokialand citizen who, though, has never owned a Nokia, I disagree.

Telecom operators are far more heterogeneous in Europe and prices vary wildly in each country. Recently EU tried to limit the roaming charges, which is positive development. In USA, Apple went with exclusive deal with an operator so it can control the experience. In Europe, this will be so much difficult. Will Apple discard its main core skill, the user experience, so it can sell its device all around Europe? Or does the user experience mean so much to Apple, that they’re willing to concentrate on just the important markets? I’m betting the latter will happen.

I have to admit that my guess is based on the assumption that Apple launches the phone in Europe on a single carrier. This probably means that iPhone will not be available in all European countries at first. My guess is UK, Germany and France. I’ve very limited knowledge of operators in these markets, but my guess is that there are some big players in all of these fighting over the exclusive deal over iPhone. Other markets will see iPhone later, through subscriptions or after Apple starts to sell iPhone without subscription in whole Europe. But for this to happen, Apple needs to find a way to bring down the price, at around 800-900 euros, it is way too expensive. Compare this to iPods and Macs, which have gained lot of adoption when they entered the price ranges of their competitors.

And then there’s 3G. Telecom operators mis-invested in 3G en masse during the dot-com boom and it’s not widely adopted, but the fact remains that the infrastructure is there and the telecom operators are desperately seeking killer apps for it. Yes, 3G eats your handset battery like nothing else. Yes, the data charges are insanely priced pretty much everywhere. Yes, pretty much everyone has broadband at home these days.

But these are just technicalities. The mobile phone culture is different here and differs widely across countries.

The main reason it won’t matter is… we just don’t care about smart phones. Or what goes as a smart phone on the other side of the pond, as according to some statistics, about a quarter of phones in European hands have the multimedia capabilities. That’s a lot. Go to any European store and try to find a model without camera, music player or internet (3G or EDGE or what they now have). I won’t mention other features like calendars, ring tones, games and such, as they’re are even in the cheapest models already. This is 2007, after all.

The European handset manufacturers made a grave mistake couple of years ago in 2004, when they presumed people were into feature-filled bricks and cheap “clam-shell” phones from Motorola and Samsung came and conquered lot of market ground. After a quick shuffle, both SonyEricsson and Nokia quickly reintroduced cheap models to their offerings. Even Nokia was forced to launch their first clam-shell model. Now, Motorola and Samsung are going for “thin” models and at least SonyEricsson is answering that challenge. Nokia’s answer to these “slim” phones is expected during fall, but the company is know for missing deadlines.

Nokia on the other hand is betting on its N-series line. These are, according to Nokia, what computers have become. Nokia N95 is formidable opponent to iPhone in Europe. On a spec sheet, it has pretty much all the features of the iPhone and is better in some fronts. Naturally, the UI isn’t slick and it doesn’t have the future technology iPhone has.

In Europe the people going for other Apple’s forte, style, might not be throwing their Samsung Ultras, Nokia N-series or SE Walkmans out of the window. They are so much cheaper and get the jobs done and look good. On the other front, technical advances, the likes of N95 is dominating the field with its geek appeal (3G and WLAN, GPS, runs on third-party-welcoming Symbian). And for the enterprise, I don’t see anyone challenging Nokia’s Communicator (and now E-series) foothold. In Finland, the Nokia Communicator (which I think totally sucks not only as a device but as an user experience) is as ubiquitous among business people as iPods are among urban people.

Yes, there will be buzz. Yes, in many ways, it will be a success. But, will iPhone matter in Europe? Probably not. It will have its niche and I hope it challenges other players in the market to improve their user interfaces, but that’s about it.

Better question is, I think, does Apple care? I got the impression that Steve Jobs would of course love to sell as many of these things as possible, but he’s not counting on it to penetrate the market, going so far as using one of the common start-up lies, “we only need 1% of the market”. The device seems to have an audience, but the features might not be so revolutionary to us Europeans that we’d invest in it. It would be a lie to say that Apple is not out to capture the markets it enters, as that’s what corporations do by definition, but it has shown that it can survive as a niche player in computer markets. It’s not Microsoft and it’s not Dell. Using their tactics, Apple probably would have larger market-share, but the costs of doing so might be not worth it (goodwill, community, brand). With iPods, they had tremendous luck (and skill) and could dominate the market without sacrificing their values. I’m afraid many Apple fans believe that with iPhone, Apple has been able to combine the the different market advantages it has in Macs and iPods. This is wishful thinking and I don’t believe that. The fact remains that computers, portable music players and phones are all different markets. Both Nokia and Apple would like us to believe in this trio’s convergence. Their devices, after all, are “what computers have become”.

Kari has always depended on the last year’s models of SonyEricsson. Now he has a SE K610i with Opera Mini installed. Even it will kick iPhone’s ass in Europe.

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