What's the noise about HD Voice?

What is it?

Orange HD Voice provides clearer calls by cutting out background noise. They say its the biggest revolution in phone calls for 20 years. It should be particularly useful to radio stations, improving the quality of remote interviews, and providing an invaluable service to those working in noisy environments.

How does it work?

HD Voice uses Adaptive Multi Rate Wideband (ARM-WB). Currently only a small part of your voice is transmitted on a normal mobile call. HD promises to use a lot more of your speech. Instead of transmitting the whole waveform, intelligent algorithms look for consecutive sections of speech that are similar, then, if two sections are alike, the redundant information is stripped out, allowing the signal to be compressed.

When can I get it?

HD Voice has been out in Germany for a while and is now available throughout the UK on the Orange network. It's free on HD Voice enabled handsets that sport the HD Voice logo (above). Nokia and Samsung have been the first to launch, with the Nokia 5230, X6 and E5, and the Samsung Omnia Pro - ok so not many yet, but more will launch soon.

Farmville coming to mobile?

The leading games developer for Facebook, Zynga, has recently bought German HTML5 specialist Dextrose AG. So what does that mean? Well they will be able to run rich programmes on both web and mobile browsers. This could save Zynga lots of development time and effort, and broaden its channels to market by bringing it games to mobile and other devices.

Facebook games generally rely on Adobe Flash, which is only supported on a few phones running Android 2.2, but most including the latest iPhones do not support it. This means that you can't harvest your crops, or check on your Mafia on your mobile. This acquisition should allow Zynga to port games to the emerging standard HTML5, which will support a greater range of mobile devices, while still offering a rich user experience. This could see even more mobile Internet traffic for the already dominant Facebook.

Who is winning the browser war?

Looking at the statistics provided by comScore MobiLens (July 2010), one can see that while the iPhone is a large slice of the browsers at 29.6%, Nokia (using the Symbian OS) is still delivers the largest slice of mobile internet traffic at 37.3.

Also of note is the rapid growth of Android, already at 10% in July nearly doubling from a year earlier, I think that by year end it will have increases substantially due to new handset releases.

What is also noteworthy is the huge differences between some countries in Europe, here Nokia remains much more dominant. This should be remembered when working with clients who's users are across Europe.