Choosing wireless services for smartphone developers
Please continue the discussion here
As a mobile gadgets geek, I own more than a dozen smartphones -- from Nokia's latest models to Microsoft Smartphone 2003 beta devices. Those devices are fun to play with. However, selecting wireless data services for them is not fun at all. Wireless carriers have a ton of marketing speak when it comes to mobile data services for consumers. It is a challenge to find out what exact you need without being over-charged. As the MDC approaches, I need to renew my services so that I can demonstrate some cool applications to fellow MDC attendees. I will post my wireless carrier research notes here. I'd appreciate your comments and, hopefully, it will be of help to mobile developers out there. :)
First of all, I want a flexible GPRS/EDGE service plan. Although the GSM data service might be OK for casual users who mainly play offline games, it is definitely too slow and too disruptive for serious end-to-end applications. The service must support unlocked devices -- I usually swap the SIM card in and out of different device depending on my need. The carrier's customer support need to supply instructions on how to set up GPRS access point etc. Fortunately most wireless carriers meet this requirement with the notable exception of NexTel, which only seems to support Motorola handsets.
The data service should allow access to any Internet IP address (not limited to the carrier's portal) and restrict as few port numbers as possible. I need a plan with a large bandwidth cap (all-you-can-eat plan is the best) since I need to install and stress test the applications under different network conditions. With a high bandwidth plan, I can even use my bluetooth GPRS phones as modem to access the Internet from my laptop. T-Mobile and Sprint both offer all-you-can-eat GPRS plans.
If I have a choice, I would prefer EDGE service much more than GPRS since the former is much faster (EDGE is almost 3G speed). It seems that ATT is the only nation wide EDGE provider but it costs $20 per 8MB ... Also, MS smartphones do not yet support the speed enhancements of EDGE.
In addition to smart client applications, I would also like to develop applications that utilize mobile services, such as the multimedia messaging services (MMS) and integrated mobile billing/payment systems. I am a big fan of multimodal end-to-end applications and one-click micro-payment. MMS is already the hottest data service application today. Although the current breed of MS smartphones do not support MMS, the new camera smartphones and pocketpc phones are just around the corner. Using XML Web services exposed by the carrier, we can develop MMS applications that interoperate with a large number of MMS phones (all new Nokia models, for example) from the server side. Almost all carriers support MMS these days. But few of them actual expose MMS servers to developers. I think you can access Cingular servers via the Nokia developer program, and ATT/T-Mobile MMS servers via OpenWave's developer program. Vodafone's Mobile Web Services platform is open to Microsoft developers. But Vodafone is not available in the US
So, what is the verdict? The ATT EDGE service should work great on my latest Nokia phones (6620 and 6230). The T-Zones Pro GPRS data service is cheap and unlimited (a huge plus!!!). I will make a decision in the next couple of days!