APPS
Push
Instant Messaging
Twitter
GPS
WLAN based Location
First GPS Devices
Speech Recognition and Speech Synthesis
Decline of the Feature Phone
Smartphones and Applications
Smartphones have been around since the 1990s. Up to now they have been a small segment in the spectrum of mobile phones. In the noughties, simple mobile phones were still dominant and were sold by the millions in Asia, South America and Africa. Anyone, who could afford it, had a feature phone. A smartphone was more for business people who were interested in emails. This changed when smartphones became better in connecting to the Internet and its services. This was only possible thanks to a new type of phone like the one Apple brought onto the market and which Samsung and others copied.
APPS
As described, mobile communications initially had difficulty establishing Internet-based services. This was also because the mobile phone operators tried to offer the services themselves. As a result, they dominated cell phone manufacturers for a long time, who had to adapt their devices accordingly.
This business model changed with the iPhone. Steve Jobs convinced mobile operators that it was better to focus on transporting data. The services should be offered independently. However, Steve Jobs and Apple had long thought that all services should be offered under Apple leadership. Apple had already done something similar with the music industry with the iPod. Music was increasingly sold via Apple in the form of MP3 formats instead of CDs. Apple wanted to prevent cell phones from taking market share from its music business. Therefore, Jobs initially saw the iPhone as an iPod with a phone and internet services rather than a smartphone that could also play music.
The iPhone introduced a new type of service or utility called APPs. Apps is a short form of application. This was a change in naming. In the past additional SW or „Programs“ was offered. Now a new term, the APP was introduced.
Apps were initially applications that we already knew from standard features and smartphones. E-mail, calendar, alarm clock, etc. With previous telephones, these applications were accessed quite laboriously via “menus”. Navigation keys have previously been used here. The iPhone was much easier to use. The applications were immediately visible on the screen using an ICON and only had to be tapped. Using the “apps” was also much easier thanks to the multi-touch displays than on conventional smartphones.
Apple initially had the strategy of developing and installing all of these apps itself. It was Steve Jobs‘ philosophy that everything, the hardware, the operating system and the software, should come from a single source. However, this was deviated from because it was feared that the competing Android system could offer more apps.
Apple therefore allowed apps to be developed externally and offered a developer system for this. However, the apps were only allowed to be distributed and installed via an Apple platform, the so-called App Store. So Apple not only controlled the applications by approving them, but it also received profits from distributing the apps.
Google joined in with a “Google Play Store” and distributed all apps for Android centrally.
Push
An innovation in the mobile communications sector that was already available was now used with a lot of apps. The push message. A push message is sent from the Internet to a device, even if it is not active or online. An example is an email. One way to read email is to actively download your emails from the Internet using an email tool. Another method, that is common today, is that when an email arrives, it is immediately “pushed” to the end device, even if it is not active. When the user activate their device, they immediately see that, and how many emails have now arrived.
A push service was already introduced as part of the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP). An SMS is sent to the user. This causes the end device to connect to the network and read the push message. A simple procedure.
The push email helped Blackberry in particular to achieve its great success in the late noughties. Business people were always “connected” to their emails and were actively informed when a new email arrived.
In June 2009, the iPhone’s iOS allowed the use of push services for the first time, triggering a series of new services and apps that went far beyond email.
Instant Messaging
In the noughties, a new type of communication became widespread. First among young people, later also among business people. The “chatting” or instant messaging.
In the late 1990s, some Israeli students founded a company called Mirabillis. They developed the world’s first instant messenger called ICQ. ICQ is an artificial abbreviation for “I seek you”. In 1998, Mirabillis was sold to AOL for $480 million. Instant messaging began a new way of communicating by sending short messages. Young people in particular communicated with each other from their PCs in this way.
Instant messenger was also soon introduced in the business sector. This meant that company employees could quickly exchange information with one another without making phone calls. You could also see who was online at the moment.
In 2009, two engineers, Brian Acton and Jan Koum, founded a company called WhatsApp. They saw the potential to make money with apps for the iPhone very early on. First, they developed an APP that made it possible to see whether colleagues or employees were active or having a conversation. When Apple allowed push messages in June 2009, WhatsAPP was the first to offer an instant messaging service as an app. WhatsAPP was downloaded 250,000 times in August 2009. Back in December 2009, WhatsAPP expanded its service by also allowing the sending of photos. The number of WhatsApp users exploded. Other messenger services such as ICQ also tried to establish themselves in the mobile communications sector, but came too late. In 2010, WhatsAPP was also available on Google Play and dominated the entire smartphone market.
Instant messaging turned the smartphone into a new tool for communication. It allowed permanent exchange of information between individuals and groups (chat groups). The smartphone was no longer a device that you took out to make a phone call or check your email. It became a device that you looked at almost constantly because new messages were constantly being sent.
Another service that became established on smartphones in 2010 was Twitter. Twitter began in 2006 as a company that sent messages via SMS. Therefore, the messages were greatly reduced in length (140 characters). Twitter quickly became popular and had 100 million new users in 2010 alone. The charm of Twitter was that anyone could instantly send messages to a number of followers. Politicians soon also used this platform to spread news.
In 2010 there was a Twitter app which gave the spread and use of Twitter a further boost. Now you could receive and send Twitter messages anywhere.
Especially due to the spread of instant messaging and news services such as Twitter, the smartphone became a device that was ultimately required to have in order to participate in “social life”. This was ultimately the triumph of the smartphone and the death of the feature phone.
Location based Services
GPS
The functionality of GPS has already been briefly described in the description of IS-95. Here GPS was primarily used to get the exact time in order to synchronize base stations with each other.
GPS is particularly interesting for navigation and location determination. However, four satellites must be received in order to receive the appropriate signals to determine the location. The problem with GPS is that these signals first have to be found. All possible radio frequencies must be searched for GPS signals one after the other until four satellites are received. Then the Doppler shift must also be calculated out. All of this can take 10-15 minutes if a GPS receiver is switched on. GPS was developed for systems that record the position continuously and not sporadically. To ensure continuous reception, GPS sends an almanac containing all the data needed to acquire additional satellites. If a satellite disappears, there is no need to search for a new satellite. You already have the necessary information from the almanac.
If you use GPS in a cell phone, it would take too long for it to acquire all the necessary data. However, GPS in a smartphone would be immensely useful because it allows for a variety of so-called location-based services.
Assisted GPS
In order to improve GPS in cell phones, the radio connection to the base station is used to transmit initial information for GPS positioning. Above all, this is the current almanac required for the location, which can be used directly from the mobile device and does not have to be laboriously searched for.
WLAN based location
Another method of determining the exact location is based on WiFi. Especially in metropolitan areas, there are a variety of different, primarily private WiFi routers in different places. With their beacon signals, these create a special profile, a location-specific fingerprint.
If sufficient WLAN profiles are collected, for example from a test vehicle on the road, it is possible to determine the exact location in which the WLAN receiver of the mobile device receives the various WLAN beacons.
First devices with GPS
The first cell phone with a GPS receiver was the Siemens SXG75, which was developed by Siemens and sold in 2005. VDO software is required for navigation purposes.
However, the real breakthrough for GPS in smartphones only came with Apple and Google, who were able to connect their GPS receivers with their own maps and navigation software. The Apple iPhone 3G with GPS receiver was released in 2008.
Speech Recognition and Speech Synthesis
Speech recognition has been researched since the 1960s in research institutions such as Bell Laboratories. Initially, we started with simple speaker-dependent recognizers with a small vocabulary. The recognition of numbers was of particular interest. The speech recognizers used digital signal processing to extract spectral features of the various sounds from the speech signal. In a training session, references were created for different words. These were then compared with the current speech signal during recognition. Special algorithms were used here, which compared the characteristic shapes from the references with the spoken shapes.
Simple speech recognizers, for example for car phones, already existed at the end of the 1980s. These recognized, for example, names of desired participants who should be called. Later, such simple speech recognizers were also implemented on handheld devices but were not widely used. Nobody wanted to train the speech recognizers and the recognition rates were too low.
There were significant advances in recognition, especially in the 1990s. Speaker-independent systems with a high vocabulary were developed. An essential element here was that there was enough training material available and enough computing power to process it. In the noughties, detection systems were already very advanced. Nevertheless, they only ran on compute-intensive platforms.
A company that specialized in speech recognition was called Siri. It was founded in 2007 and bought by Apple in 2010. In October 2011, Siri was introduced as part of the iPhone 4S. “Siri” could receive spoken instructions at the push of a button. These could be worded arbitrarily. Siri responded to the instructions with a very good speech synthesis program to confirm them or ask further questions. Siri could also be used to enter text.
To make Siri possible, Apple relied on “cloud computing”. The essential calculations for speech recognition were not carried out on the smartphones but it is simply encoding the speech and sent the speech code to a server (the cloud) running Apple’s speech recognition software. The result was then communicated to the smartphone via the radio link.
Speech synthesis with computers began in the 1960s. However, memory and computing power were limited and attempts were made to create the language by simply simulating speaking. The filters (formants) as we know them from speech coding were quite successful. These could be varied and stimulated artificially with voiced signals. The result was quite understandable, but also sounded very artificial. An example was the toy “Speak & Spell” which was built by Texas Instrument in the late 1970s. Here words could be typed in and then “read”.
Speech synthesis improved significantly as large amounts of speech could be stored economically. For example, it was possible to digitally record all possible sound sequences from a speaker and create any language from these sound sequences. A breakthrough came with PSOLA (Pitch Synchronous Overlap Add). Individual periods were extracted from the sound transitions. These could then be added back together with any frequencies and thus create different pitches. In the noughties, speech synthesis was so advanced that it could hardly be distinguished from natural speech. The speech synthesis algorithm have a characteristic voice. In Apple’s Siri, this German voice comes from speaker Heike Hagen.
Decline of the Feature Phone
The proportion of smartphones compared to feature phones was always very low. There was more benefit from feature phones to the “normal user” than from smartphones, whose “computing capabilities” couldn’t really be used. This was changing with the multi-touch based smartphones and the associated APPS. Furthermore, data-based services increasingly dominated over voice services. 2012, just as many smartphones were sold as feature phones while in 2017, the share of feature phones fell to almost 10%. Almost everyone now used a smartphone.
The triumph of the smartphone was also reflected in the increasing data traffic. In 2007, voice-based traffic still dominated. Four times as much voice data was sent as pure IP data. However, IP based traffic grew exponentially while voice traffic remained stable. At the end of 2009, more IP data was sent than voice data.
