Random News on the Mobile Front

Now that the hurricane that was the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus launches has blown out of town, other pieces of news are starting to pop up on the mobile device front along with a surprising announcement from AT&T Wireless. Rather than handling them as a string of short pieces, it seemed more appropriate to bundle the whole lot together.

Billing for BYOD

Last week AT&T announced a new billing capability for its wireless services aimed at companies supporting bring your own device initiatives. Called the AT&T Work Platform, the new program will work with mobile device management/enterprise mobility management (MDM/EMM) systems from AirWatch, MobileIron and Good Technology. While the technical details have yet to be disclosed, the service will allow AT&T to bill companies directly for corporate data use on personally owned devices; the user will still be billed directly for their personal use.

Anyone who has worked in a BYOD environment will know that the administrative burden reimbursements can be a major hassle. Reimbursements are typically done either by additions to the employees' paychecks or through an expense voucher process. When the service becomes available (no date was provided) a company will be able to get a direct bill for all data usage related to corporate email and applications. This is especially important today in light of the recent California court decision in Cochran v. Schwan's Home Service, Inc. that ruled companies must reimburse employees for any business use on their personal mobile phones.

The MDM/EMM partners are keeping the details of the new offering closely guarded likely at the request of AT&T. We will be very interested to see what billing options are available to devices under this plan and if those rates can be negotiated as we do with corporate liable devices today. Stay tuned.

Bad News for "Glassholes"

The Wall Street Journal announced that Google will be halting individual sales of its Google Glass wearable display and will work on the next generation of the device out of the public eye. First released in 2013, the $1,500 devices were plagued with poor sound quality and short battery life, not to mention the fact that they made you look like a complete idiot!

Google has apparently come to the realization that field testing prototypes is not the best idea when it comes to hardware devices, and the new strategy is to wait until they have a finished product before turning it loose on the general public. The project is being moved out of the Google X research lab and into a standalone unit.

Besides the technical problems and "fashion challenges," Google Glass stirred privacy concerns given the fact that it could record video surreptitiously, hence the "Glasshole" moniker. I for one won't miss Google Glass (or any of the other wearable viewers), but maybe the product concept and reasonable use cases will be clearer for the next iteration.

Build Your Own Phone

Also from Google, the Project Ara modular smartphone is going to be released on a trial basis in Puerto Rico later this year. I first heard about this thing a few years back when it was still in the hands of the Advanced Technologies and Projects team at Motorola. Google held on to the product when it sold Motorola to Lenovo, and it is now with the Android team.

The ultimate in "open" products, the concept was for Google to provide an endoskeletal frame called an "endo" to which could be connected a number of modules. Those modules could be memory, a display, spare battery, possibly a keyboard, each of which could be replaced with more powerful versions as they became available or the user's needs changed. The modules could be manufactured by anyone.

The ultimate in flexibility, part of the sales pitch is to cut down on electronic waste and allow users to hang on to their smartphones (or at least those parts of them they liked) for a longer span. I have a hard time seeing how this open source, modular phone concept would fly, but Google plans to sell a starter kit with the frame, display, battery, low-end CPU and Wi-Fi where the bill of materials is $50. Many of us in the mobile space are predicting an explosion of sales in low-cost smart phones to meet the demand in emerging markets, so now the user will have the option of buying a house or an Erector Set.

Tizen Reappears

Also on the cheap phone front, Samsung has released the first smartphone running the Tizen operating system, the Z1, in the Indian market at a price equivalent to $90 (5,700 Indian Rupees). The company had announced plans to introduce a more expensive model in Russia last year, but cancelled the launch at the last minute.

Tizen, which is based on the Linux kernel, is backed by Samsung, among others, and the company reportedly uses it in some of its consumer appliances. As we already have a free mobile OS in the way of Android, there is some question as to why anyone would need Tizen, particularly given the fact that there are thousands of apps for Android and virtually none for Tizen. However, when you look at the potential for 2 billion+ mobile devices in China and India to upgrade to smartphones, a lot of crazy things can happen.

BlackBerry's Not For Sale

Finally there was a report from Reuters that Samsung had made an offer of $7.5 billion for BlackBerry, a report that was quickly refuted by the company. In the meantime, it caused a temporary bump in the Canadian smartphone maker's stock and lots of analysis of the value the company still has, particularly in the way of its patent portfolio.

So there's a lot going on in the mobile space, but what we're really waiting for is the release of the Apple Watch, which was announced along with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus last fall. I'm not lining up for that one, but just as we saw with mobile payments, the whole market changes when Apple signs on. On the whole, wearables have been a slow moving niche market for fitness buffs and gadget freaks. It will be interesting to see if Apple can move it into the mainstream. There's a long year ahead.