This is the second part of a two part series. Part I can be found here.
Tag: SMART
Yes it may be made out of cheap plastic but that doesn’t mean this phone isn’t a looker. The XPERIA Arc from Sony Ericsson is one of the rare Android 2.3 Gingerbread-ready phones in the local market today (the other one being the HTC Desire S). This is an “Acceptance Unit” which simply means that it is, like us, waiting for someone to accept us for who we really are.
OK seriously, more photos after the jump.
Just in case you haven’t seen it, this is SMART’s new corporate thematic AVP. From “Simply Amazing” to “Make Life Extraordinary.” Got word that they’re making a version II of this but instead of stuff they pulled from their briefs (teehee get it?!) the ad will be a crowd-sourced from videos, photos and testimonials from Time Magazine’s Person of the Year 2006 … You.
Hey it’s a fun way to win PHP 100,000.00. Check it out.
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On a more personal note, I was invited to give two speeches about **drumroll** .. SOCIAL MEDIA again!!! The first was held in Cebu for the SMART Schools Conference and the second was for their townhall meeting. I was absolutely floored to be part of panels composed of Bam Aquino, Professor Michael Tan of UP Diliman, and visionary corporate leader Vivian Tan.
I didn’t go into the nitty gritty of social media this and that so I wanted to present two different ways of looking at this phenomenon. The first was a talk addressing school presidents, deans and administrators from 300 campuses around the country. My short presentation had the overarching theme of “being a product of your own time” and how the youth are challenged with daily revolutions and conflicts on the Internet compared to how the other generation had EDSA I and their parents, WW II.
The second talk was a more practical application of social media and I decided to show off my diving photos and videos and how sharing these over the web helped connect what we see to other people interested in our country’s biodiversity.
The points of both talks was quite simple: social media is nothing more than being able to tell a good story.
By the time you read this post, I’m still in the middle of the ocean, finishing our last day of diving Tubbataha Reef. When I get back, I fly, almost immediately to Boracay. I’m there with my partner-in-crime Andi9 so we’ll be streaming live soon!
SMART is launching LTE technology and doing the entire demo in Boracay.
LTE is a modulation technique that is designed to deliver 100Mbps (DL) per channel and give individual users performance comparable to today’s wired broadband. It was bound to happen. The question was when. To put things into simpler terms let’s have a look at a short history of how mobile phones work:
2G GSM Technology
Remember your Nokia 5110 and 3210? There. Calls and SMS. That was 2G connectivity.
2.5G Technology
This was the first shot into surfing the Internet with your phone but we were using WAP sites. Remember WAP? Yung parang pangit na website designed for mobile phones using GPRS? That was it. Add your ringtones and picture messages. It got a little better when phones started using EDGE connectivity (popular with BlackBerry then) but that was still not …
3G and 3.5G Technology
This is Internet today. It’s workable but not comparable to the wired connections we have at home. You could surf, email, chat, do your social networking, but it was honestly a bit hard to do things like online gaming and downloading huge files.
4G Technology
This is the next generation of connectivity. 100MBPS. On your phone. Built on top of existing technology. No, you cannot use your current phones or USB dongles to access these speeds. The only phone I know that’s capable of accessing this network is the HTC Thunderbolt. Yeah I think SMART is deploying LTE at the same time as Verizon in the USA. Not sure if the Thunderbolt is launching here though because there’s a slight difference in setup with the LTE here and the one in the USA. I heard they’re shipping in dongles.
So yes if you’re planning on buying a new USB dongle for mobile Internet, I suggest you wait a few. That’s because you can practically achieve faster speeds with costs similar to your current plans.
I’m not sure when exactly SMART is making the commercial announcement (i.e. data plans and rates) but if you leave a comment here they will probably get back to you as a number of them read this cute site.
Oh and just one more thing. In case you’re wondering what the difference between LTE and WiMax is, well the former is GSM-based technology: phones. While WiMax involves a completely new set of hardware and is designed for WiMax-enabled devices.
So it appears that the Netphone isn’t just one phone. It’s a brand! I was made privy (well, me and all 60,000 people) to prototypes of future devices that carry the Netphone branding that will be launched by SMART.
Seen here are the Netphone tablet, an entry level Netphone running on Brew (the white one) and the Netphone we’ve previously seen running Android 2.2. All these are part of the WAC initiative, meaning the Jollibee app you see can be made available across several platforms (i.e. Android, Brew, etc) without having to create multiple apps for different platforms. In the same way, telcos from other countries that are part of the WAC initiative can also choose to apply these apps to their store.
SPECULATION: This is actually big. Remember the Sandbox project I helped move forward several months ago? In a way, this is it’s second iteration. Imagine a BlackBerry Messenger-like service but applies to everyone who has Netphone devices. SMART is re-building its own community of subscribers by interconnecting them to one another. So instead of committing to one device platform, WAC enables SMART to use several phone platforms to interconnect. This definitely makes sense since the Philippines is primarily a feature phone market (i.e. the white Brew-enabled Netphone) but recognizing the fact that smartphones and tablets are the big thing for the upper income brackets. END OF SPECULATION.