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Random thoughts about mobile (enterprise) application development.

Where is my home network?

widianuser | 13 December, 2006 22:58

Some time ago I changed my mobile network operator to get a cheaper data plan. After the change I quickly started to feel that something isn't quite right, but wasn't sure what it was... Then I understood that my phone thinks it is not registered to home network, i.e. it is roaming all the time.


The situation is that my new operator is a MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) that doesn't have own network infrastructure but instead licenses it from a “real” operator. In this case interesting is that my operator has its own mobile network code allocated from ITU; I would assume that's not the case for most MVNOs. So now I have a subscription that is always roaming, current network is different than home network.


In practice this means that

  • limiting automatic email pull only to home network will not work

  • limiting MMS receiving only to home network will not work

  • network registration -aware settings for many applications (like Mail for Exchange) will not work

 

Techical note

For S60 3rd edition network registration status can be retrieved with class CTelephony that will tell you the current network and registration information. However, with that class you cannot get information about the home network. To get actual home network information I used an older device and the Mobinfo package from Symbian.


Business note

Of course there wouldn't be a need for “only in home network” kind of a setting if roaming costs were a little bit less astronomical. A short trip abroad with some web browsing and email activity will cost you more than a two-month domestic bill (just happened to me). There is an initiative to cut down roaming costs at EU level, but unfortunately that wouldn't affect data costs.

Enterprise, General, Symbian C++ | Permalink | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

Updated terminal performance results

widianuser | 05 December, 2006 08:11

Some new performance benchmark data about current mobile phones was yesterday published here (previous test is here), showing significant differences in graphics performance between the terminal platforms. The benchmark tests 2D and 3D graphics performance on Java platform, so the result mostly tells about the quality of JVM implementation and terminal's screen drawing capabilities.

However, the test doesn't tell much about the performance of native applications on Symbian platform. It would be interesting to see the results of the same test when running a native instead of Java application – how much is the overhead of JVM? What I also would like to benchmark is the disk I/O performance of a Symbian terminal, for both internal and removable media.

Do you know some other publicly available benchmark data or tests for smartphone performance?

General, Java | Permalink | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0)

 
 
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