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Anyone who has recently bought a mobile phone will tell you of all the wonderful features their phone has and how it is so convenient and useful in today's hectic life. Dig deeper, however, and you will notice that many of the common features such as customized ring tones, MP3 playback, and video download that are so highly touted are not fully utilized. As a result, carriers have not yet tapped these revenues streams as expected. The reason: many users see the act of transferring media onto mobile handsets as a chore.
Today's consumers demand everything now, but media transfer methods to mobile handsets have yet to keep pace. Consumers don't want to transfer that music playlist they have stored on their computer or that amazing movie that they would like to watch to their mobile handsets as they do not want to wait for a good hour before their mobile devices are available for use. Therefore, it is of utmost important that mobile device manufacturers take into account the user experience when designing mobile devices in order to ensure that customers not only buy a feature rich mobile device but will be willing to make full use of all the advanced multimedia features included.
Compared to the mobile handset that only does voice calls of yesteryears, today's mobile handset also doubles as a portable MP3 player, video player, GPS navigation device, and even portable mini-computer. Furthermore, innovative mobile phone makers even have plans to incorporate mini-projectors and High Definition video playback on their devices. All these wonderful capabilities on a mobile device require large amount of data to be transferred to the mobile handset. In their haste to add more features to their handset designs, mobile handset manufacturers have neglected the basic need to improve the capability of their designs to transfer and receive all the necessary data in a timely fashion.
A recent M:Metrics report shows that the most common way for users to transfer music to their mobile devices is through sideloading. Sideloading is the industry term for the transfer of data from PC to mobile device via USB. Although sideloading is the most popular medium of data transfer, many industry players have yet to catch on to how sideloading improves the end user experience as well as benefits handset manufacturers and carriers alike. Many mobile handsets still do not support fast sideloading capabilities and this not only negatively affects the user experience but impairs the full utilization of all their media rich features.
Mass Storage Progression
In parallel with the increase in media file sizes, mass storage densities have been continuously increasing to meet demand. In early 2005, most mobile handsets were unable to support mass storage densities of more than 4GB. Today, mobile devices are capable of mass storage densities of up to 32GB. iSuppli projects that by 2009, more than 70% of SD cards in the market will have capacities of 2GB or more. The trend of mobile handsets with larger mass storage capabilities show a very strong consumer pull towards increased mass storage capacities as media file sizes continue to increase.
With new releases of higher density standards, we see a continuous trend of increased interface speeds of SD, MMC, and NAND devices used in today's mobile handsets. This indicates that these popular mass storage bodies are aware of the need for increased data transfer speeds onto their devices. However, although the mass storage interface speeds are increasing, the bottleneck lies not at the interface of the mass storage device but at the bridge between the USB and mass storage controller. This bottleneck is usually the processor or peripheral controller used in the handset design.
Sideloading
With the undisputed growth of sideloading, the USB standard has strived to match data transfer needs time and time again to ensure that consumers can transfer data within the least amount of time. With the recent finalization of the USB3.0 (Superspeed) standard, the USB Implementers Forum has defined a new standard to ensure that the highest of data throughput needs is addressed. Nevertheless, many mobile handsets do not have the need to implement USB3.0 in the near future. However, they must improve on the performance of their USB2.0 (Hi-Speed) devices if indeed they have already made that transition from USB1.1 (Full-Speed).
A recent study by In-Stat shows that by the year 2010, 55% of mobile handsets will have Hi-Speed USB. This shows that Hi-Speed USB will no longer be just a feature on high-end mobile phone models but will be a necessity from mid-end multimedia phones to high-end smartphones. Although Hi-Speed USB is gaining momentum, not all HS-USB devices are created equal in terms of performance. A quick benchmark of mobile handsets out in the market will show that while some devices aim to provide the best possible sideloading performance of 15MB/s, other devices linger in the 2 to 3 MB/s range.
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