Mobile magician

It is almost physically impossible to have the most advanced mobile phone on the market at any one time. As soon as you’ve left the shop and unpacked your pride and joy some handset manufacturer will have unleashed its latest ultra-thin, feature-packed design classic, making your new purchase appear as advanced as My First Phone.

As one of the world’s biggest handset companies, Finland’s Nokia exploits this phenomenon better than most. Its latest mobile wonder, the N95, is a multimedia mini-computer packed with a host of features designed for the business user on the move.

To keep this production line of mobile innovation on the move requires a constant stream of new ideas, so it is perhaps no surprise that research accounts for a huge part of Nokia’s workforce. More than a third of its 60,000 employees are employed in research and development and about 800 of these work at the Nokia Research Centre, which has been the heart of the mobile giant’s R&D activities for the past 20 years.

Despite its name, Nokia Research Centre is a decentralised group of international research centres with three offices in Nokia’s home of Finland, two in the US, one in Germany, one each in Japan and China and another in the UK.

Bob Iannucci, head of the Nokia Research Centre, has a classic IT background in computer science covering years of service at firms such as IBM and is very excited by the possibilities of the mobile industry.

He oversees a wide and varied portfolio of mobile phone-related technology development including radios, injection moulding, materials, user interface technology and software. He is an engaging speaker with a passion for the possibilities of mobile phones and one of the best-placed people in the world to speculate on the direction of the industry.

Nokia’s latest big idea is Wibree, an innovative wireless technology that Iannucci believes will change the way in which we use our mobile phones. At a technical level it is nothing more than an extension of Bluetooth technology as it reuses much of the same hardware. However, according to Iannucci, the technology will enable a new breed of applications to emerge that will work with your mobile phone.

‘Instead of the terminal being the end of the line, as is the case now, it’s going to become the bridge between the internet world and the world of sensors in your environment,’ said Iannucci. ‘Wibree is the technology that makes this last hop feasible.’

Initially the industry was sceptical about Wibree’s ability to break through into territory now split between Wi-Fi and Bluetooth but Iannucci is confident. ‘Imagine you have sensors in your car or on your person, that link to your phone and give you the ability to gather instant information about your own health or whether you are about to enter a traffic jam. This is what Wibree can offer.’

This form of coupling mobile phones with sensor-rich environments is not possible with Bluetooth alone, said Iannucci. Compared with Wibree, Bluetooth uses too much power to be able to interact with a number of sensors at once.

‘Wibree will allow us to make sensors a first-class part of the broader wireless network,’ predicted Iannucci. ‘Mobile phones will have Bluetooth and Wibree running alongside each other but you will also have wristwatches, home sensors, toys and automotive accessories that have Wibree-enabled only and which can interact with a mobile phone.’

Nokia is also heavily involved in research regarding cognitive radio, a technology that uses software in both ends of the wireless connection to negotiate the best way of using the available bandwidth, as well as that technology’s natural progression — true, software-defined radio.

One of Iannucci’s big concerns is how technology and design can be used to make the mobile phone more a part of our everyday lives by improving its usability and making the user interface more intuitive. His team is also constantly working on ways to increase the phone’s computing power, he said. Building sensors into the phones, in particular, is a real focus of interest.
‘We see a very broad and ripe area for adding all sorts of things that detect where the phone is in your pocket, whether you’re holding it up or down,’ he said.

Following the brouhaha surrounding the recent launch of Apple’s iPhone, Iannucci also revealed that Nokia is developing its own advanced input technology. ‘We are working on involving accelerometers so you can use gestures as an input method — an idea that significantly predates some of the things you might have seen in competitors’ phones,’ he said.