Software Solution for GPRS Camera Phones

Europe : fg microtec announces the availability of fmM1251. This software solution for GPRS camera phones reduces transmission times for MMS pictures and delivers quality performance with lower energy consumption and more efficient usage of the air interface. The fmM1251 is available as of today and will enable handset manufacturers to deploy powerful optimised MMS mobile computing platforms that help service providers and end users enjoy higher quality MMS pictures.

Sending MMS pictures with today’s GPRS camera phones can take up to 40 seconds for a 10KByte picture size. Furthermore, the picture quality of a 10 KByte MMS picture is poor. As a net result the end user is forced to choose larger picture formats such as 100Kbyte for better resolution. But sending larger pictures can take up to one minute or more, during which time the handset is using energy for transmission. The long transmission time is mainly caused by network retransmissions. The fmM1251 eliminates most of these retransmissions, which leads to faster transmission times – even for high resolution pictures.

According to a report released by ARC Group, more than 55 million consumers worldwide will own camera-phone handsets by the end of 2003, more than doubling from the 25 million mobile units sold in 2002. Taking into account that next generation camera phones will be enabled to shoot high quality pictures with data sizes of more than 200KByte the fmM1251 is an important tuning solution to increase user acceptance of such mobile phones.

Technical Background
The fmM1251 is a small footprint, thin-client software solution, tightly integrated into wireless devices at the chipset level. It is highly optimised and designed to scale easily across a range of product platforms – from low-featured camera phones right up to complex smart-camera phones – with very efficient use of device resources such as battery energy and memory usage.

The fmM1251 is connected to the GPRS stack and the WAP stack of a camera phone. It predicts the network behaviour by using the PFC™ algorithms and adapts the packet flow of the WAP stack packet processor. The result is a robust and high quality data connection speeding the data transmission by up to 35% and also saving up to 35% power consumption on a camera phone.