infoTECH Feature

December 14, 2009

Smartphone, Heal Thyself: Droids, OTA Updates and FOTA

The world of technology is filled with examples of the auto-hose “feature,” where devices, left to their own, do something as unfortunate as it is unexpected. They may present you with some sort of screen of death, typically blue (reports of black screens of death seem to have been premature), but they can also surprise and delight in other ways. For example, Xbox fans seem fearful of the red ring of death, a hardware feature of that platform. The famous Apple (News - Alert) Switch ad with stony Ellen Feiss provides a vivid but very real illustration of the user experience such things provide (check it out here).
 
What is rarer is when you come across a beloved piece of tech that doesn’t break itself but rather fixes itself. With a technology called FOTA, this vision has become reality for over 3.5 million users in North America this year alone.
 
What is FOTA?
 
FOTA, or Firmware Over-the-Air, is a way of updating devices like mobile phones (and stuff like OnStar units in GM cars etc.) just as you’d expect, over-the-air. In the bad old days, firmware updates required a manual reflash, with cables and specialized applications and firmware downloads and much angst. During the reflash, the loss of power or the disconnect of a cable could spell disaster and a bricked phone.
 
Starting back around 2003, InnoPath (fair disclosure, my benevolent employer) started doing commercial FOTA deployments in Japan. Although we sometimes like to joke about Japan being the Galapagos Island of cell phones, Japanese devices really are ahead of the market in many ways. Manufacturers were having trouble keeping pace with the increasing sophistication and complexity of the devices combined with time to market pressures from the operators, a particular issue in Japan as people there have trouble coping with bugs, imperfections and flaws.
 
Patching phones in the field, in a relatively transparent and unobtrusive way, helps provide both operators and device makers with an out. Now, in Japan, many, if not most, devices are updated at least once.
 
Meanwhile, Back in the States
 
FOTA adoption has been a little bit slower in the United States, but this is quickly changing. In 2009 alone, more than 3.5 million devices were updated in the field using FOTA. While the problems addressed may not be earth shattering, they do include things like excessive power consumption, PTT issues, dropped calls, audio issues, problems with the contacts database, and problems with blue tooth connections. In short, a whole bunch of little things that would slowly drive a person mad.
 
Customer satisfaction and reducing churn are just part of the goodness of FOTA. Taking a greener, more global perspective, every time bugs are patched over-the-air, a trip to a store is eliminated, saving resources and reducing pollution. Maybe not much, but repeat even a very small thing often enough and it becomes a much bigger thing.
 
Looking Forward
 
Already, Android (News - Alert) devices are being updated OTA. It started with the first Android device, the HTC G1 and now even more powerful devices such as the Motorola Droid (pictured left) are getting OTA updates. While update packages once were measured in the 100s of kilobytes, the latest and greatest smartphones are requiring update packages in the neighborhood of 10s of megabytes and they are only going to get bigger. Certainly smaller than whole system images, which are rapidly approaching a half gigabyte in size, but large enough to require new ways of looking at OTA updates and how they can be delivered in the field.
 
What’s next? Stay tuned. Smartphones are evolving quickly, a trend that is both driving and enabling advanced support technologies like FOTA. With a little luck, these technologies will help remove some of the pain of high tech gadgetry from your life as well.

Jason Lackey is marketing manager at Innopath Software.

Edited by Michael Dinan
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