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Vodafone, the European cellphone carrier, has chosen decided to limit the mobile phone operating systems they support to three and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile made the cut:
Vodafone unveiled plans on Monday to become the first mobile operator to standardise the software on its handsets, striking a deal with Microsoft and saying it will work with just two other software providers.
Vodafone said it planned to slash the number of operating systems it would develop applications for in the next five years to just three, supporting just Microsoft Windows Mobile, Symbian/S60 and Linux in the future.
With little standardisation in the mobile software world, applications such as e-mail, instant messaging and music players currently have to be written in an array of different software languages to enable them to work on different handsets.
The duplication of the software writers’ work makes developing new applications costly and time consuming for operators.
Microsoft Mobile and Embedded Devices senior vice president Pieter Knook told Reuters other operators were planning similar reductions in scale.
It would have added spice to the narrative if Vodafone had mentioned how many operating systems they currently deal with since three still seems rather large. No financial terms were revealed.
Microsoft aims to double the number of mobile phones running its Windows software this year from 6 million at the end of 2005 and to keep up this rate of growth in coming years, a Microsoft executive said.
“The number of devices operating on Windows Mobile doubled to 6 million last year,” Peter Knook, head of Microsoft’s Mobile and Embedded Devices division, told Germany’s Euro am Sonntag in an interview published on Sunday.
“We want to make 100 percent again this year and to grow further at this rate in coming years.”
Microsoft competes in the market for smartphones, which can run software applications such as email, mobile TV and games, with British software maker Symbian, owned by the world’s top handset producers including Nokia.
Besides Symbian, Research in Motion (e.g. Blackberry) will have something to say about it too.
Last November, several vendors got together to form a group called the Linux Phone Standard (LiPS) Forum to help their use of Linux on mobile phones better compete with Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and Symbian’s offerings. Apparently, that wasn’t enough because another group of vendors have gotten together with similar intent – Operators plan to stuff Microsoft, Symbian with mobile Linux:
A powerful bunch of players in the mobile phone sector announced plans to build an open Linux-based operating system for mobile devices.The group, made up of Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics, and Vodafone, said it would form an independent foundation to promote the platform. In a statement today, the group said the foundation would “leverage the benefits of community-based and proprietary development”.
There’s more from Nancy Gohring at InfoWorld on the as yet unnamed group:
The creation of a common platform might help spur growth of Linux phones, a segment that has been hampered by fragmentation, said Tony Cripps, an analyst at Ovum. The Linux handsets on the market now use unique specifications, making it difficult for developers to create applications that can work across different devices, he said.The lack of an open, common approach has also meant that Linux handsets haven’t been able to compete directly with leading mobile operating systems from Symbian or Microsoft, each of which nurtures an open application development ecosystem, he said.
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The presence of operators like Vodafone and NTT DoCoMo that order large volumes of handsets is significant. If such a large and influential operator as Vodafone adopts a Linux handsets based on this platform, then other operators are likely to adopt the same or similar phones, Cripps said.
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This will be the third mobile Linux group to launch within a year, joining the Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum and the Mobile Linux Initiative (MLI). Like the new foundation launched on Friday, the LiPS Forum aims to focus on the creation of APIs to enable interoperability of applications across Linux handsets.PalmSource Inc., France Telecom SA and Orange SA are among the leaders of LiPS. The MLI, with members that include Motorola and PalmSource, is working on unifying developments around the mobile Linux kernel.
While MLI isn’t involved in the new foundation, it is likely to work with the new organization in the future.
Three groups? I must have missed one.
Jeremy Kirk at InfoWorld:
Microsoft, which has been carving a larger slice of the mobile device OS market, is developing a new product, code-named “Crossbow,” which will incorporate features such as instant messaging, a Microsoft executive confirmed Monday.
Crossbow will have strong links with Office 2007 and Exchange 12, Microsoft’s pending new office application suite and e-mail server, said Pieter Knook, senior vice president for the mobile devices and telecoms sector. Crossbow would be the successor to Windows Mobile 5.0, released in May 2005.
Crossbow will take aim at the Symbian and BlackBerry operating systems. The OS will contain a new mobile version of Office Communicator, an Office 2007 enterprise communications application, that includes instant messaging on public and private networks, Knook said.
“As the Office [2007] PC versions of those applications improve, we’re tracking that on the Windows Mobile side,” Knook said.
Knook said it’s premature to say when Crossbow would be released, but that the company plans for an annual mobile OS release.
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Microsoft is gaining ground with Windows Mobile 5.0, but Symbian is dominant, said Nick Spencer, a research analyst with Canalys.com.Near the end of 2005, Microsoft held a 16 percent share in the worldwide mobile OS market compared to 63 percent for Symbian, 10 percent for Access Co.’s PalmSource, 7 percent for Research in Motion’s BlackBerry and 4.5 percent for others, including Linux-based ones.
On the question of dates, Bink.nu points to a Microsoft presentation that gives (apparently inadvertently) more information on Crossbow and its successor, Photon. The net:
Crossbow:
Photon:
