HTC and O2 split over XDA future
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Carrier seeking new suppliers for smart-phone line UK carrier O2 this week confirmed it is looking for new handset maker partners to push its XDA smart phone family forward following a parting of the ways with its original XDA supplier, HTC. Long-time HTC customer i-mate may also be for the chop, if comments from the manufacturer are to be taken at face value.â¦
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2007 could be called the year of the mobile operating system.Since Microsoft entered the scene around five years ago, the smartphone operating system industry has been fairly stable. Symbian, Linux, Research in Motion, and Windows Mobile make up the bulk of smartphone software, each to varying degrees of success in different regions.But in 2007,&#160;Apple introduced the iPhone, which runs its own brand of software, and Google announced that next year its&#160;Android mobile operating system platform&#160;will come out.The entrance of two new operating systems from well-known brands shakes up the plans of some mobile operators, creates some headaches for end-users, presents bigger challenges for application developers, and indicates some fundamental changes in the mobile industry.To put the discussion in perspective, realize that smartphones make up a relatively small portion of overall mobile phone sales. In 2006, 8 percent of phones sold were smartphones, said Chris Hazelton, an analyst with IDC. That&#39;s set to grow in 2007, but will likely hit only the low double digits, he said.Why all the interest then? The industry has high hopes that existing phone owners, who now make up a large part of the overall population in developed countries, will want to move on to the next generation of more capable smartphones.In addition, operators are gradually indicating that they&#39;re stepping aside from their role as gatekeeper and will allow more outside companies to offer phones and services to their customers, opening up new opportunities for software, hardware, and Web services companies.Verizon and AT&amp;T have recently made bold statements indicating that they&#39;re opening up their networks to more devices. While end-users might have the option to use a wider variety of devices,&#160;Verizon&#39;s announcement&#160;at least comes with a catch. &quot;It&#39;s like, &#39;OK, we&#39;ll bow to what you want, but be careful what you wish for. You can bring these phones to our network, but if you have problems, don&#39;t call us&#39;,&quot; said Hazelton. Verizon hasn&#39;t promised technical support for handsets that run on its network as part of its new open program.Still, at the very least mobile customers in general will soon be able to add the iPhone and new Android phones to the list of handsets they can choose from. That&#39;s good and bad for phone customers. &quot;End-users will probably need to do a bunch more homework,&quot; said Scott Horn, general manager of Microsoft&#39;s mobile communications business. That&#39;s because they&#39;ll need to figure out if the new software can support the features and services they want.At the same time that operators are opening up to new handsets, they&#39;re also beginning to ease restrictions on which online services customers can use. The trend started in Europe, where operators such as Vodafone have said that the bulk of their online data revenue came from services offered by third parties outside of its portal. Operators also learned how difficult it is to build a portal of desirable services. &quot;It&#39;s an incredibly resource intensive and expensive undertaking,&quot; Horn said. The shift away from the walled garden is just starting in the United States, he said.Allowing easier access to Web services is relevant to the software on the phones. Microsoft says that some handset makers and operators are interested in Windows Mobile because of its support of popular Microsoft services&#160;such as&#160;Live IM and Hotmail for mobile users. Google has a whole host of services that it targets at mobile users, from which it hopes to earn advertising dollars. And Apple has cleverly linked the use of the iPhone and its software with iTunes, where customers can buy content.All of these changes represent a major challenge for many operators. Some operators have in the last year or so said they want to support just a couple of operating systems as a way to cut costs related to support and training, Hazelton said. &quot;I think carriers are kind of backing down on the demand that there be fewer platforms,&quot; he said, as a result of the new software hitting the market.The additional operating systems might also pose a problem for application developers. &quot;It will be hard for application developers to pick,&quot; Hazelton said. Developers don&#39;t always focus on just one platform, but there will be so many operating systems in the mobile space that it will be difficult for them to choose which will be the most popular. For now in the United States, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile have the largest developer base and that should continue in the foreseeable future, he said.But the new operating systems should also serve to grow the number of developers, Horn said. Developers will continue to have to make bets about which platform will pay off. &quot;That&#39;s always been the case. Developers say, &#39;Where&#39;s the biggest market for my talents and which market has the lowest cost to enter?&#39; In many ways, it&#39;s an economically driven decision for developers,&quot; Horn said.The experts agree that the new operating systems don&#39;t pose a threat to any particular existing platform provider. &quot;The more entrants in the near term means faster growth in the category, driving us all up collectively,&quot; Horn said. &quot;There will be big players and there will be niche players, we&#39;ll see different business models.&quot;Hazelton agreed. &quot;There&#39;s more a benefit than a threat because it serves to broaden awareness of smartphones,&quot; he said.
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InfoWorld - Taiwan&#39;s High Tech Computer (HTC), the world&#39;s largest developer of smartphones that use Microsoft software, plans to launch more than&#160;10 mobile phones and PDAs (personal digital assistants) armed with&#160;Qualcomm chips&#160;by the end of this year, the companies said Wednesday.
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O2 and Vodafone to be booted off frequencies UK regulator Ofcom has opened a consultation on the future of the 900MHz band, currently allocated to Vodafone and O2 for their 2G services, and has suggested that a technology-neutral auction might be in order for 2009.â¦
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HTC reports it sold last year 2 million of the Microsoft-based smartphones developed to compete with iPhone.
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Credit cards at the ready... HTCâs long-awaited Shift UMPC is set to arrive in the UK later this month and, rumour has it, youâll also be able to buy it from Orange.â¦
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InfoWorld - Mobile developers around the world are in an uproar over a change Vodafone has made in the U.K. that dramatically decreases the quality of their products and that they fear could prevent new and innovative mobile services from reaching the market.
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Do mobile application developers need to band together to tackle the tough issues facing them? Attendees at Sun's Java Mobile &amp; Embedded Developer Days Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Thursday afternoon will briefly discuss this issue.The idea is that developers must deal with issues such as fragmentation in features, behavior, security policies, and deployment policies and could form an alliance providing a single voice, said Terrence Barr, Sun technical evangelist for the mobile and embedded developer community."We call it the mobile developer alliance and it's essentially a developer activism group," Barr said on Wednesday evening. "It's just a grassroots thing. We haven't thought about it too much. The idea is to bring developers together to give them a common voice and try and work on some of the fragmentation and issues that the industry has."The mobile developer alliance is envisioned as an industrywide effort and not Java-specific. Developers, Barr said, have not had a consistent, uniform voice in facing issues.Among the problems developers face is having to slightly rework applications for each of the many phones, Barr said. Every phone, he said "has certain quirks that you have to deal with, and if you're trying to cover 80, 90 percent of the installed base out there it becomes very painful because you're literally producing hundreds of slightly different versions of the same application," he said.The alliance could serve as sort of a citizens' voice, but the exact mode of operation is still up for discussion, Barr said. Agreement on high-priority issues that developers want to make progress on would be a main focus, as well as trying to establish relationships with players such as carriers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs)."It's not necessarily [about] battling your enemies but it's about getting everybody on the same page," said Barr. No single player can address them, he said."At the end of the day, [developers] are the ones who have to make all this stuff work," he said.OEMs care about the platform and carriers care about the networks, said Barr. "The developer has to bring all these pieces together and that's why it's so painful," he said.Sun officials Wednesday also talked about Java ME (Micro Edition) development tools, including plans for a Java ME development toolkit with a consolidated environment for both the CDC (Connected Device Configuration) framework and CLDC (Connected Limited Device Configuration) technology.Also highlighted were enhancements planned for the Sun Java Wireless Toolkit for CDLC. Planned features include an application testing framework and support for Java Specification Request (JSR) 256 - Mobile Sensor API Submission to the JCP (Java Community Process) and JSR 280 - XML API for Java ME.The application testing framework is intended to automate manual testing. It will support refined testing scenarios in an emulated environment as well as improvements for testing of applications for users with visual, motor, or dexterity impairments.JSR 256 offers a unified way of managing sensors connected to mobile devices and easy access to sensor data. JSR 280 is designed to provide a general-purpose XML API for next-generation mobile devices.
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A lot more than bubbles at stake A long-running dispute between mobile phone networks O2 and 3 has been referred to the European Court of Justice for clarification. The dispute centres on a series of 3 adverts which O2 says infringed its trade marks.â¦
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HTC will beat iPhone to the punch in Germany as that country's three largest cellular operators say they expect to start selling the Touch device by the end of June.
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Blog: HTC Corp., announces the HTC Touch. The Windows Mobile smart phone offers a touchscreen interface and could be a potential iPhone rival.
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Operators and manufacturers to collaborate on next-gen mobile phone platform.
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US regulator spills beans Mobile phone network O2 is preparing what appears to be a mid-range Windows Mobile 5.0-based PDA phone, made not by its new XDA partner, Asus, but by Quanta.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - High Tech Computer Corp. (HTC), the largest maker of handsets that use Microsoft software, has launched four new smart phones including one that'sÂ designed to rival the BlackBerry. The HTC S620, formerly code-named Excalibur, is a slender 12.8 millimeters (mm) thick and weighs 130g. It's designed to promote the push e-mail function of Microsoft's Windows Mobile 5.0 software and to compete with Research In Motion's popular BlackBerry device. The phone has a navigation bar below the screen which provides easy access to Outlook Mobile, Word Mobile, Powerpoint Mobile and a PDF viewer. It has a 2.4-inch color screen, a full QWERTY keypad and a host of wireless functions, including quad-band GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) and EDGE (Enhanced Data GSM Environment), WLAN (wireless-LAN) and Bluetooth. The S620 is due to be offered by phone operators throughout Europe in October, when prices will be announced. Some models will be customized for certain network operators. The other phones also run Windows Mobile 5.0, and all four of them come with a mobile version of Microsoft Office, which includes most of the Office applications except for Excel. All of the phones are being offered initially in Europe, with the U.S. and possibly Asia to follow. The HTC P3300 is a smart phone that combines the functions of a PDA (personal digital assistant) with a GPS (global positioning system) device. It marks the start of a new partnership for HTC, which teamed up with TomTom International BV, an Amsterdam-based maker of personal navigation products. The P3300 comes with TomTom's Navigator 6 software and a 2.8-inch color screen to view a set of preinstalled maps for Western Europe. The handset runs Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 and other Microsoft applications. HTC and TomTom will probably work together on other devices in the future, they said. For users who want a 3G smart phone with high-speed Internet connectivity, HTC developed the P3600. The handset, which also uses Windows Mobile 5.0, features e-mail, calendar and word processing software. It also has a 2.0 megapixel camera and comes ready to run on HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) networks. It's due to be available in Europe from September. The last of the new handsets, the HTC S310, is a small, candy-bar style quad band mobile phone designed primarily for messaging. It also runs on Windows Mobile 5.0 and will be available throughout Europe in September. HTC has already lined up some major European mobile phone operators to sell the devices. For example, T-Mobile International plans to launch a customized version of the HTC P3300 in several European markets, HTC said.
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(InfoWorld) - Taiwan's High Tech Computer Corp. (HTC), the largest maker of mobile handsets that run the Windows Mobile OS, plans to launch a smartphone that looks like a BlackBerry, complete with a QWERTY keypad, by the end of the year. The handset, code-named Excalibur, is designed to promote theÂ push e-mailÂ function of Microsoft's Windows Mobile, and compete with the popular BlackBerry service offered by Research In Motion. The device, and otherÂ BlackBerry-like offeringsÂ entering the market, raise the stakes for RIM as it facesÂ increased competition. HTC's new handset will support a host of wireless functions, including GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication), EDGE (Enhanced Data GSM Environment), WLAN (wireless-LAN) and Bluetooth, according to a person close to the matter. HTC declined to officially comment on the device. The device will likely be launched first by mobile phone service provider O2Â in Germany, with a QWERTZ keypad for the local market instead of QWERTY. Excalibur will then be offered in other areas of Europe. Pricing information was not available. More information about the HTC Excalibur can be found at the U.S. Federal Communications CommissionÂ (FCC) Web site.
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Apple is expected to sell iPhone through O2 in the UK, Orange in France, and Deutsche Telekom in much of Europe.
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Look but don't - despite the name - touch Review Apple's iPhone: still unavailable but nonetheless casting an enormous shadow over the smart-phone business. How, rival manufacturers ask, can we possibly respond? If HTC's new flagship phone, the Windows Mobile 6-based Touch, is anything to go by, the answer is imitation, not innovation.â¦