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October 31 iPhone - For Business E-mail?Last June Apple launched its iPhone, one of the most successful mobile devices. iPhone is combination of a cell phone, a media player, and a web browser and with a first to-market a multi-touch user interface. Apple has already sold over 2 million of these phone in US alone. With success like this, Apple was able to successfully put to rest an old of "one device or multiple devices, best of breed, for individual function". Sony tried it with it's walkman phone, but did not get much traction. Now we see a number of phone vendors trying to compete with Apple.
Now when Apple launched iPhone, it was pretty clear that it was going to be a consumer device and business users or professionals are not the target. I think, I read it as part of the announcement. What is Apple thinking now?
Look at their latest iPhone campaign, the one about the airline pilot and the one about Ken, the guys producing a play "My first time" how by using the iPhone he is a better business man.
 I bet, they are starting targeting the business users. This is one of the Apple's trick that Apple uses very successfully. "Keep the expectations low and over deliver." It has worked for Apple many time successfully. Synchronica announced a free trail to get push e-mail on your iPhone for up to 60 days. With this service users can get their business Microsoft Exchange e-mail on their iPhone. Sweet.... October 29 My Music in the CloudLast week AT&T announced it will make the Napster Inc’s extensive music catalogue available for download starting next month. According to the announcement a single song will cost $1.99 or $7.49 any five songs per month. With this announcement AT&T hopes to better compete with Verizon’s Vcast (2 million song catalogue) and Sprint Nextel. It is expected that this new offering will not work with all the AT&T mobile devices, for example if Apple’s iPhone will be support this service. iPhone is uses Apple’s own iTunes. Note that iTunes does not allow iPhones to directly download the music to the phone. It requires the phone to be connected to the PC, where the music is download from iTunes whereas, all the services mentioned above allow direct download to the phone and also allows to download a second copy to the PC. These are a new breed of services on the phones as they get more powerful and have larger on-board storage capacity. However, there are still a few unresolved issues; music copyrights, limited catalogue, user interface complexity, and bandwidth. I expect that will fix it self sooner than later (note, I did not say sooner that we think). Expect to see more of the personal media showing up on a mobile device near you. October 27 Better Management for Windows Mobile DevicesMicrosoft CEO Steve Ballmer opened CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment show on 23rd of October and announced the company’s new mobile device management platform, Microsoft System Center for Mobile Device Manager (MDM) 2008. MDM allows enterprises to manage Windows Mobile devices and roll out applications to the phones. The system will also allow employees to access company data across the corporate firewalls. The vision is to enable IT to easily and safely manage Windows Mobile phones like other corporate systems such as laptops, desktops and servers. MDM will be available in mid 2008.
This is a significant step to securing the corporate environment and including the mobile devices as managed assets. With MDM, IT managers will be able to provision the devices over-the-air, apply updates and in case to loss or theft, lock down or wipe the devices. The mobile phone users will be able to access the corporate networks through virtual private network (VPN). See details features at Microsoft.com.
Today there are approximately 140 different smart phones that run on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system. Last fiscal year Microsoft sold about 11 million Windows Mobile Devices, with the forecast to sell 20 million this fiscal year, which will end in June 2008. Other companies are also looking at solving the same problem. Last month Hewlett-Packard announced their Enterprise Mobility Suite, to manage mobile devices. Hewlett-Packard closed the acquisition of Bitphone, a Mobile Device Management company, last February. Research In Motion, with its BlackBerry Enterprise Service provides the similar services for its BlackBerry Devices. Motorola also announced last June Good Mobile Messaging 5 for remote management of devices. There are smaller companies like Synchronica and Perlogo etc. that are looking at solving the same problems. There is a shortcoming with Microsoft’s new MDM, it supports only Windows Mobile Devices and companies do not standardize on one type of mobile devices. In majority of the cases, the user selects devices of their choice. However, Microsoft executives left the door open for possibility of managing non-Windows Mobile devices in future. October 16 Open Phone OSOn October 15, Motorola announced agreement to acquire 50% stake in UI Holding BV, currently wholly owned by Sony Ericsson. UI holding BV is the parent company of UIQ Technology AB. Under the agreement, both Motorola and Sony Ericsson will work together to to develop the UIQ open interface platform. Sony had acquired UIQ earlier this year from Symbian LTD. RAZR handsets was a great success for Motorola for a ground breaking phone design. But some estimates RAZR sold over 50 million units. However, it is no secret that the user interface was simply horrible. With this new partnership announced, the expectation is the Motorola will push the open platform model phone and expect to gain enhancements in its user interface. Possibly to better compete with iPhone, the new standard in mobile device user interface.
UIQ Technology licenses the UIQ open user interface and development platform to mobile phone vendors around the world. This platform is based on Symbian and is already used by many Sony Ericsson phone, but has not been adopted by major phone vendors like Nokia, Symbian or Microsoft. UIQ launched the first touch-screen uder interface for phones in 2002, a little known fact, perhaps it was too far ahead of its time.
Motorola and Sony Ericsson are communicating their commitment to further advancing UIQ as a strong, independent cross-vendor user interface for smart phones and media-centric phones. They also agreed that UIQ will be vendor and chipset independent. Both the company said they will increase their corporation and support for the UIQ developer program as well.
"This is an important transaction that demonstrates the increasing importance of open operating systems for all handset vendors. By working together in a strong, mutually beneficial partnership, hand-set vendors can reduce development costs and help operators launch more consistent services with greater efficiency," remarked Miles Flint, President of Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications.
Is it possibly that this is a leading indicator for Mobile OS market consolidation. But certainly a positive, at least we will see some improvement in Motorola’s mobile User Interface. We will keep our eyes and ears open for the three finalists.
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