Microsoft Enters the Cell Phone OS Market

PuZZLeR writes: "Today, Microsoft unveiled a new operating system for mobile phones (named 'Windows Powered Smartphone 2002') and plans to fully enter the wireless data devices with voice capabilities by utilizing both cellphones and PDA devices. TI already created a reference design for the Ms powered phone. While this sounds like Microsoft is going after Handspring, RIM or Danger, cellphone OS manufactures, like Nokia and OpenWave are expected to counteract to the announcements. Today, Nokia announced it will offer mobile phone makers its own development kit and OS."

Comments

Re:I can see it now...

[alex_siufy]

Actually, no. Nokia just announced their alternative to Microsoft's junk...

Why is this new?

[edwdig]

Nokia sold cellphones with GEOS on them for years. Then Microsoft threatened with Windows CE, so Nokia and a few other cell phone combines got together and wrote Symbian. Nokia's been shipping phones based off it for about two years now. SDK's have been available for a long time from Nokia's developer's site. Altho I will say, I signed up for one multiple times and never got it. Had no problems getting the SDK for their GEOS phones (even wrote an HTTP server for them). I know others have gotten them with no problems tho.

So what's the news here?

Semi-duplicate post?

[Raetsel]

Gee... if /. gets to post duplicate (but slightly different) stories, does that mean I have to repost my comments -- but slightly altered?

I refer to this comment.

I referred to better pictures of the Journada 928,

• infoSync's article [infosync.no] has a much better picture of the Jornada 928 [infosync.no] than the token thumbnail Forbes provides.

And then went on to talk about the OS on it:

• They also have an article about what has been added to WinCE [infosync.no] (guess I know why MS calls it PocketPC now...) to turn it into a mobile phone-integrated PDA. There are six (!) pages of screen shots in that one. You can also look forward to "...Mobile Information Server (MIS) 2002 Enterprise Edition, which adds Server ActiveSync..." -- here's ANOTHER pie MS wants to sell you pieces of.

  The interesting thing is that ringtones -- which phone companies want to charge you for -- aren't there. Instead, you can assign .WAV files as ring tones, and specific files for specific callers. Wonder what the motivation for that move is...?

  Still... I want one!

Oh well... if they can cut-n-paste, I guess I have to as well.

Nokia is not alone

[haggar]

First of all, OpenWave is not a cellphone OS manufacturer. OpenWave makes a whole bunch of mobile middleware solutions and an embedded microbrowser.

However, Nokia is in good company as far as cellphone OS-es go: in fact, they use and work on the same OS: which is Symbian. I hope that now the uninformed will start to see the wisdom behind Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, Psion, Siemens, Sony, Matsushita ETC. uniting on the issue ofa single cellphone OS that is Symbian OS: not to pay the MS tax. Sure, they had to pay up fronttens of millions of dollars to found Symbian (the company), but that's small potato compared to the money they would have paid Microsoft, if it got hold of the mobile market. That would have been a cut on the revenue on each sold unit! I can tell you for certain, that would have been the nightmare of any cellphone manufacturer.

On another note, I am really glad Microsoft is openly stepping on Nokia's toe. Damn that's a good feeling! Now the big bad bully just picked a decent adversary! Nokia is not only big enough, it's also nimble and potentially dangerous for Microsoft. It also has a brand recognition that rivals Microsoft's.

Re:Who cares?

[powerlinekid]

Actually this is slightly offtopic but IBM is the worlds largest software company, its just that while the software is commercial IBM's biggest customer is itself.

Re:More Microsoft "Innovation"

[CharlezManning]

What's new? They already tried with "Stinger" and only picked up some Samsung biz... and Stinger was much broader than WinCE.

WinCE is far too fat/slow/power hungry to run as a cellphone OS. This means that either you need to go with something like Intel PCA (essentially once CPU to do the phone part and another CPU to run the WinCE PDA part) or you can achieve a sigle CPU solution by using a really tight little OS to run the phone part and use WinCE to do the PDA stuff. Even Symbian phones do this and Symbian is much more efficient than Wince.

I don't think the WinCE PDAphone will win any friends through its nice UI. Start buttons just don't work nicely for phones. In Europe the Symbian phones outsell all other PDAs.

Likely though M$ will make some inroads through .NET FUD. Big mobile operations (eg. the army of Cocacola sales reps) could easily go for this kinda thing.

Also of interest is Microsoft getting in the sack with Qualcomm with their BREW phone application achitecture. Again, this could likely lock people into a proprietary Microsoft back-end. Depressing stuff....

Re:I can see it now...

[emir]

Didn't Nokia, Ericsson and Siemens (not sure about Siemens) agree 2-3 years ago to standarise on symbians epoc?

If they are still honouring this deal microsoft is going to have tough time getting their Os into phones as Nokia/Ericsson/Siemens probably have more than 80% of cell phone market, here in europe at least...