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Sendo Can't Get Microsoft Source; Ditches Windows
An anonymous submitter wrote: "Just when you thought the award-winning data leech Microsoft had become invincible... cellphone manufacturer Sendo, in a statement on the front page of its web site, announces the termination of its Z100 smartphone development on the Microsoft platform, licensing the rival Symbian from Nokia instead. (Further reports by ZDnet and Heise.)"
Sendo Z100 NOT TO LAUNCH
Company Statement
Sendo has terminated its Smartphone development program utilising the Microsoft Windows Powered Smartphone 2002 software.
As a result, Sendo regrets to announce that it will not be shipping the Z100 Smartphone.
It has been a very difficult decision for Sendo given its leadership position in the development of smart devices. We are disappointed that we will not be able to ship the Z100 given the high level of interest shown in the device.
Although a set back, we are pleased to announce today that we have licensed the Series 60 platform from Nokia for our smartphone category. We believe this will create the opportunity for us to continue as a lead player in the development of smartphone products for 2003.
SENDO CHOOSES NOKIA'S SERIES 60 PLATFORM FOR ITS SMART PHONES
Thu Nov 7 2002
Sendo, a British mobile phone manufacturer, today announced that the company has decided to license Series 60 Platform from Nokia for its smart phone category. The Series 60 is a software platform for feature- and application rich smart phones that Nokia licenses to mobile handset manufacturers. The platform is optimised to run on top of the Symbian OS. Sendo joins as the newest member to the Series 60 licensing community with Matsushita, Samsung, Siemens and Nokia.
"Earlier this fall we reviewed our smart phone strategy. While our mission of providing customers with feature-rich and ubiquitous devices remains unaltered, seeing that the Series 60 fully embraces both our mission and the new strategy we decided to approach Nokia," said Hugh Brogan, Chief Executive Officer of Sendo Holdings Plc. "The platform utilises open standards and technologies, such as MMS and Java , jointly developed by the industry. The platform is robust, yet uniquely flexible, bringing great benefits to licensees, operators, developers and consumers."
"We welcome Sendo, a pioneer in smart phone development, to join our Series 60 community. We see that a combination of Sendo's technical expertise and growing market presence will bring significant contribution to the mobile market with Series 60 devices. Interoperable solutions that are built on open and common industry standards are proving to be the winning formula in meeting demands of business users and consumers alike," said Niklas Savander, Vice President and General Manager, Nokia Mobile Software.
Nokia licenses Series 60 Platform as a source code. The model enables licensees to contribute to the development of the platform while fully executing their individual business strategy, brand and customer requirements in fast developing and highly competitive mobile communications market. Licensees will be able to include the Series 60 into their own smart phone designs, thus speeding up the rollout of new phone models at lower costs.
The Series 60 is a comprehensive software platform for smart phones, created for mobile phone users that demand easy-to-use, one-hand operated handsets with high-quality colour screens, rich communications and enhanced applications. The Series 60 platform consists of the key telephony and personal information management applications, the browser and messaging clients, as well as a complete and modifiable user interface, all designed to run on top of the Symbian OS, an operating system for advanced, data enabled mobile phones.
I'm not sure where the "can't get source" comment in the title came from. I clicked through to the announcement, read both stories, and even translated the german text, and nothing in there said they terminated the agreement due to inability to get the source.
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
Sendo junks MS smartphone, joins Nokia camp
:-(
BTW, What happened to theregus.com? It seems to be gone.
It doesn't say anything directly about Linux.
So the editors would be blithering idiot OSS/Java fanboys.
...would have been nice, before giving Nokia full ownership of Symbian. As the article says the licensed software is optimised to run on Symbian, but it is not Symbian. From the Symbian website: "Symbian was established as a private independent company in June 1998 and is owned by Ericsson, Nokia, Matsushita (Panasonic), Motorola, Psion, Siemens and Sony Ericsson. Headquartered in the UK, it has offices in Japan, Sweden, UK and the USA."
It's not that it's command line or terminal driven (directly) as much as there is simply far less people cisco certified than MCSE certified. Simple supply and demand will raise the salaries(price) of the more rare resource.
Book description of "Programming for the Series 60 Platform and Symbian OS" here
Microsoft is trying to hook it's claws into all things digital (including phones, appliances and cars).
;)
I work in the auto industry as a sysadmin, and I can confirm that last one for y'all if you're sitting their scratching your heads. I picked up an automotive industry trade rag one day and there it was, in big letters on a yellow BMW: Microsoft Windows CE for Automotive. Had the Windows CE logo and everything. I'm not even kidding. I wish I were.
My journal has hot
Microsoft invested a lot in sendo, and for the last year or so sendo was the only mobile phone maker planning to launch a microsoft based smartphone, which was planned to be launched this month. All the microsoft smartphone OS marketing was based around the now never to be launched sendo z100. Sendo is saying like "thanks for the money" and choosing an competitor instead. Microsoft is really running out of partners in mobile phone business.
signatures pending - ansa@kos.to - (dont mail there)
How big a company is Sendo? How prominent are they in the field?
Sendo isn't really a big player in the mobile industry, but it's nice anyway to see them leaving Microsoft!
Sendo was listed as one of the first SmartPhone (what a misnomer) partners: who else joined? Have they put anything out yet?
By now, only Orange offer a "smartphone"...
The press release from Microsoft and a discussion at news.com.
One of the first things you learn in business school is that cost already expended should have no influence on your future actions.
Failure to understand this is sometime called "Throwing good money after bad".
Lots of reason not to launch springs to mind, Support cost being an obvious one. Once you sell the first unit you need to support it.
Second Economy of scale. If you can't sell enough units you will not reach the required production cost. You loose money (variable cost) on each unit you sell. Better not to sell anything at all. Lots of other reasons, so I think the people running Sendo has business acumen. It actually takes guts to do what they have done. (Maybe this is a ploy to get code and whatever they else they want. Maybe they want to be acquired by MS and act as their development arm. Who knows)
Help fight continental drift.
Yea? No shit, dude. Clarion came out with an AutoPC in 97 running a modified... uh, CE 2.0, I think. The damn thing even had a ctrl-alt-delete sequence (power-joystick-#).
It was all voice recognition and TTS. Optional integration with wireless data services and a GPS receivers. And this was in 1997. You can still get these on eBay for about $400. Regardless of the windows portion, not bad radios.
I can even use KDE instead of GNOME!
Tsshhh, whats wrong with a nice text terminal?
Apperently they make phones for companies like Virgin Moble, and brand them with the operator's own label.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2415603.stm
hell, microsoft will be in the black shortly.
4 1ME
Um, no. I hate to burst your "I bought an Xbox, so it damn well better succeed" bubble, but Microsoft is demonstrateably nowhere near having brought in $1 billion in revenue from the Xbox. Look at their last few quarterly reports. You'll see two things. First, they group Xbox revenue in with revenue from MSN subscriptions, PC games sales, and consumer software. Basically everything microsoft makes that's not Office, Windows, or a server product, and all the revenue (not profits, revenue) from MSN. Second you'll see that they bring in under $2 billion a year with all those things. There is NO WAY that Xbox accounts for half of Microsoft's non Windows/Office sales, especially since those numbers aren't significantly increased from the previous year when Xbox didn't exist. Not only that, but revenue figures don't take into account the expenditure for building each device.
Estimates I've seen tend to agree that Microsoft must sell between 10 and 20 games to break even on an Xbox sale. How many games do you have for your Xbox?
The xbox is selling very well
Again, bullshit. There's loads of market research that shows Xbox in an uphill battle for second place. http://www.instat.com/press.asp?ID=390&sku=IN0200
You need to shell out $3k for the numbers, but it's not to hard to figure it out from the abstract. If sony sold >20 million consoles in the last 12 months, 31 million consoles were sold overall, and Nintendo and Microsoft have sold roughly equal numbers of consoles, you can see that the Xbox is not selling very well compared to PS2. That means there are 40 million PS2 in people's houses, and ~5 million Xboxes out there. Also, if you head over to NPDFunworld, you'll see that for the last 6 months Xbox has had on average 1 game in the monthly top ten based on sales. That's not anything to write home about, especially when there are typically 6 PS2 games and 3 GBA games on the list.
Maybe someday there will be enough good Xbox exclusive titles out there to get more people to shell out the $200 for an Xbox, but with microsoft already planning on releasing Xbox 2 in just over 2 years, and 90% of the good xbox games being available on other platforms, Xbox sales may not be picking up anytime soon.
For those who didn't get the humour in the parent posting should visit http://www.apple.com/switch/ads/ellenfeiss.html and http://www.ellenfeiss.net/.
I thought you could just download that of the M$ homepage? Has something changed or is this a diffrent product they were after?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Because you're paying for someone who understands networking, not for someone who knows the Cisco command line.
Anyone - me included - can spend a day or so learning the Cisco shell. Whether that gets you a finely tuned network that operates to the SLA you require or a big, steaming, festering pile of dog crap depends on whether that someone understands the underlying concepts. That doesn't change with a GUI, which is why there are so many fucked-up Windows installations out there. Because people like you believe that a GUI makes an expert.
Uncredited, however, is the fact that it was generated by Evil Finder, linked to by sweetcode a couple of months ago.