Comment Articles

Hand-to-hand fighting masks bigger issues

Rupert Goodwins AnchorDesk

Published: 13 Mar 2002 16:58 GMT

For an industry bent on reinventing itself as fast as possible, the giant CeBIT trade show in Hannover remains a staunch indicator of how much remains the same. Take mobile phones: this year's hot topic is whether Microsoft will manage to head Symbian off at the pass and establish a monopoly in the mobile market to match that on the desktop. Last year's hot topic? The same. And the year before that? Guess.

What's different this year is the number of phone-based announcements and demonstrations that put flesh on the bones of speculation. There are Symbian phones -- Sony Ericsson, Nokia -- and there are Microsoft Smartphones -- Sendo, HP. There are picture phones from Sharp. And lots of them, like the phone from Siemens, run Java.

At the moment, it's a stand-off. Nokia alone sells 40 percent of the world's mobile phones, so between it, Ericsson and Motorola there's not much space for Microsoft to move into on the existing phone market as it is currently structured. But Microsoft has a huge presence in the developer community, with uncounted thousands of programmers already familiar with its programming tools and way of working. It's also muscled in with the service providers, running deals with Orange, Vodafone, T-Mobile in Germany and Telefonica in Spain for branded versions of the Windows Smartphone 2002.

Against that, Nokia is boosting the fortunes of Symbian by partnering with Texas Instruments, selecting TI's Open Multimedia Applications Platform (OMAP) for a reference design. This, says Nokia, means that designers can pick a low-cost, proven way to get to market using TI's chips and Symbian's OS. TI doesn't mind too much if you don't, however -- it's also done a similar deal with Intel and, yes, Microsoft for much the same thing.