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@FierceWireless: #Motorola picked for public-safety
There sure seems to be a lot of “industry love” coming out of Mobile World Congress this year, with operators and device manufacturers working together in unprecedented ways.
First, there was the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) announcement yesterday. And now, the GSMA has adopted the OneVoice initiative, an attempt by a group of operators and vendors to handle voice and SMS services delivered over LTE networks. Verizon Wireless, KDDI and China Telecom are the primary drivers, given their investments in LTE.
We’re not sure what GSMA’s adoption of OneVoice means for the other voice-over-LTE initiative, called VoLGA. But we do know what the WAC and OneVoice announcements mean for the world of mobile marketing. Operators and device manufacturers have officially drawn a line in the sand against content providers that are coming over the top of their networks to sell services. These developments also indicate an apparent desire by operators to have greater control over revenue generation on their networks.
For app developers, this can be a mixed bag. On one hand, there will be the “operator control issue.” On the other hand, fears of industry fragmentation over 4G standards may be resolved, so that they can develop voice and data apps that – in theory – could be made available to more than three billion people for years to come over 2G, 3G, and 4G networks. Ka-ching.
Speaking of mobile apps, in case you missed it, Microsoft announced Windows Mobile 7 (or “WinMo 7”) and its Phone 7 Series, which will be available this 2010 holiday season. A fair number of device manufacturers are onboard (Dell, HP, HTC, LG, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba, etc.) as well as operators (AT&T, Orange, Sprint, Telefonica, T-Mobile, Verizon, Vodafone, etc.).
The big theme coming out of the Microsoft camp was “Life Integration.” There is Xbox LIVE integration, along with other games, apps, music and video on Zune and Pandora, social media access, Bing searching (including a live search for a sushi restaurant in Barcelona; yes, they found one), and so on. Oh, did we mention Microsoft Office integration?
We’re not going to call WinMo 7 a “game changer” or anything silly like that. But, we will say that Microsoft is responding in strong fashion to iPhone and Android, and the company’s software background will be a real asset in this battle of mobile OSes.
