Nokia has announced an industry initiative to create an open
architecture for mobile services and said it would license its key
software for mobile phones.
Non-proprietary technology has made the Net great and it will do
the same for the mobile Internet, said Nokia president and chief
executive Jorma Ollila.
"We are supporting an open, non-fragmented architecture. This is
how we stimulate innovation and competition," Ollila said in a
keynote speech at Comdex on 12 November.
The "open mobile architecture" initiative joins together all major
handset manufacturers and the world's largest mobile phone
operators, including Motorola, Siemens, Sony Ericsson Mobile
Communications, NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone.
"We wanted to avoid a situation where there would have been perhaps
half a dozen different standards in the world," Ollila said. "There
would be very small volumes, so you wouldn't have the economies of
scale and you wouldn't have the global availability [of services]
consumers want."
The supporting companies will develop software that is compliant
with specifications of bodies such as the WAP Forum and the Third
Generation Partnership Project (3GPP).
The software would power services offered on GSM networks with a
GPRS add-on, and on forthcoming 3G networks.
A single platform will benefit users and provide an opportunity for
developers of mobile applications, Ollila said.
Mobile phone users are willing to pay for calls and text messages,
so they will also pay for the mobile Internet, Ollila said, arguing
that mobile Internet services will do what fixed services have
failed to do: bring in money.
"The fixed line Internet offers only a few business models that
generate substantial profits. Mobile can make the Internet a more
valid proposition, since the almost one billion users are used to
paying for what they want," he said.
Nokia, the world's largest mobile phone handset vendor with a
market share of about 35%, will license terminal client components
and its smartphone software platform to its rivals.
Earlier on 12 November, Sony announced that it would work with
Nokia to develop an open middleware platform for mobile phones and
consumer devices to work together. The resulting standard would
cover areas such as user interfaces, content downloads, multimedia
messages, digital rights management and compatibility when
implementing IPv6.
Companies involved in the open mobile architecture initiative
include AT&T Wireless Group, MMO2, NTT DoCoMo, Telefonica
Moviles, Vodafone, Fujitsu, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Motorola, NEC,
Nokia, Samsung, Sharp, Siemens, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Symbian.