“Shortly after one of Microsoft’s key partners unceremoniously dumped its software for one made by Nokia, the company said it remains a player in the combination cell-phone and PDA smartphone market. In a move industry analysts called a “blow” and “stumble” into the marketplace by Microsoft, cell-phone maker Sendo scrapped plans to release a Microsoft-powered smartphone just days before it was due to launch.” Read the rest of the article at Wired.
Microsoft: Still a Smartphone Player?
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
who knows what went on behind the scenes. MS has plenty of money and ambition so don’t count them out just yet.
I wonder if this has to due with more of MEN’s (motorola, nokia, ericsson) monopolistic behavior. Remember that GPRS protocol stack is not standardized yet. That means you have to test and tweak the software so that it will communicate with base stations from different vendors. That means that as a handset provider you must interact with motorola, nokia, and ericsson. Could be that all three made it very difficult for sendo to acquire the proper information. I wouldn’t doubt that at all. They wouldn’t dare do that to a carrier, which would explain the MS orange and AT&T devices, but screwing with sendo is an entirely different matter. Why not
So another potential question is when are the Europeans going to deal with their own monopolistic beasts and will they be any more successful then we were here in the US? I doubt it.
Act one, MS loses, What will act two bring? MS is doing an excellent job of trying to divide and conquer by focusing on nokia and series 60. MS is not totally off base here. I can’t wait until Nokia tries to sync their phones with a pc or tries to let users browse the real web, which mainly runs on explorer, on smart phones. Yeah nokia and the rest of the fools in that industry think OMA will replace a need for the real web. dream on.
We are now seeing the clash of the titans. MS vs. symbian/nokia and cisco vs ericsson/nokia. This will make for fun viewing folks.
Don’t forget that Nokia has the market for cellphones now and I think for the foereseable future. MS has the desktop which has nothing to do with the wireless. Nokias will sync with a PC just as easily as they do now. No need for MS to do that. The problem here is that MS is testing new markets where there are alreary smart big fish swimming.
I think, until MS can do everithink Nokia does it cannot compete and that means it will never be a real player in this market.
my 2c
Motorola is US company.
No one of those companies (MEN) may be counted as monopolist.
Seen a lot that journalists etc think of the Nokia series 60 as an OS. It isn’t. It is a UI-kit (think window-manager) for symbian. Licensing series 60 interface from nokia means that sendo will be devising one-handed non-touch-screen symbian devices. If they want a touch screen / stylus device they’d go get a license for UIQ. Only the UI code would be different, and given the symbian application architecture (very MVCish) that ought to be very straightforward to port / maintain in parallel.
My point is that Nokia series 60 isn’t becoming the pervasive OS of the future, it is symbian that is. Cool. Very straightforward to run adapt series 60 code to UIQ or to any other UI-kit that comes along.
I think it is becoming more and more clear that Microsoft has too many irons in the fire and companies aren’t afraid of them anymore.
The term MEN came from Red Herring or another American magazine which accused them of being monopolists and backed up the American Quallcom.
The Register on the other hand ran a counter article ripping the original to shreads.
Read it, very interesting stuff.
Symbian have been in the portable device game for much longer than microsoft and it shows – it never crashes and batteries last ages, can’t say either of these for MS.
All the big Phone makers have signed up to Symbian, only one (Siemens) have signed to MS, but they have signed to both.
MS will persist but that doesn’t mean they will take over the market. Even with Sendo I doubt they would have even got 1%.
Posted from a Symbian device (Psion 5mx) via another Symbian device (Ericsson R380s)!
Guess who I support…
The register is the same source that calls qualcomm the beneficiary of corporate protectionism and goes on to praise GSM and UMTS, two of the biggest pieces of nationalist driven protectionism in the history of modern telecom and technology.
Moreover, The red herring article is accurate. Just look at the patent holders in UMTS, sony, NEC, ericsson, Nokia. UMTS is nothing but a high level beaucratic decision by Europeans and Japanese to keep US companies, and really qualcomm, out of the market. ridiculous. They whine and complain about qualcomm’s patents. Hey guess what, they don’t have to use CDMA, and they don’t even have to use qualcomm’s patents to implement CDMA.
I might also add that while i used the term liberally, the MEN article really focuses on the infrastructure market, a market that has little to do with symbian and a market where MEN are indeed behaving badly. Just go talk to anyone in that market and you’ll see it. Heck, the japanese went so far as to change their W-CDMA specification, which makes it incompatible with the euro version, to make it difficult for nokia and ericsson and compete in Japan.
The main point of that article is true. incumbents are keeping innovation out of the wireless market just like microsoft is keeping it out of the pc market. But i doubt there is a european on the planet that will admit their part of the crime.
I read in specialized PDA/Phones sites very positive review of the Orange SPV / Smartphone 2002.
And about PocketPC they have already a good market share. MS is not a newcomer in the mobile area now.
Orange one of Europes Largest cell phone compagny launched a MS equiped phone bundle at the beginning of this month.
—
http://islande.hirlimann.net
this one still does not make sense to me. Sendo claims to have dumped MS in favor of symbian because symbian let them use the source code and because it supports java. Those are great reasons to use symbian but it is a bit odd that sendo didn’t realize that until after they spend years and millions working on the MS phone and ten days before its introduction.
I guess we’ll see if it is actually the performance of the platform from the other MS phones that are out there. Economics are a different matter of course but sendo should have realized that the MS smart phone was going to be expensive a long time ago. everyone else did.
Its possible that sendo lived in denial all of this time but they have some pretty good people over there so i wouldn’t bet on that. Net, i wonder what the real story is here.
while you are right its not, it is not tied to the Symbian kernal either.
while you are right its not, it is not tied to the Symbian kernal either.
you mean the look&feel, or the actual code?
Sendo claims to have dumped MS in favor of symbian because symbian let them use the source code and because it supports java. Those are great reasons to use symbian but it is a bit odd that sendo didn’t realize that until after they spend years and millions working on the MS phone and ten days before its introduction
I’m glad someone pointed this out. This ‘smells’ to me more like a corporate power struggle than a decision made based on sound engineering principles.