Operating Platforms

Often times, we take for granted things that make our lives easier. For example, where would we be without inventor Mary Anderson? In 1903, Anderson, an Alabama belle who was on a trip to New York City, noticed that during her city tour, a motorman in her streetcar had to continually get out to wipe off the snow and ice that collected on the windshield. This prompted Anderson to sketch a device that allowed the motorman to manipulate a lever from the inside, which "activated a swinging arm that mechanically swept off the ice and snow." She received a patent for the windshield wiper in 1904.

Much like the often-overlooked importance of the windshield wiper, where would we be without the platforms that form our next-generation devices? If our industry didn't have those software developers, we might be like the poor motorman, continually trying to live with subpar wireless devices with little or no capabilities.

Several companies are the "Mary Andersons" of the wireless industry. Two in particular, Symbian and Microsoft, are making innovative applications possible through developing core software and setting up standards that wireless manufacturers can develop into sophisticated devices. The origins of the two companies, however, are a different story.

Everything to Everyone When the wireless industry hears the name Symbian, most think of handset manufacturers. That's because its history started with big-name manufacturers. Symbian was established by Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia and Psion in 1998, then Matsushita (Panasonic) joined in 1999. Symbian's mission is straightforward: To set the standard for mobile-wireless-operating systems and to enable a mass market for wireless-information devices. It plans to do this by developing core software, application frameworks, applications and development tools for devices, and to evangelize standards for the interoperation of wireless-information devices with wireless networks, content services, messaging and enterprise-wide solutions.

According to Paul Cockerton, Symbian marketing and communications head, creating a standard means that users will have access to all the applications that are developed regardless of what phones they may have.

Developing a standard also allows Symbian to license its products to many manufacturers: the top three handset manufacturers, Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia, all use Symbian's platform. With such strong ties to manufacturers and others, Symbian can help get the product to market faster.

"We work with handset manufacturers that we license the platform to (in order to) create a community of people to help credit this mass-market device happening as quickly as possible," Cockerton said.

Although Symbian wants to get next-generation devices to the market as soon as possible, the company does realize the overall basic function that wireless handsets provide.

"The easiest form of communication is voice at the moment," Cockerton said. "Voice is certainly a big driver that's going to push these types of devices out."

Cockerton added that just a voice-only phone, however, is becoming somewhat of an anachronism. Most phones can do basic management, and newer phones include browsing as well. With the variety of devices on the market, it's hard to imagine one software platform that will work for all phones. To compensate, Symbian has developed an agnostic open platform for next-generation mobile phones, called version 6.0, that incorporates all the relevant wireless standards into one.

Symbian's platform is optimized for pen- and keyboard-based communicators, as well as delivering integrated mobile-phone technology with e-mail, SMS, WAP, HTML and other messaging and browsing capabilities. Symbian provides three reference designs that use the same software and provide the same content, but are tailored to meet specific user requirements. Two are based on the communicator concept: one keyboard-based and the other a tablet communicator using a pen operation. The third is a smart-phone design.

Symbian's Generic Technology components provide services used in all the reference designs - data management, communications, graphics, multimedia, security, application engines, messaging engine, browser engines for WAP and HTML, Java run-time environment and support for data synchronization and worldwide locales. This plethora of technology offers manufacturers and carriers the option of providing mobile devices that are highly personal and varied. Two examples, the Ericsson R380, and the Nokia 9210 Communicator, have different looks, but both are based on Symbian's operating system. That individuality is exactly what Symbian is focused on.

"The point of providing this platform is to create an open platform that third-party companies can develop applications and services for," Cockerton said.

The Powerhouse When membors of the wireless industry hears the name Micro-soft, most don't think of handset manufacturers. Bill Gates and the PC-market monopoly ring a bell, but the wireless industry has, up until now, not equated wireless-information devices with Microsoft. The company is about to change that. Its long-standing mission was to put a PC on every desktop.

"In the last year or so, for the first time in the history of the company, we've actually redefined that vision," said Ed Suwanjindar, Microsoft Mobile Devices Division product manager. "We want to empower people through great software anytime, anywhere, on any device."

Of course, the bait is that even though any device means any device, Microsoft now offers a "preferred" device platform to the wireless industry.

Microsoft is set on delivering three main mobile devices to the market - a PDA, a feature phone and a smart phone.

The PDA platform, called the Pocket PC, offers wireless capability for data and voice communications. One recent example is the Pocket PC from Sagem, a French handset manufacturer. It's in a PDA form factor, but has an integrated GSM radio on board so that a Sagem user could access Internet content and also make voice calls from his device without adding any additional hardware.

The second example is a feature phone, which delivers basic Internet content and services to customers. The phone includes dual-mode microbrowser software, called Microsoft Mobile Explorer, that accesses Internet content written in WML and HTML. This platform can be found in Sony's Z5 in Europe.

About two years ago, Microsoft decided that it needed a product that would combine the phone and PDA experience. This collaboration resulted in a smart-phone platform called Stinger.

"The goal for Stinger is to be the best device for both verbal and technical communications when you're mobile with an emphasis on providing up-to-date personal-information management and also access to relevant Internet content," Suwanjindar said.

Stinger provides several key applications including Mobile Outlook so that users have real-time access to all of Outlook's information on their phones. Also, a version of the Pocket Internet Explorer Browser, a richer browser than what Micro-soft Mobile Explorer includes, will be available in the near future. It will support HTML, WML, XML and SSL for secure purchasing. This enhanced browser will be used because Microsoft thought the screen size of the Stinger phone is big enough to accommodate use of the Web in a deeper fashion than on a text-only browser. The technology also is set up to be similar to a browser on users' desktop PCs. There's a navigation button, a home button, and a back button.

However, Microsoft did pay attention to the handset's limitations. Several things that exist on the Pocket PCs aren't included with Stinger - most notably Pocket Word and Pocket Excel.

"It doesn't necessarily make the best sense (to include these on) a phone where you're going to be doing most of your onboard data input through a 9-key touchpad," Suwanjindar said.

Even though Microsoft only has been working on Stinger for the past two years, it has focused on research throughout the world to understand what people are likely to do with a phone, what features are most important to them and how exactly they would use them.

One manufacturer is listening. Samsung and VoiceStream have agreed to develop GPRS phones that incorporate the Stinger platform and Microsoft Mobile Explorer microbrowser technology. Suwanjindar thinks the deal reflects on Microsoft's expertise.

"Applications that we're putting onto the phone have a lot of hooks into the things that we're doing at a desktop level," he said.

Being Choosy So how does a manufacturer or carrier decide which platform to use? Most manufacturers have been choosing a platform on a case-by-case basis. But one point is clear: Symbian has strong relationships - Microsoft has a strong history.

According to Suwanjindar, Microsoft believes its importance to the market lies in the fact that it has significant investments in every aspect of the mobile-data value chain.

"The servers, applications and content that we're providing on the back-end for the phone, the things that you'd want to access on the phone are in areas that we've built our company on as far as delivering people data and information in a timely and efficient manner," he said.

Symbian is not threatened.

"We're very focused on providing a platform for the next generation of mobile phones," Cockerton said. "There may be niche market devices that are linked to PCs or whatever companies may produce. And that's fine. We won't get the entire market, just 75% of it."

There are several principles that will determine the wireless Internet devices of the future, according to Herschel Shosteck Associates. The company's study, Wireless Internet Devices: From Phones to the Future, reviewed the motivations, market factors and technologies that are enabling new devices. Shosteck formed several conclusions from the study:

Mobile phones have a unique opportunity to become "gateways" for other wireless-capable Internet devices. But manufacturers have to react quickly and execute correctly to avoid losing profit opportunities.

The current software-platform war between Microsoft and Symbian may be irrelevant. Both platforms may fail to achieve widespread market adoption.

Only the very largest consumer-electronics companies such as Sony, Matsushita, Philips, etc., have a realistic chance of building most of the future Internet devices.

WAP and i-mode will be forced to merge with Internet standards, possibly rendering them redundant. Despite this, they will continue in the marketplace.

Most of the added value of future Internet devices will be provided by Internet firms. As networks improve, the imperative for devices to use Internet standards will increase.

Wireless-device ventures aimed at corporate enterprises will remain niche solutions. Long-term winners will be those which enable useful services to consumer markets - but those services can't be predicted accurately, forcing device manufacturers to take risks for the short term.