A Zune phone not anytime Zune

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 05 September 2007 16:56

Opinion and Analysis

Rumours come and rumours go but one rumour that will never come to fruition is Microsoft attempting to emulate Apple's entry into the mobile phone space with a device based on Zune.

Microsoft has its hands full trying to make Zune fly in the portable music player space let alone the cut throat mobile phone market, where even Apple, a hardware specialist with superior design capabilities, is at full stretch trying to compete with established giants like Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and others.

Despite its forays into the hardware space - the Xbox family being its biggest - Microsoft essentially remains a software company and that's where the company's strength lays. Playing in the mobile space for Microsoft means supplying the bits and bytes that make devices like cellphones and smartphones work.

Even in the software space for mobile devices, however, Microsoft has a lot of work to do. In the smartphone space, the Windows Mobile operating system only has about 6% market share compared to Symbian which dominates with more than 70% and Linux which is approaching 15%. Given that the popular RIM Blackberry has a roughly equal market share to Microsoft, it is easy to see why rumours abound about cash rich Microsoft acquiring RIM and in so doing doubling its marketshare in one fell swoop.

Now that the Zune is on the market, however, an area of interest that Microsoft could pursue is the wireless capabilities of the device and how they relate to telephony. With VoIP and IM applications such as Windows Live Messenger and Skype starting to take the world by storm, Zune could easily become a device of choice when making a cheap voice call or sending an instant message from a wireless hotspot such as a hotel room.

The iPhone of course has similar wireless capabilities to Zune but with Apple's fanatical desire to control what applications are made available to users, we're not likely to see Skypeout calls being made on iPhones anytime soon - unless someone comes up with a hack that allows it. This could actually be a big opportunity for Microsoft to make Zune much more than just a music player if it chooses to grasp it.

As a prologue to this story, having recently returned from a business trip overseas, I found that by far the cheapest way to call home or anywhere in the world including the country I was visiting was from my laptop computer connected to a wireless hotspot using Skypeout. The roaming rates for my mobile phone were ridiculous as were the hotel phone charges. Substituting my phone's SIMM for a local prepaid SIMM was certainly cheaper but Skypeout killed everything. The only disadvantage was that I had to use my laptop to make a call. Hello Microsoft, are you listening?