Stuart Corner
Sunday, 11 May 2008 18:54
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
And when he talked of emerging competitive threats, it was not the rising handset stars of the east like Samsung and LG that Kallasvuo singled out: it was: "companies such as Apple, Google and Microsoft [that] are not our traditional competitors, but...are major forces that must be reckoned with," adding: "Make no mistake: We are taking on these challenges seriously and aggressively."
He might also have added a more diffuse threat: LiMo, the Linux based open handset platform formed in January 2007 by a host of major players: Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics and Vodafone. On schedule in April, it
issued release one of its open source handset platform. Pitted against it is the Google-backed Open Handset Alliance and it Android platform.
In January Japan's giant mobile operator, NTT DoCoMo announced a partnership that included
studying the possibility of bringing Android handsets to Japan . Were that to happen, it would create a 50 million strong market for Android.
As the world becomes more mobile, Microsoft is clearly determined to extend its dominance of the enterprise desktop to the enterprise mobile device and has a distinct advantage as organisations move to expand their Windows-based IT environment to embrace mobile devices.
And this week the US second largest mobile operator, Verizon is rumoured to be about to announce that it will use new cellphones based on the LiMo Foundation 's mobile Linux operating system.
US news website Unstrung,
which broke the story quoted Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney as saying: that all operators were trying to replace "the proprietary platforms of the past with more smartphone-centric platforms both to enable higher-end capabilities but also to help software developers leverage what they do more."
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