T-Mobile exits as curse of MS smartphone strikes again

Customers succumbing to lifeboat-frenzy?

By John Lettice • Get more from this author

Posted in Mobile, 15th May 2003 15:35 GMT

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In what begins to look like what Lady Bracknell would call carelessness, Microsoft mislaid another smartphone customer today. T-Mobile International, which along with AT&T was one of Microsoft's two best shots at winning volume for its phone platform, confessed today that it wouldn't be launching its version this summer after all.

A spokesman present "on the sidelines" of a Deutsche Telekom news conference in Bonn told Reuters that the company would not be pursuing the project "for the time being." It's not entirely clear why at the moment, although Reuters suggests technical problems resulting in high failure rates may have cooled T-Mobile's enthusiasm.

Certainly, getting on top of bugs has been an ongoing struggle for Orange, which has not shipped vast numbers of its SPV implementation of the MS smartphone, but seems not to care hugely. Whose fault it doesn't work is also a critical component of the 'lawsuits at dawn' spat between Microsoft and Sendo, the refusenik we prepared earlier.

Microsoft has a number of smaller networks worldwide running or about the run with its handsets, but it's got a lot riding on AT&T now, and if anything goes wrong there it'll be difficult to categorise the whole smartphone enterprise as anything other than a disaster. ®

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