Microsoft gets smart with dumb phones
Offloads processing and storage
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Microsoft wants folks in emerging markets using inexpensive mobile phones to social-network away their free time just like fancy smartphone users do.
The company on Monday announced plans for a light-weight mobile application platform called OneApp, aimed at developing countries where cheaper phones and pre-paid services are the norm.
Despite wildfire growth of mobile devices in such markets, it's been a tough spot for developers to crack - in part due to the prevalence of phones with low processing power and memory.
Microsoft intends to solve this particular problem with the OneApp platform, which can serve up the majority of an application's processing and storage through a cell network rather than locally. The software is debuting in the next few weeks in South Africa, where Blue Label Telecoms will ship a mobile services package powered by OneApp with about a dozen mobile apps such as the usual gang of social networking tat like Facebook, Twitter, and Windows Live Messenger as well as a mobile wallet program. Additional apps will come later focusing on areas such as healthcare.
OneApp itself takes up a scant 150 kilobytes of memory and individual programs can be as compact as 10 to 15 kilobytes, according to Microsoft. The company also describes OneApp as being able to launch "just the parts of a mobile app that a person wants to use, eliminating additional installation time and the need for a person to store all the mobile apps on the phone."
Redmond intends to start offering a OneApp software developer kit before the end of this year. Programs for OneApp can be written using common tools like JavaScript and XML. The OneApp platform itself will be launched in more countries sometime in 2010.
You can heck out Microsoft's OneApp website here. ®
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COMMENTS
"...as well as a mobile wallet program..."
A mobile wallet program hosted centrally*? What could possibly go wrong?
*And hosted centrally on an M$ platform** for added "underpants round ankles" value.
**Owned and run by those doyens of customer data security, the mobile telcos.
They don't get it, do they?
Let me see...
"El Cheapo" phones? check
Small aplicattion, wich would run on it? check
Poor country, where people buy cheap mobiles and use pre-paid due costs? check
Microsoft Solution to this mobiles? check
Network data plan, due to the huge amount of bandwith? No thanks, sir. It's out of my budget!
Fail.
Just what the world needs. Anonther single standard
This is only re-inventing what Infusio, Rapid Mobile media or Ideaworks already do. An abstraction platform that provides a lowest common denominator for phone developers. We've also go OneAPI and Bondi, plus some 'single' web enviroments.
Remember the best selling phone in the world is the Nokia 1100 series. An abstraction platform, epscially one using Java or XML as this does, is far too processor heavy to achieve what is claimed here.
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