Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

Update 20070204:

• I removed the question mark. It will stay away provided the many announced offerings become really real. Running a demo on one phone only is not what the market requires (neither users nor widget developers), even though it will work at 3GSM World Congress to attract media and create hype. It's completely open what companies will "win", and we've just seen the beginning of such companies providing MIDP-based widgets platforms.
• Talking about future offerings this early could mean that more capable companies go stealth until they actually have something that works on many phones, and then sign up operators to provide the platform and ditto applications.
• Device compatibility is a major issue. That's why I mentioned Mobile Distillery as a company that's already several steps ahead of these start-ups (via Celsius). Will they take the opportunity? Start-ups could of course use Celsius etc as a base for the widget platforms, but could they afford it without external funding?
• Adobe will surely sharpen their marketing message for Mobile Flash at the congress, so they don't get pushed out. Even though there are no widget platforms that are ready for the market yet, hype goes a long way (and calling them AJAX compatible is a good way to create hype). Also, Flash Lite is primarily for embedding, so it's a quite different thing delivery-wise.
• Mobease is another company that intends to release a platform for mobile widgets.

Many talk about providing AJAX on mobile phones, and it can argued whether anyone actually does yet, so that's why I instead talk about mobile widgets and mobile widget platforms.

The main competitor to "AJAX" solutions is no doubt Flash Lite, yet most (all?) mobile widget platforms run on top of MIDP, which is a benefit compared to Flash Lite, that's typically embedded (and hence must come with the phone).

In a way mobile widget platforms could be said to make MIDP programming simple, but that's only if the platform providers make their solutions independent of phone. Therefor e.g. Mobile Distillery with their knowledge of phone differences could potentially make a very good widget platform, provided they bother about that market.

As tends to be the case in such new fields, the business model is a bit fuzzy, but supposedly Bling already has deals with music and sports people.

mFoundry - mojax

Bling Software

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