3GScottishUser
15th May 2005, 10:03 AM
From The Sunday Times (17/05/2005):
[...]
It is not hard to understand Microsofts ambition. Today there are about 650m PCs in the world, the overwhelming majority of them running Windows. But there will soon be three times as many mobile phones 2 billion in total.
At the moment, most of these rely on simple proprietary software. Yet as the processing power of chips and memory storage improve, mobiles will increasingly become mini- computers, capable of managing contacts and diary information, displaying documents and spreadsheets, providing access to e-mail and the internet, playing music and video in fact, doing just about everything that a grown-up PC can do.
Such smart phones have been available for two or three years, but as yet they represent only a fraction of the overall market 17.5m of the 684m handsets sold last year, according to Strategy Analytics.
This is the opportunity for Microsoft, and for Windows Mobile, the cut-down version of its operating system. Gates was in Las Vegas last week for the launch of Windows Mobile 5.0, an update touted as offering important enhancements both for consumers and for application developers.
As phones get richer software, we can make a bigger difference, said Gates. The change thats taking place really plays to our strategy. If you want more speech recognition, more productivity, its software thats going to help provide that.
Windows Mobile 5.0 will make it simpler for users to access their music, videos and photos, making it easy to share (or synchronise) such content between their PC and their phone. They can attach pictures to their contacts, perhaps as an aide-mémoire. And businessmen will be able to review and rehearse their Powerpoint presentations on their phones.
This latest version of Windows Mobile will also support high-speed 3G mobile services, and other wireless technologies such as wi-fi. Gates said: The future for us is to do with market-share growth as these new services become mainstream. Our concern is understanding what operators need, and coming out with rich new versions of the platform.
The technological advances will make mobile phones increasingly serious rivals to digital music players such as Apples iPod. Samsung has already developed a phone, the i300, with a 3-gigabyte hard drive enough, said Microsoft, to store about 1,000 songs.
We have taken leadership here, said Gates. The Samsung i300 (has) a fantastic user interface to select your tunes or playlist. It would be a better way to carry your music around. It will be a very high- volume thing.
Apple, current kingpin of the music-on-the-move business, has recognised the threat from the mobile-phone industry. The maker of the iPod is working with Motorola to incorporate its iTunes software into a mobile- phone handset. But the scheduled unveiling of this product in March had to be pulled at the last moment seemingly because of resistance from network operators, who have their own plans to sell songs over the airwaves, and at prices significantly higher than those charged by iTunes.
Gates is dismissive of Apples efforts so far to get into the mobile industry. Theyre not in the mobile area, he said. They did an announcement. We are doing more in this space than anyone.
THE growth of Windows Mobile has previously been hampered by considerable industry suspicion of Microsoft. Even mobile giants such as Nokia have been concerned that Microsofts longer-term goal is to grab as big a share of the economic pie as it managed in the PC sector.
The companys reputation as a partner was not enhanced by its legal dispute with Sendo, the British mobile-handset company that was one of the first to embrace Microsofts operating system as the basis for its own smartphone plans. The 2001 agreement quickly fell apart in an acrimonious legal dispute, with allegations of intellectual property theft and financial skulduggery aimed at undermining Sendo. Microsoft settled the dispute last September.
Nor did it help that early Microsoft-powered phones were prone to bugs, and some menu structures were poorly designed.
Many of the early problems have now been tackled. Gates said many of the advances in version 5.0 are kind of under the cover. The advances in quality and security substantial work went into these things.
Microsoft has also taken a bigger role in the core radio technology. Weve really advanced the state of the art, said Gates.
Perhaps Microsofts biggest advantage is the familiarity of working with phones that use Windows Mobile. Programs such as Word and Internet Explorer are instantly recognisable; there is little need to relearn the software.
Full Article (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,2769-1612322,00.html)
[...]
It is not hard to understand Microsofts ambition. Today there are about 650m PCs in the world, the overwhelming majority of them running Windows. But there will soon be three times as many mobile phones 2 billion in total.
At the moment, most of these rely on simple proprietary software. Yet as the processing power of chips and memory storage improve, mobiles will increasingly become mini- computers, capable of managing contacts and diary information, displaying documents and spreadsheets, providing access to e-mail and the internet, playing music and video in fact, doing just about everything that a grown-up PC can do.
Such smart phones have been available for two or three years, but as yet they represent only a fraction of the overall market 17.5m of the 684m handsets sold last year, according to Strategy Analytics.
This is the opportunity for Microsoft, and for Windows Mobile, the cut-down version of its operating system. Gates was in Las Vegas last week for the launch of Windows Mobile 5.0, an update touted as offering important enhancements both for consumers and for application developers.
As phones get richer software, we can make a bigger difference, said Gates. The change thats taking place really plays to our strategy. If you want more speech recognition, more productivity, its software thats going to help provide that.
Windows Mobile 5.0 will make it simpler for users to access their music, videos and photos, making it easy to share (or synchronise) such content between their PC and their phone. They can attach pictures to their contacts, perhaps as an aide-mémoire. And businessmen will be able to review and rehearse their Powerpoint presentations on their phones.
This latest version of Windows Mobile will also support high-speed 3G mobile services, and other wireless technologies such as wi-fi. Gates said: The future for us is to do with market-share growth as these new services become mainstream. Our concern is understanding what operators need, and coming out with rich new versions of the platform.
The technological advances will make mobile phones increasingly serious rivals to digital music players such as Apples iPod. Samsung has already developed a phone, the i300, with a 3-gigabyte hard drive enough, said Microsoft, to store about 1,000 songs.
We have taken leadership here, said Gates. The Samsung i300 (has) a fantastic user interface to select your tunes or playlist. It would be a better way to carry your music around. It will be a very high- volume thing.
Apple, current kingpin of the music-on-the-move business, has recognised the threat from the mobile-phone industry. The maker of the iPod is working with Motorola to incorporate its iTunes software into a mobile- phone handset. But the scheduled unveiling of this product in March had to be pulled at the last moment seemingly because of resistance from network operators, who have their own plans to sell songs over the airwaves, and at prices significantly higher than those charged by iTunes.
Gates is dismissive of Apples efforts so far to get into the mobile industry. Theyre not in the mobile area, he said. They did an announcement. We are doing more in this space than anyone.
THE growth of Windows Mobile has previously been hampered by considerable industry suspicion of Microsoft. Even mobile giants such as Nokia have been concerned that Microsofts longer-term goal is to grab as big a share of the economic pie as it managed in the PC sector.
The companys reputation as a partner was not enhanced by its legal dispute with Sendo, the British mobile-handset company that was one of the first to embrace Microsofts operating system as the basis for its own smartphone plans. The 2001 agreement quickly fell apart in an acrimonious legal dispute, with allegations of intellectual property theft and financial skulduggery aimed at undermining Sendo. Microsoft settled the dispute last September.
Nor did it help that early Microsoft-powered phones were prone to bugs, and some menu structures were poorly designed.
Many of the early problems have now been tackled. Gates said many of the advances in version 5.0 are kind of under the cover. The advances in quality and security substantial work went into these things.
Microsoft has also taken a bigger role in the core radio technology. Weve really advanced the state of the art, said Gates.
Perhaps Microsofts biggest advantage is the familiarity of working with phones that use Windows Mobile. Programs such as Word and Internet Explorer are instantly recognisable; there is little need to relearn the software.
Full Article (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,2769-1612322,00.html)