Mobile Solutions CI

Microsoft KIN (Pink)--Now the OS players want their own UI layer

Microsoft rolled out their new social networking phones which will be called the Kin phones. The concept looked nicely executed with sms, email, social networks, photoshare, blogging, etc all rolled into a small UI on a qwerty keyboard device with a web-based client for management, backup, and retrieval. As an added bonus we don't have to see any more breathless "reveals" of the Pink project.

I struggle to see how this will be much of a hit though. It's essentially a souped up feature phone in a really strange form factor. Pink turns out to be INQ (remember the FaceBook phone?) with Ovi Share as web backup.

While the product looked nice I was surprised that platform fragmentation didn't get addressed even tangentially. There is no intention for 3rd party apps on the KIN devices but it does bring many dependencies to carriers and other partners. This is an OS overlay on the new Windows Mobile so before WM7 is  in market it is fragmenting like Android has. Given the lack of backward compatibility to WM 6x this is banking an awful lot on silverlight and web service level platforms. Are we going to be seeing every OEM skinning each OS (Blur, Sense, etc) as well as the OS providers doing it? Will Google start offering uniquely branded, skinned, and featured Android subsets? How is it a win for partners to have Microsoft splinter WM even further? How many different service infrastructures are service providers going to support?

In many ways I'd say this looked like Motoblur with a Dashwire integration. Great concept for 2 years ago, still relevant last year, questionable launching in the same window as iPhone 4. My skepticism comes from wondering how Microsoft expects their partners and ecosystem to be excited about offloading contacts, content, and backup (backup! after the Danger debacle) to Microsoft with no value add provided within the application, service, or network partners. 

Microsoft better plan on marketing and selling the crap out of these things if they hope to get and keep any kind of traction. 

Do we have a smart phone yet?

Interesting post over on Markaholic about how to define a smart phone.

The key point: "a  smart phone is a mobile phone that  has “intelligent and automatic systems for controlling the operations of the device”.  

It's interesting to think about how poor even the best devices are at clearing this hurdle. But is a phone smart only if it "knows" or controls device-side information? You could have a phone which intelligently interacts with the user's state, time and presence information with contacts, location, etc. and have all of that occur on the control plane or in the cloud. And it would seem pretty smart.

The larger point is a good one and speaks to the industry's love of piling on features rather than improving the experience of the consumer. A phone which was smarter about reacting (never mind predicting) to me would be a welcome goal.

Microsoft rolls out WM 6.5

Microsoft had their big open house yesterday to roll out Windows Mobile 6.5. There were no big surprises so if you've been following mobile news at all over the past year or two you got just what you were expecting.

There is a decent roundup here at CNET. It focuses on the remote wipe and app store. It tells you something that the overall usability and the flow between applications and user scenarios is getting very little coverage.

Microsoft itself emphasized "operator choice" in promoting the dozens of handset form factors that will be available. That is a useless drum to bang--operators are not your press audience and they are the only ones who care about operator choice. 

Developers here that and think "great, further fragmentation and I can be sure I have to tailor an app to multiple devices or have an addressable market that is unlikely to top 1 million". Consumers here that and think of all the feature-laden unusable phones that have been shoved over the counter for the past fifteen years.

So that is my cranky Tuesday morning summation of the incremental release that never should have been. When does WM 7 launch?

FUD alert: MSFT & Nokia aliance is not RIM challenge

Well the rumours were true and Microsoft and Nokia announced a collaboration to distribute Office mobile software on Symbian devices. Reuters quotes a Nokia executive as saying "This is giving some of our competitors -- let's spell it out, RIM -- a run for their money".

FUD alert! It is not, of course, doing anything of the kind.

1. Mobile client software is not a challenge to the device, middleware, and NOC integration offered by RIM.
2. This deal is with Microsoft's Office division and not the mobile division so it does not neccessarily signal anything further than software distribution. It is in effect a bigger version of a dataviz launch. 
3. Offering Microsoft mobile does not affect enterprise buying decisions for solutions--that happens because of role admin capabilities, security from both a process and hardware/software perspective, more basic usability criteria such as battery life, UI, device durability, etc. 
4. Slapping more client software on top of Symbian as an OS is not a recipe for better integration and access to mobile business needs. Integrating those features natively in Symbian would be, but that won't happen because the OS moves to the Symbian foundation and not Nokia.  

So this is a great distribution deal for Microsoft and a nice extra for Nokia's E-Series device line. But you'd certainly think that a company that had burned through several in-house mobile email efforts, a huge acquisition and divestiture, and several partnerships during failed efforts to offer solutions competitive to RIM would know better than to use a client software distribution deal to claim parity with a Blackberry and BES solution. Doing so just demonstrates how little someone understands the enterprise mobile market.

Continued evidence that mobile security rests on people and process, not technology

Oops! McCain Camp Sells Loaded BlackBerry - The Channel Wire - IT Channel News And Views by CRN and VARBusiness.

It's still common for people to sell Blackberry and other smartphones with all kinds of sensitive data on them:

"They should've wiped that stuff out," later adding "Given the way the campaign was run, this is not a surprise."

Julie Ask - T-Mobile Hits Market with New Services Targeted Towards Parents

Link: Julie Ask - T-Mobile Hits Market with New Services Targeted Towards Parents.

This short blog post coments on TMO's new service option for parental controls of voice and data plans. Device Management is increasingly be described as security, or parental control, or contact management, etc.

In all cases the trend is for service providers to expose management layers to end customers as a service. This will have interesting implications for both consumers and SMB.

It also highlights the increasing competition between PC-based capabilities inherent in iTunes and Unite (consumerized middleware really) and services offered by operators.

Motorola Good opening up NOC

Motorola's Good announced a managed service VPN as part of Good 6.o, it's new product release, this summer.

The current issue of Informa Groups Mobile Messaging Analyst addresses this in an article citing  Hugh Stevenson, EMEA business-development manager for Good Technology in th eMotorola Enterprise Mobility unit.

This article positions the VPN as simply a first productized offer for Motorola to use Good's NOC to launch managed services to SMB's worldwide. It's an interesting model on several points: bypasses carriers (presumably through IT channel), offers product as managed service, and changes value prop from product/application layer to service delivery (i.e. commoditizes NOC to offer as managed secure bandwidth).

It will be very interesting to see what uptake this has relative to Microsoft's play to go server-side to achieve the same things with SC MDM.

Synchronica wins distro deal with device maker for email gateway

Email gateway vendor Synchronica announced a worldwide licensing agreement with a Chinese electronics and handset manufacturer, rumored to be TCL, for Synchronica's Mobile Gateway. The push email and PIM synchronization software will provide Synchronica a revenue share of 20 percent of all revenues earned by the manufacturer for the service, with a minimum of $1.00 per handset per year.

TCL - known for producing Alcatel handsets - expects to ship about 16 million devices in 2008. The Synchronica client will also be downloadable to existing smartphones and should theoretically have a larger addressable market than the new devices.

This marks the success of emerging competitors who target markets where mobile subscribers are unlikely to have PC access and include backup/restore functionality with lightweight, standards-based messaging clients.

Synchronica is also showing that mobile application startup vendors are moving beyond operators as a channel as device manufacturers are forced to respond to RIM, Apple, and to a lesser extent Nokia and WM devices in bundling value-added services to handsets.

Summmary Article

Good announces GMM 6.0 with hosted VPN and DM

Good announced a new product version today. Good becomes a direct competitor to both white label solutions and BTF vendors with this new product announcement. here

Some additional details:

The suite will include Good Mobile Connection, Good Administration Center and Good Mobile Messaging. This will be available as BTF or has hosted/managed service for VARs and operators to offer their customers.

Product Overview

Good Mobile Connection:

Managed service VPN that enables a smartphone or mobile device to connect to any application or resource behind the corporate firewall like instant messaging, intranets and thick-client applications.

Offers persistent network-agnostic connection through the Good Network Operations Center to behind-the-firewall data and applications. Doing so lets users deploy any application leveraging standard TCP protocols over the Good Mobile Connection transport with no modifications or custom coding required.

The VPN does not require continual log-ins if a connection is lost. It automatically re-establishes the connection and starts the session again.

Lets users set restrictions on the type and location of assets that can be accessed behind firewall in addition to the device-level security features of the Good Mobility Suite.

Good Administration Center

OTA management of applications, devices, software distribution and troubleshooting, fleet reporting, security polices and data access rights from web console

Contains unspecified APIs to "enable automated management operations and integrate with other third party management portals and processes".

GMM

Customizable home screen

Client APIs which let third party applications easily interoperate

Voice activated dialing even when the device is password protected

Pricing and availability not detailed.

Motorola Good's repositioning

There have been a couple of interesting articles about Motorola Good in recent weeks. Good is being wrapped into Symbol both from the product side and in its Go-to-Market.

A few weeks ago Moto announced it was "making it (Good) available to more than 12,000 VARs through its PartnerSelect" channel program. Here is the most important part:

"Motorola's PartnerSelect VARs will now offer a family of bundled mobile computing solutions comprising Good Mobile Messaging and Good Mobile Intranet on a choice of mobile devices, such as the MC35, MC50 and MC70, devices that stem from Motorola's acquisition of Symbol Technologies in 2006. Good solutions can also be offered on Motorola's Q family of smartphones and a variety of other smartphones from Palm, HTC and Samsung. Resellers can package the bundled solutions with device activations and vertical applications."

Moto is also announcing that Good will be the front end for Symbol: "In the coming months, Good Technology plans to release more products and services that let an enterprise manage devices from the "shop floor to the corner office" using the same systems."