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.
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.
July 28, 2008 in Good Technology, Mobile Device Mgt, Mobile Email Vendor Roundup, Mobile industry commentary, Motorola | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)