Mobile access for the masses

If industry experts are right, 12.5 percent of the 160 million mobile phones that will ship this year will be so-called smart phones. The rest will be inexpensive, albeit data-capable, cell phones costing less than $100 with the carrier subsidy.

I’m sure the carriers, with underutilized data services and high-speed wireless networks, would prefer that140 million users, rather than 20 million, were downloading data. I don’t think the device manufacturers would object either. Why would they want to pay additional fees to Microsoft, Palm, or Symbian for an operating system when they already have their own homegrown OS?

But the trick is making mass-market cell phones available for sophisticated data services.

Necessity is the mother of invention, so as soon as telecom vendors hear the “ka-ching!” of that big mass-market cash register in the sky, solutions are sure to be on the way. In fact, some are already here. 

Johnson Controls, a tier-one automotive supplier with more than $17 billion in sales, is not averse to saving money. Using technology from MobileWebSurf, it is able to deploy its entire Back2Basics b-to-b portal for its suppliers on any cell phone with a browser without having to create a so-called alternate universe for mobile access on the backend or requiring customers to spend hundreds of dollars on expensive mobile devices to access the data on the front end.

MobileWebSurf Intelligent Transformer resides either with the carrier or behind the corporate firewall. Basically, it uses artificial intelligence and semantic analysis to identify what the limitations of the client device are and then transforms the content appropriately into an SMS message, text, voice, or any other mode.

Another leading-edge company that is helping to deliver sophisticated business data to inexpensive cell phones is OpenWave Systems, in Redwood City, Calif.

OpenWave’s Brian Dally, director of product marketing, explains why the need for high-priced smart phones — or perhaps even PDAs– will be greatly reduced.

Thanks to the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), a consortium of most of the players in the wireless industry, a de facto standard has been created around presentation and protocols in the markup languages. One layer down from there is the rendering platform that speaks to applications and to the handset’s proprietary system software. OpenWave’s Version 7 middleware framework resides there.

The middleware talks to apps above it and the system software below, thus obviating one of the major problems in getting good applications to market: developer reluctance to write and rewrite apps for hundreds of models of cell phones, each with its own system hardware and software. Using the OMA standards and the OpenWave middleware should greatly reduce the cost of development time by ISVs as well as in-house developers.

To be fair, developers don’t need Microsoft, Palm, or Symbian. But these companies all have lower-priced OS offerings for less feature-rich devices. Frankly, the goal of the carriers and handset manufacturers is to eliminate the need for any significant operating system. And that’s not my opinion, but that of industry insider Bill Nguyen, president and CEO of Seven, in Redwood City.

“On a handset, an OS is an unnecessary burden,” Nguyen says.

Nguyen sees three hurdles: the shortage of the mature 3G networks, the need to reconcile applications with battery life, and the lack of competitive pricing for data.

But with 140 million customers waiting in the wings, I think the job will get done.