Le mar 20/04/2004 à 10:30, ben@ben-evans.com a écrit :
> The FT is reporting that the (part Vodafone and Orange-owned) Savaje is at
> the centre of a plan for a consortium of ALL Europe's major operators to
> have common OS. Savaje make a java-based phone OS that can have the entire
> UI and some functionality replaced OTA or by changing the SIM.
An other view here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/20/carriers_phone_alliance/
I don't quite agree with your reading of the article. It seems to me
that operators are effectively trying to 'unionize' against Nokia and
such, but that Savaje is only 'considered'.
Savaje is an interesting company, but they have been in stealth mode for
a long while (more than year). This may be good news or bad news. They
are so silent that they had to fill their 'news' section with 'industry
news' (i.e. fluff) in order not to look like a dead company with nothing
to say. Their idea of putting the whole J2SE stack in a keitai is very
interesting, but unless I'm mistaken, that's going to require
Microsoft-sized mobile phones (16MB RAM/16 MB, ARM 200MHz) just to run
the OS. Of course, I would trade my N-Gage for a Savage-powered phone
anyday, but I don't think that this is going to happen any time soon.
> http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1079420444817
>
> The idea is that VOD, Orange, T-Mobile, TIM and TEM (and others) gang up
> on the vendors and get them to install this common platform. After that,
> consumers won't argue about whether Nokia or Samsung have a better
> interface, but Vodafone or mmO2.
That's clearly any operator wet dream. Think about the consumer loyalty
and the ARPU boost! It is especially attractive since some operators
pulled it off (like DoCoMo). Wet dreams don't always come true.
> This does rather answer the question as to why no operators have bought
> stakes in Symbian - it's starting to look like an irrelevance. Regardless
> of whether this particular venture suceeds, does anyone think the market
> for Symbian/MS Smartphone combined will be any bigger than the PDA market?
> How many consumers actually care whether their phone OS is 'open'?
According to the last Canalys study (as reported here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/20/euro_q1_pda_sales/), in the EMEA
market, the smartphone market (i.e. Nokia Series 60) is twice as big as
the PDA market.
Now, the real question is: do European/American consumers want phones or smartphones ?
Cause this whole debate is moot unless people actually want to do other stuff with their phone than calling and texting.
Regards,
David
Received on Tue Apr 20 22:47:25 2004