Mobile mantra: open platforms

By
EE Times
(03/15/02, 05:19:32 PM EDT)

HANNOVER, Germany The mobile phone industry has reached the first crossroads of its brief life. Casting a wary eye on the PC industry model, handset makers who gathered at the CeBIT trade show here this past week nevertheless hammered home the need for an open platform on which to build interoperable phones capable of running as many hot new applications as possible. But even as vendors open up their proprietary architectures to licensing and sign on to a Nokia-led open-platform coalition, they diverge on what that architecture should be.

"A whole new race has begun for mobile handset vendors," said Mats Dahlin, Ericsson's head of the Europe, Middle East and Africa market area. The industry, he said, is making a dramatic shift "from a few complete suppliers to a chain of specialized companies, similar to the PC industry." (See related story.)

Handset companies remain divided over whether the personal computer can be a sustaining model for them. At the same time, most industry players agree they can no longer afford the risk of designing and building proprietary platforms expressly for their own handsets. "We should promote an open-platform architecture, more to enable others and ourselves," said Peter Zapf, president of Siemens Mobile Phone.

Open mystery

Exactly what that open architecture will look like, however, is still a mystery. Although Java-based phones were prevalent among a slew of introductions at CeBIT, no handset vendor sees Java as the be-all and end-all for interoperability.

Siemens is pitching its M50 as the company's first mass-market Java phone, saying the handset can deliver "unparalleled freedom and flexibility over applications, downloads and games." It is based on K-Java, a small version of Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Java programming language for mobile devices. But asked about technology building blocks required for an open-platform architecture, Siemens' Zapf said, "We see K-Java as a good, simple starting point but we know that Java [alone] is not enough."

Java is also a component of the Open Mobile Architecture (OMA), the industrywide open-platform initiative spearheaded by Nokia, the world's largest handset vendor. Matti Alahuhta, president of Nokia Mobile Phones, called "interoperability enabling any service on any terminal over any network" as "the agenda for OMA." Today, 33 companies with the notable exception of Microsoft Corp. have endorsed OMA. "We at Sony Ericsson fully support the OMA," Jan Wareby, corporate executive vice president at Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications, told EE Times. "We want to have a clear understanding and agreement on well-defined interfaces for OMA to avoid proprietary systems."

To date, OMA members have "identified XHTML, Java and Multimedia Message Service as the first critical enablers for OMA," said Pertti Korhonen, senior vice president of Nokia. Ultimately, OMA's compatibility documents are expected to specify technical elements such as screen sizes, user interfaces, attachments, file formats and different input mechanisms. No company at this point is willing to say when the spec will be completed. "We expect it to take a while," said Siemens' Zapf.

Efforts to determine the level of detail and depth needed for OMA appear to be a work in progress. Sony Ericsson's Wareby, although in favor of OMA, bluntly pointed out that Nokia has much to gain from the initiative. "They are trying to make a business out of it."

Crown jewels for sale

Rather than keeping their ASICs, homegrown operating systems and software stacks to themselves as corporate crown jewels, leading handset vendors have already switched their business model to open their architectures and make them available for licensing.

Nokia today is offering competing handset vendors the source code for its internally grown smart-phone software stack, called Series 60, based on Symbian's operating system and Texas Instruments Inc.'s Open Multimedia Application Platform. No licensees have yet been announced, but Japanese consumer electronics giant Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. is reportedly studying Nokia's Series 60 for its own 2.5- and third-generation (3G) handsets. Nokia hopes to align its Series 60 with the OMA spec, whenever that emerges.

Meanwhile, Ericsson has been licensing the core technology for its Ericsson Mobile Platform (EMS) to a number of companies. Sony Ericsson, the London-based joint venture that combines the parents' mobile phone operations, was the obvious first licensee, but South Korea's Samsung and LG Electronics have also signed up for EMS. The agreement with LG Electronics allows LG to use EMS for handsets to be sold in the Chinese market.

While Nokia's Series 60 is geared toward more-advanced 2.5G and 3G implementations based on the Symbian operating system, Ericsson's EMS offers a host of core technologies ranging from internally developed chip sets and homegrown operating systems to all of the company's communication protocol stacks everything needed to build a complete phone.

Sony Ericsson, however, is internally developing its own software application layers for its handsets. "We do it ourselves," said Wareby, for two good reasons: The company can afford it, and it believes that's where the differentiation lies.

Wareby said that the mobile industry is fast becoming as competitive as the PC and consumer electronics industries are today. To compete in such an environment, "You need a lean organization and you need to be focused on key things like product designs, applications and software components," he said.

Confidence to compete

The partnership with Sony is giving Ericsson confidence in the joint venture's ability to compete in a cutthroat market where, as in PCs, almost every company is building more or less similar boxes. "Look at how successful Sony has been with their Vaio [computer] products," said Wareby. At a time when most PC manufacturers are using the same Microsoft operating system and Intel CPU, "With the right design and features, Sony showed that there is a way to take a share of the market and make money," he said.

Both Nokia and Sony Ericsson have fiercely defended the viability of Symbian's operating system for their high-end phones. "We feel that Symbian has come a long way," said Sony Ericsson's Wareby. "We've put a lot of effort into adding mobility and telephony functions into that OS."

Wareby, however, stopped short of endorsing the Symbian OS for the company's mobile phones across the board. "Symbian can be still an overkill for some models," he said.

Asked about the use of alternatives such as Microsoft's Windows CE or Palm Computing's Palm OS for high-end business application phones, Nokia's Alahuhta made it clear that Symbian is Nokia's choice. "We are not just targeting the business market with our mobile phones," he said. "Our products are designed to go into every consumer's pocket."

Even though a host of new multimedia features including polyphonic MIDI ring tones, animated screen savers, color displays, tiny cameras and even MP3 players have begun to migrate into mobile phones, the biggest challenge ahead of handset vendors may be the old, familiar questions: How much will it cost, and will consumers want it badly enough to pay?

Sony Ericsson's Wareby said educating the consumer could be tough. "We'd have to convince them that this little device is going to offer so much more than just talk," he said.