TELECOMS & MOBILE
Nokia offers a plus to mobile developers
05-12-2000
by Aoidin Scully
Nokia has announced that it will make its Smart Messaging specification available to the industry without a licence fee.
Smart Messaging is a Nokia developed concept for sending and receiving ring tones, picture messages, operator logos, business cards, and calendar requests over the Short Message Service (SMS).
Nokia's Smart Messaging is a widely adopted terminal specific content delivery technology. Hundreds of millions of Nokia handsets supporting Smart Messaging are already in the market.
Many industry players, including Ericsson, are expected to implement Smart Messaging features, with analysts predicting that over 75 percent of phones will shortly adopt the standard. This will create a broad and lucrative business system, and open the road to the development of Multimedia Messaging (MMS), the first standardised service to be deployed in the third generation (3G) mobile networks.
"The success of Smart Messaging has demonstrated powerfully that there is a strong value chain and a highly profitable business model for mobile value added services, such as ring tones. Nokia wants to continue the active development and promotion of the Smart Messaging specification," said Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President, Nokia Mobile Phones.
He added that Nokia welcomed contributions to the future evolution of Smart Messaging.
The announcement comes after Openwave Systems, the combination of Phone.com and Software.com, revealed the commercial availability of WAP-certified mobile phones containing its enhanced UP.Browser microbrowser at the end of November.
The UP.Browser allows secure, billable download of entertainment-related content to handsets, and to date, fourteen of the twenty WAP Certified handsets contain Openwave's software, including handsets from Motorola and Alcatel.
Industry insiders speculate that the timing of Nokia's announcement shows that the company regards the UP.Browser competitively, and that by releasing the Smart Messaging specification now the company hopes that it, rather than the UP.Browser will become the industry standard.
"We're delighted with the announcement. We intend to support both the UP.Browser and Smart Messaging, and I'm delighted that there will now be more mobile phones on the market which incorporate Smart Messaging," said Roy Zakka, CEO of Dublin-based software developers, Jinny Software, which offers SMS-based services to mobile devices.
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