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Nokia is buying the 52% of Symbian that it didn’t own, and spinning off the mobile software company into a new entity called the Symbian Foundation. Sony Ericcson, Motorola and NTT DoCoMo are the other partners in a long-needed effort to reunite the various forks of the world’s most popular mobile phone operating system. AT&T, LG, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments. and Vodafone have commited themselves to the new effort. Samsung is also expected to join the foundation. See this article from the Associated Press for more information.

Related articles and pages on billso.com

• iPhone
• 20 April 2008: Mobile phones - the cure for global poverty?
• 21 February 2008: Nokia brings back N-GAGE
• 20 February 2008: Mobile phone platform wars
• 25 January 2008: Nokia claims 40 percent market share
• 20 January 2008: Nokia, Sprint announce layoffs

In last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Sara Corbett has a long article about the mobile phone’s growing importance in global and local economics. The article is also a great example of how qualitative research and ethnography can be used by larger corporations. When I teach research methods courses and supervise professional papers, I often recommend that graduate students investigate these methods.

The article follows a Nokia researcher named Jan Chipchase as he collects field notes and photographs from around the world. His research data is sent back to Nokia’s designers, so they can determine how to add features that will stimulate mobile phone adoption in lesser developed countries.

Can you see me now?

Some of these features have nothing to do with software or hardware. In rainy regions, a mobile phone might require a hook to keep it off the wet floor. Inexpensive phones must be durable.

Corbett also discusses something I’ve seen more frequently over the years: mobile phone users who arrange their meeting place by phone in real time. Instead of meeting at a set hour in a specific spot, an appointment becomes a game of tag, as the two people give each other landmarks until they actually see each other.

Mobile microfinance

There’s a long discussion of how mobile phones might be used to help microfinance schemes become scalable. Microfinance involves loans of relatively small amounts of money, usually arranged by face-to-face meetings. Mobile phone applications such as text-messaging could be used to make the loan and repayment processes easier and faster. Swift repayment is a key success factor for these plans, and Vodaphone has been implementing mobile banking systems that would work well with microfinance ventures.

Once concern that I have is the cost of these microloans. Eight days earlier, this New York Times article discussed the backlash against Mexico’s leading microfinance firm, Compartamos. Economist Muhammad Yunus, who won the 2006 Nobel peace Prize for proposing the microloan concept, wants non-profit groups to arrange microloans.

Compartamos is a for-profit company that is launching an IPO, based upon the massive interest revenues the company has generated. The IPO keeps microloan customers from participating in the group’s success. This Business Week article from December 2007 has some more information about the IPO.

Mobile telecom firms are likely to use microloans as a way to subsidize inexpensive mobile handsets for their customers, which as only an indirect benefit to the microfinance community.

Phones or food?

Today’s New York Times published a long article about global hunger. There are some heartbreaking stories in this article, including the growing market in Haiti for flavored dirt. One quote from the article really caught my attention:

President René Préval of Haiti appeared to taunt the populace as the chorus of complaints about la vie chère — the expensive life — grew. He said if Haitians could afford cellphones, which many do carry, they should be able to feed their families.

Are the world’s poor being asked to choose between mobile phones and food? It seem farfetched, but the surging cost of basic staples in some countries has forced the question.

IS 7010 students who have read the Nokia case in our textbook might chuckle a bit at this news: Nokia has resurrected 2003’s N-GAGE mobile phone/video game console.

The first new model for the US market is the Nokia N81, a WiFi 3G GSM handset that ships with 8 GB of RAM and retails for US$639.

Mistake number one: users must pay a one-time US$10 fee to activate the built-in games on this phone. Hard to believe that Nokia couldn’t provide a free game on a handset that is more expensive than an iPhone.

At least the N81 does not look like a taco.

The platform wars are heating up in the mobile phone industry. It is very difficult for a mobile carrier to support several different handset operating systems. Vodaphone CEO Arun Sarin estimated that his UK-based company supports 30 or 40 different OSes, according to this MacWorld UK report. Sarin is also quited in this Business Week article.

It takes a great deal of effort to establish a computing standard. Consider Apple, which became a new entrant with its iPhone. There are about 4 million Apple iPhones available or in use now, which is a respectable number when one considers its limited availability. There are no official iPhone providers in China or Japan yet, for example.

Google won’t make or market its own mobile phone, especially now that the company has dropped out of the 700 mHz auction, as reported by Forbes. The company’s Android mobile phone platform is based upon Linux, and over 30 companies have signed on to develop and support Android hardware. Prototypes of the Google phone were shown in Frankfurt at the Mobile World Congress this week. This CNET slideshow starts with a pic of one such prototype, which appears to be running and connected to a GSM network.

Microsoft used a similar approach to develop its Windows Mobile platform for PDAs and smartphones. The company expects that 20 million Windows Mobile phones from various manufacturers will be sold in the first half of 2008. None of these phones are Microsoft-branded devices.

Symbian claims to have the top spot, with 77 million units sold in the last year. Nokia is the main manufacturer that uses the Symbian operating system, along with Sony Ericsson. The latter company has started using Windows Mobile in its high-end smartphones, however.

For more information, see my earlier articles tagged as mobile, including:

• 11 February 2008: The modular mobile phone
• 31 January 2008: Applications are coming for the iPhone
• 25 January 2008: Nokia claims 40 percent market share
• 13 January 2008: The story of the iPhone
• 11 January 2008: BlackBerry vs iPhone
• 26 November 2007: Mobile devices for US census takers
• 24 September 2007: Do you want a PC on your iPhone?
• 23 April 2007: Samsung and Microsoft further their convergence goals

From Forbes: developers are readying programs that will actually run on the iPhone, instead of just in the Safari web browser. There’s a wide variety of web-based applications available, but these programs don’t offer the speed and features that an application that is actually running on the iPhone could provide. Web-based applications also have to respect firewall and security rules in order to access any Web-based data.

Apple has not released a Software Developers Kit (SDK) that contains tools that help programmers access the iPhone’s resident applications like the address book and calendar.

Windows Mobile, Palm and Symbian mobile phones do run applications directly. The operating system developers released SDKs long ago.

Apple has maintained strict control over the iPhone application market through the company’s exclusive agreements with mobile carriers. Carriers either want to sell the iPhone or sometime like it, as I discussed on 13 January 2008. It’s widely assumed that Apple will let programmers sell their iPhone applications through iTunes, which is the management software for iPhone users. Ars Technica revealed that an iPhone application installation key – a very long string of numbers – has been identified by some programmers and released on the Internet as an image file.

Of course, Apple would take a percentage on any software sold through iTunes. The Forbes article mentions 30 percent as a possible fee. As Marc Hedlund pointed out last November, the Sidekick uses a similar business model. As a Sidekick user, I agree with Marc – I hate paying for features on my phone. The Sidekick 3 doesn’t include a world clock, for example. Users have to navigate to the phone’s download screen and buy a clock.

One of the Sidekick’s original developers, Andy Rubin, now works for Google on its Open Handset Alliance project. I mentioned the project on 5 November 2007. Here are some other articles about the rumored gPhone.

There are third-party iPhone applications available, of course. Some of these are designed to unlock the iPhone, or to add an application installer feature.

But Apple can break these unauthorized applications or change the application installation key at any time by updating the iPhone firmware, as I mentioned on 26 January 2008.