A feature phone could become more like an application-friendly smartphone if Microsoft’s OneApp is successful. Released Monday, the new software portal allows a wide variety of phones with limited memory and processing capability to access such mobile staples as Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live Messenger, various games, and other apps.
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Microsoft is targeting emerging markets first for OneApp. The initial release is through Blue Label Telecoms in South Africa, as part of that carrier’s mibli consumer mobile service. OneApp will launch there with more than a dozen mobile applications. New apps are in the works.
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Blue Label customers can download mibli for free. Microsoft said it expects to launch OneApp in other countries by next year.
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‘Transform Nearly Any Cell Phone’
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Amit Mital, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Group, said OneApp will help people do things they couldn’t do before with a phone — anything from paying bills to helping diagnose health issues or just staying connected with friends and family.
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Mark Levy, co-CEO of Blue Label Telecoms, said OneApp can transform nearly any cell phone into a highly sophisticated, cost-effective and user-friendly transactional device.
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Microsoft said OneApp shows up on the phone as, appropriately, a single application that leads to various mobile applications. The OneApp client is only about 150KB, so the installation can be relatively fast, with the server component handling much of the processing.
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It can launch dynamically only the parts of a particular mobile app that the user chooses, limiting downloading, installation and storage issues. Cloud services are employed to hand off processing and storage where possible, and Microsoft said it uses data networks efficiently to limit data-access charges.
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SDK By Year’s End
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New applications can be created by third-party developers, incorporating such standard tools as JavaScript and XML, and a software developers kit is expected to become available by the end of this…