In years past, when the mobile-phone industry gathered for its biggest annual convention, the talk was mostly about bells and whistles — who had the sexiest, thinnest, or most feature-packed handsets. Not this year. At the 2008 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, the center of attention has shifted to the software inside phones that most consumers don’t ever think about.
From flashy newcomer Apple with its hit iPhone, to gate-crashing Google, to stalwart Nokia, the titans of tech are locked in a high-stakes battle for the heart and soul of mobile phones. At stake is nothing less than the future of mobile communication — and, by extension, of the Internet, as a growing number of consumers around the world access the Web from handheld devices.
It’s no wonder operating systems have become the industry’s new focus. The majority of today’s handsets are still based on proprietary operating systems developed by makers such as Nokia and Motorola for use in their own phones. These closed software environments are costly for makers to maintain and upgrade, limiting the opportunity for economies of scale that would be possible if phones from many makers shared common software.
What’s more, by fragmenting the market, closed systems make life more difficult for operators and suppliers of mobile software and services. Paris-based Gameloft, for instance, the leading seller of mobile games, has to separately develop, test, and support hundreds of versions of every game it makes thanks to the lack of software standards in mobile phones and differences in operator network configurations.
Industry leaders are fed up. “Today there are 30 to 40 different operating systems for mobile, and that is too many,” said Arun Sarin, the chief executive of Vodafone during a Feb. 12 speech in Barcelona. “We need to narrow that range to three, four, or even five.”…