Damien Saunders

Comment: Terminal manufacturers are developing new applications and intergrating the user experience of other brands. Can this be a harmonious relationship with operators own portals?

With a selection of mobile phones from Christmas 2006 sitting on my desk from several big names its apparent that 3rd parties are now working with the terminal suppliers directly to port their web experience to phone apps. You can see this happening in Europe primarily with Google for blogging and search, but in the US, Helio has had success with its brand phone and social-networking tools.

Since the early days of mobile, it was primarly the reponsibility of the operator and terminal manufacturer to develop phone applications or new services for customers. Traditionally this has been in 3 areas -

• Native phone firmware or apps which includes the terminal settings, pictures and themes an operator installs, and
• Shell Apps like Java, flash or other applications developed and ported across phones, and
• Web/wap apps which are quickest to develop and are used in portals like Docomo and Vodafone live! as well as any third party.

Its the native apps that the 3rd parties are now working to integrate. Sony Ericsson camera phones now come with ‘Send to Blogger’ and blogging clients on the phone and some devices come with a static internet jump page that already has an internet search box.

The handset manufacturers are installing these applications in their part of the firmware. This is now a new area for operators to test and check these apps work or alternatively, to block from working (such as those operators still with walled gardens or child-blocking technology). Interestingly how can this be commercialised for the benefit for customers? without a direct billing relationship, customers are still going to be paying data charges for these searches which are not included in their on-net portal browsing.

Its certainly a reason for customers to argue for simpler pricing models like the flat rate xseries from 3 UK. More likely, these apps will stay in the 3rd party or expensive off-net browsing section with its per kb or timed data charges (opps revenue)

Up until now getting access to documents, music files or photos or your calendar when you are away from your office or home PC has been limited to a mess of cables, WIFI or datacards. SoonR seems to have hit the nail on the head, with a smooth interface and more features than you can throw a dog at.

While not all the word is as mass mobile as I am, and it could be a long way before many want this service, which Soonr has solved already …

Want to transfer music to your phone from your home pc? Soonr can Transfer pictures? or any file you want … Soonr can do that too

Want to check your outlook calendar at work? or book that meeting with your boss … Soonr can … or read that email you missed before you shut down … yes Soonr can.

And want to check this from your Mobile or from any ol PC? Soonr can … and you have complete control of what files are shared and accessible by you … or you can setup a shared folder for this.

I guess there are many reasons I like this - from the web2.0 styling to the speed in which it was setup. I was up and running in 2 mins - after it asked for my proxy settings on the office firewall … and took no time at all to install on my home PC. Now the little server client is loaded all the time.

So what about the competition - having checked out whats out there, I tried using the client from http://www.orb.com … which according to the blurb lets you watch tv from your phone … groan … why would you want to do that?? when I have a great 3G phone already? Oh and you need a TV Card in your home PC. Put to the test, it failed - when I discovered that you can’t set the web proxy so the server app couldn’t get outside the office network. From my home PC with its tangle of wi-fi, routers with ’solid’ firewalls and NATing I didn’t even try to set it up. Scared off by the first experience.

What I’m convinced is a good feature on Orb is the integrated streaming app - so you can listen to music on your home PC without downloading the full thing to your phone - saves you data and starts playing quicker than a download. If Soonr doesn’t do this soon (sorry for the crap english) then it will do it some time because its users are already requesting this.

Soonr just seems downright friendly, in a Flickr or any web2.0 softwar without the letter ‘e’ seems right. Put to the test, I emailed orb support to find out what I had to do to amend the proxy settings - contact my IT helpdesk and get them to open a port on the firewall … now why would I want that??