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WAP Update
April 27th 2000
Sony picks EPOC for its SmartphonesSymbian - the company which allies Nokia, Ericsson,
Motorola and Panasonic (Matsushita) with Psion - scored a major success by
signing up Sony as a licensee for its EPOC
operating system for use in Sony’s future smartphones. Sony has become only
the second major name licensee (after Philips) for Symbian's EPOC o/s. The
company confirmed that it has no intention to utilise Microsoft's Mobile
Explorer as its browser. It is currently unclear when the first Sony EPOC phones
will appear. There's a possibility that a GSM phone utilising GPRS (packet data)
and WAP could appear next year, but Sony obviously wants to make a W-CDMA phone
for its home (Japanese) market a priority. The news is especially good for
Symbian as Sony has previously struck a deal with 3Com to produce a PDA based on
the Palm operating system. The smartphones will also use a special chipset
provided by Texas Instruments to power its phones. The TI core chip combines an
ARM9 CPU with TI's own DSP technology. While the Sony announcement is a major
boost for Symbian, it still has to wait for Ericsson’s WAP enabled R380
smartphone to ship, to finally prove its smartphone technology. Symbian produced some intriguing figures – based on research done by The Europe Company. It breaks the handset market down into three sectors: WIDs (Wireless Information Devices); browser (ie WAP) phones; and voice only phones. WIDs are essentially combined PDAs and mobile handsets - like the Nokia Communicator while browser phones are like the Motorola P7389. Consequently Symbian predicts that WAP phones will enjoy 35 per cent of the total market sales in 2003, followed by WIDs with 15 per cent while voice phones will take a massive 50 per cent of the market. WAP Insight feels that – considering both Alcatel and Motorola will migrate their entire handset ranges over to WAP – the figure for voice only handsets is way too high. Interestingly Symbian is also promising enhancements to its core software during 2000 which will include both a WAP protocol stack and a WAP browser. To date Psion had to go to Purple software for a WAP browser for its PDAs. |
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