By: OneBlueSky
Reply To: None Tuesday, 11 Apr 2000 at 9:35 AM EDT
Post # of 272012
Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola News Conference
REUTERS Rtr 09:00 04-11-00
LONDON, April 11 (Reuters) - The world's top three mobile
phone manufacturers -- Finland's Nokia , Motorola of the U.S. and Sweden's Ericsson -- said on Tuesday they were calling a London news conference at 1400 GMT. The companies said in a statement they wanted to share the industry's views of the latest technology developments in the fast-emerging mobile electronic business market. No further details were immediately available.
Motorola, Nokia and Ericsson are already linked via their Symbian joint venture with British handheld computer company Psion Plc and Matsushita of Japan. Psion-led Symbian is built around Psion's EPOC operating platform, which has thrown down the gauntlet to U.S. computer giant Microsoft Corp's Windows CE and palmtop market leader Palm Inc rival technology.
Analysts said the news conference could unveil another stage in a battle between leading telecoms groups to produce an open operating system that will become the industry standard for the likes of smart phones -- cellphones with similar functions to those on palmtops, such as e-mail and word processing.
"The key thing they (Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia) want to do is develop mobile commerce as quickly as they can, and if they can get standards set between them, they'll accelerate the whole market," noted one analyst. The Symbian platform also has layers of services dealing with WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), which connects mobile phones to the Internet, Bluetooth, which allows mobile devices to communicate with each other without wires and high speed General Packet Radio Switching (GPRS) network technology. These are features that Windows CE and the Palm operating system currently lack. But the borders between alliances are becoming increasingly blurred in an industry that is braced for booming demand for smart, high tech cellphones as European governments hold beauty contests or put up for auction next generation mobile licences.
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