re: Sendo "Stinger" Overview
Picture of Sendo's version at link:
>> Stinger
Sandra Vogel
PMN
pmn.co.uk
With Microsoft pushing hard to make itself the leading player in the PDA operating system market, a move into smartphones seems like an obvious one for the company to make. This statement is far from being a huge journalistic insight. Microsoft has had its eye on the mobile phone market for some time, and first demonstrated its platform for the sector in February 2001. The event was the prestigious GSM World Congress in Cannes France, and Marek Pawlowski had a demonstration of a working device.
Since then, though, product announcements have been thin on the ground. It is not unusual for there to be a time lag between initial announcement and product appearance, but in this case the length of time has been so protracted that the software’s codename, Stinger, has been widely enough used to have pretty much achieved the status of an official name, supplanting the officially preferred moniker of ‘Microsoft Smartphone Platform’.
Despite the lack of visible hardware, Microsoft has announced several partnerships with hardware manufacturers. It will work with these in the same way as it does with its Pocket PC partners, though the list of Stinger partners is hardly comprised of industry leaders in the way the Pocket PC partner list is. Among those favoured with association with Stinger are HTC, Samsung, and Sendo. HTC, for those that don’t know the company, is a Tiawaneese manufacturer that makes the iPAQ for Compaq.
Of these, only Sendo, the company which gave Marek his demo all that time ago, has actually announced a time to market with a working product - the Z100. Sendo is a company you aren’t likely to have heard of unless you are British, and even then, frankly, you can be forgiven for not knowing the name. Based in Birmingham and founded in 1999, Sendo has grown well since inception, basing much of its movement forward on developing handsets for specific operators and providing ways in which they can differentiate themselves from the crowd. Differentiation comes in terms of both hardware design (interchangeable fascias and so on), and software design, with one of Sendo’s current pushes being into the areas of personalised, animated graphics and SMS based gaming. For more on the company itself see its web-site (www.sendo.co.uk).
Why, you might ask, has Microsoft had to partner with the likes of Sendo, instead of the SonyEricssons and Nokias of this world - and why is Microsoft getting into this game at all? Well looking at the second question first, the company’s official mission these days is to help provide information to people anytime, anywhere, and on any device. There are four factors which combine to make smartphones one of the kind of devices that, given this mission, Microsoft needs to be is interested in. In no particular order they are the development of ‘connected’ PDAs from all players in the PDA arena proving that you can use a pocket sized device to remotely access and locally manage information. The emergence of companies like Symbian whose platform is deliberately tweaked to include a range of devices from keyboarded connected PDAs to keyboardless smartphones. The advances in mobile phone hardware allowing ever smaller and more feature-rich devices to be produced. The development of, faster wireless connections first in the form of GPRS and at some point in the future 3G.
As to the choice of hardware partners, we have to say Microsoft’s hands here have been somewhat tied. Most of the key hardware people had already made deals with smartphone software companies before Stinger came along: both Symbian and Palm have been busy for some time in this field. While some of the existing deals are not exclusive, it makes sense, at least in the short term, to avoid the development costs involved in working with different operating systems, and to also avoid confusing a public already befuddled by technologies, competing hardware designs, and a plethora of phone features.
Microsoft’s selection of Sendo was strengthened in July when Microsoft invested in them. Sendo insists it remains a free agent, and we have no reason to doubt that. But the financial tie-up looks like a sign that Microsoft is keen to ensure the development of the Z100 is hitch free, and has provided funds to help.
The Z100 itself isn’t expected to see the light of day as a product you can actually buy till the tail end of the first quarter of 2002. By then GPRS should be up and running, and the Z100 should be usable in every respect out of the box. We already know quite a lot about its specifications. It will be a tri-band phone (it will work in Europe and the US) which supports GPRS, and will be neat and light at 99g in weight and 99cm in height (the antenna is internal). The display is TFT, and will provide 65,536 colours in its 176 x 220 pixels. There is a multimedia card slot which could be used to add data storage or Bluetooth. Bluetooth isn’t built in, incidentally, because, Sendo says, there are still some interoperability issues. They want to wait for the industry to sort the standard out before supporting it in their hardware.
The key feature of the Z100 will, of course, relate to the Stinger software that comes with it. This is based around Windows CE, and has been designed to have a Pocket PC-like look and feel, though the range of applications is truncated in relation to those you get on a Pocket PC 2002 device. They will include Contacts, Calendar, Tasks and Voice Notes applications, Inbox for SMS and email (standards supported run to SMTP, POP3 and IMAP4), Windows Media Player (well, you will want to use your phone for music and video won’t you?), a version of Internet Explorer with WAP support (both with data security features), a calculator, and, of course, Microsoft’s Solitaire game. ActiveSync will manage data sharing with your PC by a cabled connection and over the air too. Sendo will bring a few extras of its own to the party, including support for the Java virtual machine, MPEG4 video, SyncML and some additional games.
Microsoft clearly hopes Stinger will appeal to those people who like the idea of a PDA but don’t want to carry a separate device to their phone. Sendo is adding its own ingredients to the cake with multimedia card support and software additions. The net result is a product that could appeal to both corporate and consumer markets.
Microsoft might not have the leading hardware partners in the smartphone game, and they are starting from a long way behind in terms of ‘mindshare’. But if syncing with their ubiquitous desktop software really works in a ‘plug and play’ fashion, and in particular if it works over the air, and if the price is right both for the hardware and for GPRS access, Sendo could go from small fry to big fish, from unknown to well known in a very short space of time. <<
- Eric - |
