Ericsson bids to unify mobile platforms with common web services

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Ericsson bids to unify mobile platforms with common web services

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 15 December, 2008

READ MORE: Ericsson

The dominant theme in the evolving mobile internet market is which software platform or platforms will stay the course, and how these may be unified to provide a mass market environment for developers. While Symbian and Google Android lead the race for would-be OS standard - and Apple, Palm, RIM and LiMo plow their own furrows - companies like Adobe and some operators hope to provide the unifying technology to bring them altogether.

But now there is a new heavyweight bid to provide the cross-platform glue, and therefore snatch the steering wheel of the mobile web - Ericsson is proposing a common cellphone software platform, based on a common set of application programming interfaces (APIs), which would enable programmers to write once for multiple mobile platforms. This would shift the cellular industry initiative back to the European wireless technologists, whose influence is under threat from PC/internet players like Google.

Ericsson placed its own handset operations into the joint venture with Sony several years ago, but retains significant efforts in mobile software and platforms (some of these, on the silicon side, due to be placed into the ST-NXP Wireless joint venture soon). But it is relying for market weight not on its cellphone position - which is dwarfed by that of Nokia, which has its own cross-platform ambitions - but on its influence over carriers through its market leading infrastructure and operator services activities. Though there are scant details of its actual technology, this approach alone shows that this will be an initiative heavily driven by traditional wireless concepts and politics, and this may make giants like Intel and Google, coming in from the PC internet space to seek wireless domination, wary of joining up.

It plans to define its first APIs and launch an industry group to support them towards the end of the first quarter of 2009. Speaking at the company's executive summit on broadband mobility, which was designed to beef up Ericsson's presence in the US enterprise market, Jorgen Odgaard, head of developer relations, said the approach would likely use many elements of Ericsson's IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) platform for interoperable, cross-platform web services. In particular, he compared the cellphone software efforts to the existing IPX interface used by operators and content developers to handle mobile payments.

The environment will almost certainly be Java-based and use web services APIs similar in structure to browser plug-ins. "We have a web browser-based application environment [that could evolve to be] a common denominator for Symbian, Android and other OSs," said Martin Korling, director of service layer technologies, in an interview.

"It's very ambitious," Odgaard admitted. "We need to open up the developer environment so telecom is not so difficult to deal with for developers.... We want to bring internet speed to mobile, and let internet companies access open mobile APIs to services and create mash-ups."