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So here's one that came out of left-field. Having failed spectacularly at numerous attempts to make a dent in the smartphone market, Microsoft appears to have retooled its strategy for a magnificent return to mobile by instead targeting not so smart phones. Perhaps that's an unfair reading of Microsoft's new OneApp platform, but the Redmond giant's history makes it a little tempting to view it with such cynical spectacles.

OneApp is not an operating system. It's an application environment which appears to be a widget platform on steroids. While the applications themselves can be written using tools like XML and JavaScript (just like widgets), storage and processing of the app is offloaded to the cloud. This approach allows OneApp to have a small footprint, as low as 150K according to Microsoft. This is not a solution for producing rich 3D games for feature phones, but is an ideal approach for bringing social networking, information management and messaging type applications to these less functional devices. Examples of apps currently available include Window Live Messenger, Facebook, a Twitter client and RSS reader. Microsoft is working directly with selected partners to develop OneApp, but the intention is to release a SDK to allow third parties to write their own OneApp programs.

At this point readers will start to notice similarities with Java, and like Java, OneApp programs will reside and execute within a sort of sandbox. The difference will be that, with Microsoft controlling the platform, compatibility of applications across handset models should be assured.

Targeting mid-range handsets makes strategic sense. Smartphones are a rapidly growing segment and have commanded much of the market's attention this year, so much so that it's easy to forget that feature phones account for about 70% of the global market. In many developing regions, feature and low-end phones account for pretty much the entire market - the smartphone share is wafer thin.

What's more, populations in these regions are becoming more tech savvy and are demanding access to the tools and services which the developed world takes for granted. This fact was hit home a couple weeks ago when Nokia announced that Ovi had notched up one million users to its mail service in just six month, with 65% of accounts registered by users in the developing world. The top five countries for OVI Mail subscribers were India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia and South Africa. It is therefore no surprise that Blue Label Telecom in South Africa is Microsoft's launch partner for OneApp.

There is no debate that Microsoft needs to pull something radical to reclaim mobile. According to Canalys, Microsoft's share of the smartphone OS market drop to 3.4% in Q2 of this year, compared to Apple's share which jumped more than six-fold from a 0.7% to a 5.2% share. Even Google's Android was able to etch out a 1% share with pretty much just a single handset model available. If this rate at market share haemorrhaging continues, within a year Microsoft will qualify for a position in the embarrassing "Others" category, alongside Palm and various unheard of Linux systems.

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