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Pushing the smartphone experience to the mass market is one of the key themes of this fall, and will certainly see Android and Symbian squeezing the midrange featurephone segment, targeting younger or less web-savvy users in the developed economies, and the top end of the emerging markets user base. But will we really see Android running on 50MHz, $15 handsets with GSM connections (and often unreliable ones at that)?

Certainly not, is the view of Benoit Schillings, previously chief technologist at Nokia (a company that knows more than most about bringing the mobile web to new economies), and now CTO at Myriad Group, which is rising to the challenge of delivering a useful data and web experience to people with very low end phones. The key techniques will include USSD (GSM messaging), very 'light' widgets, low end Java and standards such as Bondi, plus the increasing use of the browser - Myriad's V9 WebKit-based system - as the OS. All this will help create a friendly interface that can run at extremely low power, and highly resource constrained phones and connections.

One of the challenges for Android and Symbian is currently to take full advantage of the emerging breed of 'superphones', with their gigahertz processors, their promise of multiple graphics processors, their massive storage capacity and their $700 price tags. Myriad, a mobile software group focused on many areas of the cellphone experience, is now particularly focused on precisely the opposite challenge, creating a strong user experience for the most basic phones and networks, and even for users who cannot read.

It has scored two notable breakthroughs in recent weeks. One was to hire Schillings away from Nokia. The Belgian software engineer is perhaps most famous for being a lead engineer on the iconic BeOS project, and joined Nokia when it acquired Trolltech, where Schillings was CTO, at the start of 2008. The Trolltech purchase can be credited with Nokia's hugely significant, and much underestimated, decision to adopt a multi-OS strategy (and eventually, an OS-neutral strategy, with all its focus on cross-platform technologies at higher layers). And Schillings' departure is a blow because he was the most high profile, and highly articulate, face of that software strategy.

Perhaps the corporate structures of Nokia were too much of a culture shock after a company that rejoiced in free thinking and job titles like 'Chief Troll', but Schillings is now bringing his creative approach, and his public profile, to Myriad, which was created in February from the merger of embedded Java specialist Esmertec and Purple Labs, which had also acquired the browser business of OpenWave (where Schillings also once worked). These combined assets mean the group has software embedded on about two billion handsets worldwide - not smartphones in general, but the kind of devices that are not going away any time soon, and in fact will grow their base as more emerging markets take to the airwaves.

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