A client-cloud app that coordinates mobile phones with online apps and services
Earlier this week Microsoft unveiled some new code, and a new approach, that lets basic feature phones — with limited RAM and processing power — use a much wider array of mobile apps.
OneApp is a client-server or client-cloud application: it’s just 150Kbytes, and as a result, it can run on a wide arrange of feature phones (mostly Nokia and Sony Ericsson models so far), which Microsoft describes as mobile phones that can access basic data services. It acts as a kind of doorway to and coordinator for online services.
And for that reason, OneApp may be the start of a breakthrough for Microsoft in the mobile Web.
But you can’t just load up OneApp and start running Facebook, Tweeter or whatever on your feature phone. The client app is deployed in partnership with carriers, who load a server-side companion. The first deployment is with Blue Label Telecoms of South Africa, which is using OneApp as the foundation for a new service called mibli.
Blue Label isn’t even a conventional mobile carrier: it’s main business is secure, prepaid electronic tokens and transactional services for both third parties and consumers in developing economies; the prepaid services include mobile phone service but also prepaid electricity. There will be no charge for the new mibli service, but users will incur some additional charges on their prepaid data service.
Blue Label subscribers signup for mibli, download the compact client, and then can access a set of applications that just aren’t available to the mass of mobile phone users around the world. Mibli users can access, not surprisingly Windows Live Messenger and MSN, but also Facebook, Twitter, a contacts management app, a location service to find your friends and contacts or vice versa, a news reader and others. Some of the apps are services, such as an electronic, on-device “wallet,” a notification service that lists messages or invitations you received when offline, and status updates from your contacts.
OneApp seems to be a client-side coordinator for cloud-based apps and services. According to Microsoft, the OneApp client downloads only those parts of an application that are immediately needed. The server-side also compresses the data, to speed up the transfers and minimize data charges. The compression will be also be needed if only part of the app is running on the client, with the heavy lifting being done by server-based code.
One key part of OneApp: it seems to be intended as a application platform, and Microsoft says developers will be able to Web standards such as JavaScript and XML to create applications for OneApp. The SDK “is expected” to be ready by year’s end, according to Microsoft.
Software developers are going to be able to write new apps for OneApp using familiar industry standards like Javascript and XML. The OneApp software developer kit is expected to be available for developers by the end of this year.
Blue Label seems to be using the OneApp-powered mibli service as a way to blend global mobile Web apps, such as Facebook, Live Messenger and so on, with highly local transactional services, such as paying a bill or buying a bus ticket.
OneApp is the brainchild of Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Group and Startup Business Accelerator, the result of a recent merger of two separate teams, headed up by its newest chief Amit Mital, corporate vice president. (Ars Technica has a recent interview with Mital.)
The official Microsoft statements indicate OneApp is aimed at the continuing explosion of cell phone use is the developing/emerging economies, where without computers, the mobile phone becomes the users’ voice and data link to a much larger world. But I wonder if OneApp’s basic approach can’t be applied to, say, U.S. smartphones as well.
In one sense, a smarphone has the capacity to run its own apps. But the client-cloud approach seems to offer Microsoft something that Windows Mobile hasn’t been able to achieve: the ability to claim a space on mass market non-Windows handsets, and turn that space into a utility for merging the phone, its user, and the user’s identity with a growing array of cloud-based services.
