Word: smartly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...joint venture, called Symbian, will license Psion's software as the underlying brains behind a new generation of smart devices, ranging from mobile phones that receive e-mail, surf the Internet and even pay for transactions, to laptop computers that can go online automatically without anyone's having to open the carrying case. Yet the battle between Symbian and the Microsoft camp is not just about who will make next year's cool gadgets. It promises to determine who will control the next era of personal communications...
...what a lovely war it will be! Market researcher Dataquest estimates that global sales of mobile phones, already astounding most analysts, will soar from 100 million handsets annually in 1997 to 360 million a year by 2002. Of that number, 15% to 20% are expected to be so-called smart phones that can handle data as well as voice traffic, a market that will rival today's volume of PC sales. "I foresee an absolutely huge future for the pretty amazing new stuff that's going to be added to the mobile phone," says Martin Heath, a telecommunications specialist...
Whatever the distance ahead, the smart-phone era has already dawned. In Europe later this year, Nokia will begin selling its 9110 Communicator, a second-generation device about the size of a large mobile phone with a flip-top computer screen, capable of composing faxes, sending and reading e-mail and accessing the Internet. Alcatel, the French phone giant, is already marketing a phone called the One Touch Com, which has taken all the functions of a palm-size organizer, such as address book and scheduler, and installed them in a mobile handset small enough to slip in a shirt...
That led Potter to approach Nokia, Ericsson and later Motorola--which has agreed in principle to join Symbian--with an offer to use Psion's operating system EPOC as the basis for smart phones. He offered a remarkable deal, taking only 31% of Symbian and selling the remainder to the three phone giants for $50 million. "Companies like Nokia and Ericsson are concerned about ending up like the manufacturers of personal computers, becoming box shifters for Microsoft," says Martin Butler, a British computer consultant. "Potter could become the Bill Gates of the portable-device marketplace. It's there waiting...
...only Philips Electronics has actually licensed Psion's software for use in a smart phone, but the software has a compelling advantage: Symbian is charging just $5 a phone, while Microsoft charges computer makers $25 for each device that uses Windows CE, according to analysts. Jan Ahrenbring, an Ericsson vice president, adds that Microsoft's operating system "really wasn't applicable for mobile," but Microsoft maintains that the software is modular and can be customized to suit customers needs. South Korean manufacturer Samsung has produced the prototype of a Windows CE phone that it plans to market next year...