Mobile development: global, competitive & useful… but how?

With the Mobile World Congress just around the corner, it’s no surprise to see a whole heap of mobile marketing malarkey bubbling up this week. A new name to me was the LiMo Foundation, who, I read, are rolling out a “globally competitive” Linux-based software platform (and publicly available API) for mobile handsets.

Now I’m not necessarily a mobile specialist, so I had to look LiMo up (do they pronounce that Lii-moh or Lee-moh I wonder) and found that the likes of NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Motorola, Vodafone, Panasonic and Samsung comprise its founding members.

According to LiMo head honcho Morgan Gillis, the “globally competitive” spin here comes as a result of the platform combining technologies that are already extensively market proven within an array of leading handsets. “This will enable initial LiMo handsets to register in the marketplace far more rapidly than handsets based on unproven technology,” they say.

As an open-source project – this is a modular, plug-in-based, hardware-independent architecture with a secure run-time environment – and will no doubt benefit from the functionality and scalability of being Linux-based. But – I recently completed some emerging markets telecoms analysis work and spoke extensively to Nokia, Motorola and Samsung about the factors that will make handsets globally competitive in developing areas such as those in Africa or poorer parts of China – and the deciding factors were not perhaps as Linux-driven as LiMo initially appears to be making out.

For starters, it’s things like smaller units of incremental billing and top-ups that will make a difference to your typical Soweto user who wants to be able to spend just a dollar on top-up rather than five dollars. Non-tech factors such as license liberalisation and excise duties aside, it is developments like software that can handle dual slot phones that can handle two SIMs (for communities that can not afford one handset each) that will make the biggest difference. There’s the whole question of spectrum refarming to consider too (the process which allows the 2G spectrum to be used for 3G) in terms of allowing global roll out of mobile services to be done competitively.

I know I have gone off on a slightly different tack to the “hey we’re here and we’re doing good work” theme of LiMo’s central pre-show message. But if you are going to make statements about global competitiveness and simply refer to compatibility and scalability I think you need to consider what “global” really means these days in terms of mobile.