All the wireless players are looking for the new mobile device format that could catch the imagination of the user base and become the next cellphone or notebook. Netbooks, smartbooks, MIDs, mobile media players and so on – on vendors’ future roadmaps, they all come in many varieties, but only a few will gain a mass market. One is expected to be the combination of portable games console, phone and browser – and as the obvious supplier, Sony Ericsson, dithers over a possible PlayStation Portable handset, Microsoft may pip it to the post.
As if the Zune music phone and Pink WinMo reference platform were not enough from the Microsoft rumor mill, the giant is also considering extending its Xbox games system to the mobile platform, according to Shane Kim, corporate VP of strategy and business development within the Microsoft Interactive Entertainment Business. He told gaming web site Kikizo: “For us, it’s a matter of focusing on ‘when’, because if we chased after a mobile or handheld opportunity, we would not have the resources and ability to do things like instant-on 1080p HD, Facebook, Twitter, Project Natal. And so we’ve chosen to focus on the living room experience from a hardware standpoint, if you will, but we’re building a service in Live that will … extend to other platforms. No question about it.”
There are many questions to answer first though, according to Kim. “Do we do our own device, do we create our own phone? That’s a question for the company itself. Do we continue to go down the Windows Mobile path, which is that path that we’re on today, etcetera, etcetera?”
Patent and trademark filings give clues to the thinking of the suppliers’ R&D departments, and some Nokia documents have come to light, hard on the heels of the recent ones from Apple. The market leader has registered the trademarks for several new possible classes of devices, adding to speculation – fuelled by Nokia’s own comments about creating entirely new formats in the MID space – that the Finnish company aims to diversify its range, producing a far more granular family of products to target specific user bases.
The web site of the Office of Harmonization for the Internal Market posted details of Nokia’s new trademarks, which include the Cseries, the Xseries and ‘Booklet’. We could guess that the first two are part of Nokia’s drive to push many of the capabilities and web experiences of its high end Nseries and Eseries down to the mass market – with Cseries being aimed at low end consumers and Xseries at the midrange. Of course Nokia already has many phones for those segments, but currently these do not feature advanced web and media capabilities.