Now blogging at diego's weblog. See you over there!

The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that Microsoft and Motorola are set to announce their partnership tomorrow:

[T]he partnership also highlights the challenges Microsoft faces in that quest as its new partner loses market share amid stiff competition in the mobile-phone business.

The companies expect to announce that Motorola will begin building phones that run on Microsoft's Mobile Windows software, according to executives at the companies. The phone, a "clamshell" style unit, will be the first phone sold in the U.S. that runs the Microsoft software.

AT&T Wireless Services Inc. plans to offer the unit to its subscribers beginning later this year, according to an executive at the mobile operator.

[...]

With Motorola as a partner, Microsoft now has support from the world's second-largest handset maker, behind market leader Nokia Corp. of Finland. To date, Microsoft has relied heavily on HTC Corp. of Taiwan to manufacture its phones, which are mostly sold in Europe.

Before Motorola, the only other major handset maker to announce support for MS's Smartphone has been Samsung. Samsung, however, has pushed back the release of their MS-powered phone repeatedly (according to them, due to technical problems). I wonder if Motorola is going to run into the same problems--probably not, since the MS mobile phone software has gotten relatively decent. As the article notes, apparently the announcement will include AT&T Wireless as a carrier, but Orange had also been rumored to be ready to deploy Motorola-MS phones.

We'll have to wait until tomorrow to see if Motorola's phone will feature any of the good stuff we've gotten used to with Symbian (such as Bluetooth). Based on the picture above, it seems that at least it will have a built-in camera with what I expect will be support for Windows Media and such. Various news sites are reporting, however, that it doesn't have Bluetooth, Java, or a camera. Strange.

Categories: technology
Posted by diego on September 15 2003 at 2:13 PM