OStatic

First rule of public relations: Don't make an announcement when it's going to be drowned out by competing announcements you can't hope to beat. The Wholesale Applications Community announcement put out yesterday was up against not one, but two mobile announcements guaranteed to steal its thunder: Windows 7 Mobile and the MeeGo announcement from Nokia and Intel.

Setting aside the bad timing, let's look at the actual initiative. What is the Wholesale Applications Community? A major initiative from a gaggle of telecom operators to build an open platform for mobile phone users. It combines 24 operators, including AT&T, NTT, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, and many others, with device manufacturers LG Electronics, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson. The group's mission is to create a wholesale app ecosystem for deployment across all carriers and devices, rather than the fragmented ecosystem that we have now with apps for various phones and carriers.

As GigaOm and this Reuters report note, there is talk that Nokia will show a Maemo phone at next week's Nokia World show in Germany. Maemo, of course, is Nokia's long-standing operating system for its line of Internet Tablets, and is based on Debian GNU/Linux. However, some are interpreting the possibility as yet another sign that Nokia's focus on an open source Symbian OS is wavering.

The Symbian OS has half the global smartphone market, but Reuters quotes Neil Mawston from Strategy Analytics as saying: It looks like Maemo, or at least a Linux derivative of some description, will play a key role for Nokia in high-end (products) over the next year or two. If that's true, I have to question Nokia's overall prospects in the smartphone market.

The Google Android SDK, released yesterday, confirmed what had been long been rumored: Google's mobile platform uses WebKit, an open source browser engine . We have been working on our mobile implementation of WebKit for quite some time, ...