Microsoft, Motorola and Orange team up for UK smart phone

Three of the biggest names in mobile technology have entered what they’ve called a “special relationship” with Orange’s UK release of the Motorola MPx200 mobile phone with Microsoft Windows Mobile software.

The product itself sports a small, clamshell design, based on a 200MHz processor and an expandable memory card of up to one gigabyte. Orange is initially selling it for £239.99 with a £15 per month tariff, including reasonable GPRS data usage.

Described as for the ‘high-end consumer and business professional market’, Stuart Jackson, Orange corporate communications manager, said it is for people who might “want help with their working day but access to email on the way home”.

But of more interest is the fledgling, three-way alliance. Orange announced a partnership with Motorola in June and has been a key user of Microsoft technology, being the first operator to sell a device based on the Windows Smartphone 2002 operating system last October – its SPV, manufactured in Taiwan by low-profile HTC.

Amer Husaini, VP and director product operations PCS EMEA at Motorola, said the deal is “about three major brands building a story” and “looking at a long journey”.

It covers joint marketing and development and Microsoft-based PDAs as well as phones.

But despite Orange taking the lead, other operators are sure to get the Motorola-Microsoft double play. Motorola’s Huaini pointed out Orange is the “primary” rather than only operator involved and similar rollouts are expected next month from AT&T Wireless in the US, and others in Europe and Hong Kong.

The MPx200 is a tri-band GSM device but Motorola is looking at other wireless technologies, including versions based on CDMA and even W-CDMA, teeing up the design as an eventual 3G handset.

Motorola recently sold its equity stake in handset OS venture Symbian – leaving Nokia and Psion as the major shareholders plus still a raft of major names such as Matsushita, Samsung, Siemens and SonyEricsson – though it claimed to still back the technology in addition to Linux and Java, which will be key to the American company maintaining its lead in China.

But a deal between Microsoft and Motorola has been the industry’s worst kept secret for some time. A range of retailers, integrators and even Symbian have been expecting the announcement for most of this year.

Derek Brown, director at Microsoft’s mobile devices division, told silicon.com at the launch: “There is a special relationship at this table today.”

While Symbian now points to its many licensees and the handsets that are finally coming out based on its OS, Microsoft talks about a not too dissimilar 30 licensees – though many fewer actual phones - and being in mobile for the long-haul.

Orange has made a lot of noise about its Update and Backup services, making a virtue of storing users’ information on its network or an organisation’s Exchange server, and such synchronisation and connectivity is one of the key reasons Microsoft is in mobile.

With still strong relationships with Nokia and an announcement with Palm on the near horizon, Orange denied it is taking a scattergun approach to offering the devices that users want.

“We have 45 million customers and this is all about customer choice,” Orange’s Jackson said.

The MPx200 will be available in the UK from mid-October.