Nokia takes on Microsoft in the phone wars

Nokia today announced a complete design kit for manufacturers of smart phones in a bid to fight off Microsoft's advances into the market.

The move is the first concrete step taken by an industry alliance with Matsushita that was first announced in November, and provides third-party mobile phone manufacturers with a complete range of tools for developing smart phones - data and internet-enabled mobile handsets designed for 2.5G and 3G mobile networks.

The kit includes Series 60, Nokia's software platform for smart phones, a software development kit for application designers, and the Symbian operating system.

The decision to make Series 60 available to third parties was announced by Nokia in November when Matsushita signed up as the first customer.

Series 60 is the software platform for the recently-launched Nokia 7650 smart phone with built-in camera, which runs the Symbian operating system on top of it.

The Nokia announcement builds upon the long-standing Symbian consortium, a joint venture to develop smart phone operating systems between Ericsson, Nokia, Psion, Sony Ericsson, Matsushita and Motorola.

The move will help Nokia and the other Symbian shareholders to resist Microsoft's bid to muscle into the market for data-capable mobile phones and PDAs - Microsoft already supplies its licences with a software platform, Windows Client Edition (CE), as well as a variety of operating systems.

Windows PocketPC 2002 was launched last year, while the phone edition of PocketPC 2002 is being launched this week at the 3GSM World Congress. A system for smart phones, code named Stinger, is set for launch later in the year.

The move to open up Series 60 and other elements of proprietary software to licensees has led to Nokia being accused of trying to dominate the smart phone market.

Don Listwin, chief executive of Openwave, made comments in the Financial Times earlier this month to that effect, though he subsequently claimed that he had been misquoted.

Today's announcement sees Nokia promising to produce reference designs for smart phones using Texas Instruments' OMAP processors by the third quarter of 2002.

TI, however, is selling weapons to both sides in this war. Today the company also announced a deal to incorporate OMAP processors into Microsoft's smart phone operating system.