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Sunday, May 18, 2008
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Motorola challenges Indian developers

Special Correspondent

First-ever MotoDev conference in India

Christy Wyatt

BANGALORE: It was a small but significant step towards Open solutions for mobile phones.

At MotoDev, its first-ever developer conference in India, last week, Motorola, the U.S.-based communications player who created the first handheld phone 35 years ago, dared ‘desi’ software wizards to create compelling applications for an open framework .

Motorola threw enough hints that it sees Open solutions, slowly but surely, taking over from proprietary standards.

Offering its own next-generation Linux platform, MotoMagx, vice-president for Software Platforms Christy Wyatt explained: “For some time to come, we still have to work with multiple platforms like Symbian and Windows Mobile, but there is $1.3 trillion in revenues out there and clearly every one would prefer having to deal with a single standard.”

India is today the world’s fastest growing mobile market. With Indians buying 10 million phones last month (to total 261million), it has overtaken the U.S. to become the second largest wireless nation — after China.

By next year, it would be the only mobile market which would continue to grow year on year — so it made sense to create products tailored for local needs, added Malcom Dawe, vice-president and general manager for India and South West Asia. However, the world banked on Indian developers’ ingenuity, not just Indian customers, he said.

Later this year, Motorola will launch ‘MotoDev Studio for Linux’ to support applications written in C or C++, for future MotoMagx Linux platforms.

Get cracking, software whizzes.

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