Mobile World Congress set to begin: Global Apps Platform coming?

mwc We’re getting ready to follow all the fun in Barcelona (early) tomorrow morning (Seattle time, that is), setting up some Twitter and RSS feeds, and we already came across one little tidbit.  On the Mobile Business News RSS feed, we caught a quick glimpse of a post now pulled:

http://www.mobilebusinessbriefing.com/article/mobile-operators-unite-on-global-apps-platform-

The world’s largest mobile operators have joined forces to launch an open international applications platform, marking the largest unified move to date by the operator community into the mobile apps space

Of course we’re cursing partial RSS feeds right about now, but we do expect to hear more about this (and whether or not Microsoft, or Google, or Apple will have any connection to it), once it’s really ok to post the news.

UPDATE: The Times Online is breaking the story that ”Orange, Telefonica, AT&T and nine others are forging an alliance to build an open technology platform designed to deliver applications to all mobile-phone users”, calling it a “war on Apple apps” 

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Apple and the iPhone have, for the time being at least, cornered the market on apps, so much so that there’s an “App Planet” at MWC, featuring exhibitors and developer conferences (with some noticeable holes in the Auditorium 2 schedule on Wednesday and Thursday, hmm).

We’re expecting app development to be a big part of Windows Phone 7 Series, with lots more news coming at Mix next month, but Microsoft may be making at least some developer/app related announcements at MWC, too.

Our friends over at Neowin.net have already posted about one tidbit, Windows Mobile Started Edition, and now there’s news of a new HTC WinMob 6.5 device, the HD Mini, coming from WMPowerUser.

We’ll be up early to check out the latest news, but you can follow along, too.  Here’s a list of links to MWC news:

Microsoft Press Conference

Windows Phone Press Conference live webcast (Monday Feb 15, 3pm CET (GMT +1))

Tom Warren and Long Zheng liveblog

Windows Phone Expert official liveblog

Official MWC News

GSMA Mobile Business Briefing News from MWC

GSMA Twitter account

More Twitter

#MWC or #MWC10 hashtag

#TMDP hashtag (just in case!)

Comments

  • http://www.techinch.com/ Matthew

    What I would like to see is apps that would work on absolutely everything … think Windows Mobile apps that could run in Windows! That would be great, and after all, a calculator, for instance, could be exactly the same on both. And if these would work on all oses (WM, Android, iPhone … Windows, MacOS, Linux), that would be amazing!

    However, I can’t imagine this would ever happen… :)

  • johnny223344

    lol @ Apple supporting global apps – It would never happen.

    Although im probably wrong, but wouldn’t QT be considered as close to this already. It runs on Symbian and Windows Mobile, and I’m sure android support will come soon enough