If viruses evolved as quickly as USB hard drive docks, mankind would be but a rotted pile of bones littered with the occasional bottle of green NyQuil.

The $80 Sharkoon SATA QuickPort Duo is a watershed in 2.5-inch/3.5-inch SATA to USB hard drive dock design as it transcends the accomplishments of yore with the incorporation of USB 3.0.

Some see USB 3.0 as merely a means to increase speed. The 2.5-inch/3.5-inch SATA to USB hard drive dock aficionado knows better. He knows that the construct of "speed" is but a means to quantify the flow of truth.

With USB 3.0, the 2.5-inch/3.5-inch SATA to USB hard drive dock has never been closer to enlightenment, nor have you. Remember this day; your grandchildren will thank you. [Sharkoon]

This is swanky. RIM's showing off BlackBerry's new WebKit-based browser, and yes, it's fast! JavaScript actually loads! It even scored a perfect 100 in the Acid3 rendering test. Still months away, but we'll take it. [BlackBerryRocks]

Leave it to a bunch of engineering students at Yale to design a crazy spokeless bike. It's not the first spokeless bike we've seen, but it looks a lot more like a real bike than past models.

Only the back wheel is spokeless, but that's just because they only had a limited amount of time and money to build this. It would be pretty simple to do what they did to the back wheel to the front wheel. As for how it works:

It's a single speed setup. We used two cranks and two bottom brackets in the front to gear up the ratio. It goes from (IIRC) 53 to a 13, which is connected to the second crank and another 53 which connects to the rear hub. The rear hub is just a normal ratcheting rear hub that we mated to our belt pulley. Not sure if all these bike terms are right, but that's the general idea.

The front wheel would be almost exactly the same as the rear wheel except that it could be a little lighter. Some of the aluminum can be shaved off since there's no powertrain to connect to.

[Reddit via Crunchgear]

The Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm is fast becoming the standard chip for smartphones—both Android and Windows Mobile—but surprisingly we haven't seen anything that can harness its performance in gaming. That may change this year, according to Qualcomm.

Speaking to Mobile-Entertainment at Mobile World Congress, their VP of product management, Mark Frankel, said:

"There will be, by the end of this year, specific game-centric platforms launched around Snapdragon"

"You'll be able to see clearly that gaming is the main focus of those devices. There'll be a category of gaming devices that hasn't been on the marketplace before using Snapdragon."

The lack of gaming-centric phones was something we were bemoaning recently, although that could change with the Xbox 360 integration in Windows Phone 7 Series. [Mobile-Entertainment]

Bunnie Huang, one of the minds behind the famous Chumby, encountered a strange production problem when building Chumby Ones with Kingston microSD cards—namely, some microSDs appeared to be dysfunctional counterfeits. The catch? They were bought directly from Kingston.

Huang's observations took him down a rabbit hole of microSD manufacturing, a fairly epic quest to discover the truth about Kingston's manufacturing process that, while never conclusive, had some interesting findings:

• Shopping around for Kingston cards from street vendors in China, some were obviously real and others were obvious fakes. But there were definite "irregular" gray area models—like those that caused low yields in Chumby production—that have questionable build quality likely due to Kingston enlisting the work of crumby production partners.

• Kingston appears to buy all the actual flash storage chips inside their microSD cards from Sandisk/Toshiba, yet they often still manage to undercut the microSD prices of manufacturers like Sandisk and Samsung. Of course, Kingston needs to make up the money somewhere, and the controller chip is the only other place that's possible. So Kingston may be stretching their thresholds of controller chip quality to make profitability possible—at minimum, the impetus is certainly there.

Of course, even if Kingston is padding supply chains with low-grade cards, I'm guessing such is more a worry for manufacturers (and purchasers of said manufacturers' products) than the random guy at Best Buy picking up a new microSD card, as Kingston probably champions the transparency of America's retail markets over the murky backwaters of Chinese industry. Probably. [Bunnie Studios via boingboing]

With Windows Phone 7 out, everyone has forgotten about the other Microsoft handsets, the allegedly Sidekick-derived Turtle and Pure cellphones. Someone got a peek into the firmware, which confirms some of the rumors about these "not-so-dumb cellphones".

• The user interface is done in Silverlight, which the cellphones will obviously support.
• Turtle—Pride in the CDMA version—will have a 320 x 240 resolution.
• Pure—Lion in the CDMA version—will have a 480 x 320 display.
• Both firmware are tied to Nvidia Tegra.
• They seem to run a Windows CE6 core.
• There are references to Premium Mobile Experiences all through the firmware.

With the strong push on social networks in Windows Phone 7, it feels like these are now outdated and out of place. [WMExperts]

As expected, the tricky question of "How we gonna get paid?" has reportedly become a sticking point in Apple's negotiations with newspaper and magazine publishers. Put simply, subscriber information is deeply valuable, and Apple doesn't want to to share it.

Demographics are everything to magazine (and blog) publishers. It's how you sell ads. Under the iTunes model, content producers receive sales numbers, and the money that goes with them. No credit card numbers, no addresses, no hint whatsoever of who's buying what. This does not sit well with publishers.

Also, while the 70 percent split makes book publishers giddy that they're controlling their own destiny since they can set prices (good luck with that, guys) newspaper dudes are understandably less thrilled about giving away a third of the subscription, since it's an ongoing payment. "Thirty per cent forever changes the economics," one exec told the Financial Times. Apple won't move on this point at all, apparently. Magazines are basically like apps to Apple. I'm sure the homogenization of content, conceptually speaking, sits very well with publishers and their precious, glossy pamphlets.

Since both the NYT and Conde Nast's Wired are both officially on board with launching iPad content, I'm curious if they've agreed to the terms that other publications are supposedly balking at, or if they have a different kind of deal—or if their deals are in fact still up in the air. (Update: The New York Times' is working through the same crisis, Gawker's discovered. Are they selling an app, for $10 a month, or a newspaper, for $30 a month? These are not merely financial questions, but existential ones, less than easily resolved.)

In the end, it'll get worked out. The glistening trickle of slobber sliding out of their lips gives the publishers away. They can't not be on Apple's glossy slab of the future. And then they'll privately grumble about how unhappy they are with the crappy deal they were forced into. But whatever, because they're just one app out of 140,000. [FT]

Not every gadget comes with an inbuilt solar charger, like the Puma Phone. XPAL's Solar Egg can do the job just fine, dangling from a keychain or belt-loop (if you dare) and charging to 90 per cent in four hours.

It doesn't even need a hot summer's day to do so, with XPAL claiming it works just as well in "medium levels of natural light." It's compatible with all types of gadgets with (presumably) a few cables included, and will be out in March. [XPAL via Engadget]

Even as Windows Phone has emerged from the Dark Ages, there's still a gaping chasm between BlackBerry and consumers, which RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis makes clear as he warns that people's phones need to use less of them internets.

"Manufacturers had better start building more efficient applications and more efficient services. There is no real way to get around this."

"If we don't start conserving that bandwidth, in the next few years we are going to run into a capacity crunch. You are already experiencing the capacity crunch in the United States."

"That is pretty fundamental to a carrier as that means you can have three paying Blackberry browsing customers for every one other customer."

"That has a huge advantage for the carriers if you think about the many billions of dollars the carriers have invested over the last five years in spectrum auctions and infrastructure rollouts."

Worrying more about carriers than people? You sound like AT&T.

Guess what? People want to do stuff with their phone, cool stuff like stream TV, download photos, upload a video of that crazy homeless guy saying crazy things in that crazy part of town. You know, the wonderfully awesome and connected future carriers have promised for years in pretty promos. There is no going back.

Fake Steve pretty much nailed it a few months ago, when AT&T was talking incentivizing people to use less data:

We've got people who love this goddamn phone so much that they're living on it. Yes, that's crushing your network. Yes, 3% of your users are taking up 40% of your bandwidth. You see this as a bad thing. It's not. It's a good thing. It's a blessing. It's an indication that people love what we're doing, which means you now have a reason to go out and double or triple or quadruple your damn network capacity. Jesus! I can't believe I'm explaining this to you. You're in the business of selling bandwidth. That pipe is what you sell. Right now what the market is telling you is that you can sell even more! Lots more! Good Lord. The world is changing, and you're right in the sweet spot.

Why would you even think about giving that up? Because carriers will like you more? RIM's bread-and-butter is corporate dollars, but you know what, so was Windows Mobile's. Keep thinking that way, and see how far it gets you. [Economic Times via 9to5Mac]

Fisher-Price's iXL is a learning tool for young'ns that lets them read interactively, draw, look at pictures and play games—pretty much everything your kids currently do on your iPhone but without you having to worry about jam-hands.

OK, the chunky clam shell gizmo doesn't owe much to the iPad in terms of physical design, but the applications it contains line up pretty closely with those of Apple's tablet. While Apple has evolved past the use of any input devices besides the ones attached to your palms, the iXL is a stylus-based gadget, geared towards three- to six-year-olds.

There are six programs that come loaded on the device: story book, game player, music player, art studio, note book, and photo album. All of them are geared towards learning and interactivity: the story book reads out loud and lights up words as they go along; the note book helps little ones hone their handwriting by providing upper case letters to trace; the art studio offers easy options for drawing with brushes or stamps on a variety of cartoon backgrounds.

Some of the programs are intended for landscape orientation and others portrait, with a little monkey chiming in when the mini-user is supposed to turn it.

All of the programs work snappily and have some neat features, and while they're intuitive to an adult, it still seems like this device offers an awful lot for a four-year-old to get the hang of. Adding to the complexity, more officially-licensed programs will be downloadable in months following launch. These, as well as audio files and pictures, can be loaded via USB or with the built-in SD card slot.

But maybe I'm selling kids short. In any event, if you're hoping to get your kid started on the gadget-obsessed track early, the iXL is a toy to check out. It will be available in October for the nice price of $79.99

Toy Fair is the annual event where we get to completely regress back to childhood and check out all of the awesome toys coming out for the rest of the year. And well, we love toys.

You think that your MacBook embodies the essence of simplicity because of it was painstakingly machined from a single slab of aluminum? Well, the Brick Lamp by HC Wang is pretty much just that slab of aluminum.

The Brick Lamp's controls couldn't be simpler. You want light? Place the lamp on one of its edges. You want dark? Place the lamp on its back.

Of course, while HC Wang may be on to something here, I'm pretty sure that I can take the design to the next level. How?

I'm going to remove the light. [HCWang via mocoloco via OhGizmo!]

Adding a USB hard drive to your PS3 or Xbox 360 isn't as simple as plugging it in (and on the 360 especially, it's pretty much a hack). But Datel's new Space Docks make the process simple.

Their Space Dock, available in PS3 and Xbox 360 versions, accepts 2.5" or 3.5" SATA HDDs (up to 1TB) just like cartridges before what we can only assume is an automatic formatting and file install process that allows stock drives to be instantly compatible.

Once installed, the drive mounts in your system to backup saved games (a feature that looks exclusive to PS3 version), play movies, etc, plus you can always plug the drive back into your PC to transfer more files since the formatting structure is really just FAT32.

$40, available soon and kind of neat. (Datel is free to use that catchy sales pitch, if they'd like.) [Datel via Maxconsole]

It's not the full thing, it doesn't fly on anti-gravity engines, and it doesn't include lots of wookie hair, but I definitely like this 11 by 8-inch Millennium Falcon released at Toy Fair. Why? Because the damn thing FLIES.

The remote-controlled Falcon comes with a charging controller, all for $50.

As we see in this first ever video, the Windows Phone 7 interface is filled with simple, beautiful animations not so dissimilar to the Zune HD. (We'll be updating this post as Microsoft shows us more.)

It's astounding that until this moment, three years after the iPhone, the biggest software company in the world basically didn't compete in mobile. Windows Phone 7 Series is more than the Microsoft smartphone we've been waiting for. Everything's different now.

Today, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft is publicly previewing Windows Phone 7 for the first time. The brand new, totally fresh operating system will appear in phones this year, but not until the holidays. All of the major wireless carriers and every likely hardware maker are backing it, and they'd be stupid not to. It's awesome. Further details are forthcoming, but here is what you need to know:

The name—Windows Phone 7 Series—is a mouthful, and unfortunately, the epitome of Microsoft's worst naming instincts, belying the simple fact that it's the most groundbreaking phone since the iPhone. It's the phone Microsoft should've made three years ago. In the same way that the Windows 7 desktop OS was nearly everything people hoped it would be, Windows Phone 7 is almost everything anyone could've dreamed of in a phone, let alone a Microsoft phone. It changes everything. Why? Now that Microsoft has filled in its gaping chasm of suck with a meaningful phone effort, the three most significant companies in desktop computing—Apple, Google and Microsoft—now stand to occupy the same positions in mobile. Phones are officially computers that happen to fit in your pocket.

Windows Phone 7 is also something completely new for Microsoft: A total break from the past. Windows Mobile isn't just dead, the body's been dumped, buried and paved over by a rainbow brick road.

The Interface

It's different. The face of Windows Phone 7 is not a rectangular grid of thumbnail-sized glossy-looking icons, arranged in a pattern of 4x4 or so, like basically every other phone. No, instead, an oversized set of bright, superflat squares fill the screen. The pop of the primary colors and exaggerated flatness produces a kind of cutting-edge crispness that feels both incredibly modern and playful. Text is big, and beautiful. The result is a feat no phone has performed before: Making the iPhone's interface feel staid.

If you want to know what it feels like, the Zune HD provides a taste: Interface elements that run off the screen; beautiful, oversized text and graphics; flipping, panning, scrolling, zooming from screen to screen; broken hearts. Some people might think it's gratuitous, but I think it feels natural and just…fun. There's an incredible sense of joie de vivre that's just not in any other phone. It makes you wish that this was aesthetic direction all of Microsoft was going in.

Windows Phone 7 is connected in the same sense as Palm's webOS and Android, with live, real-time data seamlessly integrated, though it's even smoother and more natural. Live tiles on the Start screen are updated dynamically with fresh content, like weather, or if you've pinned a person to your Start screen, their latest status updates and photos.

The meat of the phone is organized around a set of hubs: People, Pictures, Games, Music + Video, Marketplace, and Office. They're kind of like uber-applications, in a sense. Massive panoramas with multiple screens that are kind of like individual apps. People, for instance, isn't just your contacts, but it's also where social networking happens, with a real-time stream of updates from like Facebook and Windows Live. (No Twitter support announced yet, it appears—a kind of serious deficiency, but one we're sure will be remedied by ship date.)

As another example, Music + Video is essentially the entirety of Zune HD's software, tucked inside of Windows Phone 7.

A piece of interface that's shockingly not there: A desktop syncing app. If anyone would be expected to tie their phone to a desktop, you'd think it'd be Microsoft, but they're actually moving forward here. All of your contacts and info sync over the air. The only thing you'll be syncing through your computer is music and videos, which is mercifully done via the Zune client.

Hello, Connected World

The People hub might be the best social networking implementation yet on a phone: It's a single place to see all of your friends' status updates from multiple services in a single stream, and to update your own Facebook and Windows Live status. Needs. Twitter support. Badly. But you have neat things going on, like the aforementioned live tiles—if you really like someone or want to stalk them hardcore, you can make them a tile on your Start screen, which will update in realtime with whatever they're posting, and pull down their photos from whatever service.

All of your contacts are synced and backed up over-the-air, Android and webOS style, and can be pulled from multiple sources, like Windows Live, Exchange, etc. Makes certain other phones seem a little antiquated with their out-of-the-box Contacts situation.

Holy Crap! The Zune Phone!

Microsoft's vision of Zune is finally clear with Windows Phone 7. It's an app, just like iPod is on the iPhone, though the Zune Marketplace is integrated with it into the music + video hub, not separated into its own little application. It's just like the Zune HD, so you can check out our review of that to see what it's like. But you get third-party stuff like Pandora too built-in here. Oh, and worth mentioning, there will be an FM radio in every phone (more on that in a bit).

Pictures is a little different though, and gets its very own hub. That's because it's intensely connected—you can share photos and video with social networks straight from the hub, and via the cloud, they're kept in sync with your PC and web galleries. The latest photos your friends post also show up here. Of course, you get around with multitouch zoom and scrolling stuff too.

Xbox, on a Phone

I'll admit, I very nearly needed to change my pants when I saw the Xbox tile on the phone for the first time. Obviously, you're not going to be playing Halo 3 on your smartphone (at least not this year), but yes, Xbox Live on a phone! It's tied to your Live profile, and there are achievements and gamer points for the games you can play on your phone, which will be tied to games back on your Xbox 360.

If Microsoft's got an ace-in-hole with Windows Phone 7, it's Xbox Live. Gamers have talked about a portable Xbox for years—this is the most logical way to do it. The N-Gage was ahead of its time. (Okay, and it sucked.) The DS and PSP are the past. The iPhone showed us that the future of mobile gaming was going to be on your phone, and now that just got a lot more interesting.

Browser and Email

Yes, the browser is Internet Exploder. And yes, the rumor's true: It won't be as fast as Mobile Safari. Not to start. But it's not bad! Hey, least it's got multitouch powers right out of the box. Naturally, you've got multiple browser windows, and you can pin web pages to the Start screen, like any other decent mobile browser.

The Outlook email app makes me question how people read email on a BlackBerry. It is stunning. I never thought I'd call a mail app "stunning," but, well, it kind of is. It's the best looking mobile mail app around. Text is huge. Gorgeous. Ultrareadable. Of course, it's got Exchange support too.

Apps, Office and Marketplace

Remember what I said earlier about Windows Mobile being dead? So are all the apps. They won't work on WP7. Sorry Windows Mobile developers, it's for the best. Deep down, we all knew a clean break was the only way Windows Phone wasn't going to suck total balls.

The Marketplace is where you'll buy apps. Since we've got like 6 months 'til Windows Phone 7 launches and people should be excited to develop for it, hopefully there'll be plenty of stuff to buy there on day one. Apps have some standardized interface elements, like the app bar on the bottom for common commands.

Naturally, Bing and Bing Maps are built into the phone as the default search and maps services. They're nice. Bing's also used for universal search on the phone, via a dedicated Bing button. Bing Maps is multitouchable, with pinch-to-zoom. It's rich, with built-in listings with reviews and clever ways of searching for stuff. And yeah, Office! It's connected to that cloud thing, for OTA syncing and such. Business people should be happy.

Hardware and Partnahs

Another way the old Windows Mobile is dead is how Microsoft's handling partners and hardware situation. With Windows Mobile, a phonemaker handed Microsoft their monies, and Microsoft tossed them a software kit, and that was that. Which is why a lot of Windows Mobile phones felt and ran like crap. And why it took HTC like two years to produce the HD2, the most genuinely usable rendition of Windows Mobile ever.

Microsoft's not building their own phones, but they're going to be picky, to say the least, with Windows Phone 7. There's a strict set of minimum hardware requirements—a capacitive, multitouchable screen, for example—and benchmarks that have to be met. Every phone will have a Bing button and an FM radio. Custom skins, like the minor miracles HTC worked, are now banned. The message to hardware makers is clear: It's a Windows Phone, you're just putting it together. Basically, phonemakers get to decide the shape and whether or not there's a keyboard.

One other word on hardware, in a manner of speaking. Hardware it won't work with? Macs. Which is kind of stupid to us—a lot of the people Microsoft wants to use Windows Phone 7, like college students, have been going Mac in droves. You wanna lure them back Microsoft? Let them use your phone with any OS.

The Big Picture

Windows Phone 7 Series is, from what we've seen, exactly what Microsoft's phone should be. It's actually good. But there's a real, lingering question: Are they too late? The first Windows Phone 7 Series…phone—goddamn that is a stupid name—won't hit until the end of this year. That's more than three years after the iPhone, two years after Android, hell, even a year after Palm, the industry's sickly but persistent dwarf.

History is on Microsoft's side here—we know what happened the last time Apple had a massive head start. Microsoft is, if nothing else, incredibly patient. Remember the first Xbox? Back when it was crazy that Microsoft was getting into videogames? It's cost them about a billion dollars and taken nearly 10 years, but now, with Xbox Live, Project Natal and their massive software ecosystem, they arguably have the most impressive gaming console you can buy. That was a pet project. Now, mobile is the future of computing. What do you think Microsoft will sink into that?

The mobile picture is now officially a three-way dance: Apple, Google, and Microsoft. The same people who dominant desktop computing. Everybody else is screwed. Former Palm CEO Ed Colligan famously said a few years ago: "PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in." That's precisely what's just happened. Phones are the new PCs. PC guys are the new phone guys.

[Microsoft]

Steve Ballmer. Aggressive. Unpredictable. Highly territorial. He'll be unveiling Windows Phone 7 today, Microsoft's smartphone that looks every bit as bold as Ballmer. And you can watch the press conference live starting at 9am Eastern right here:

[Microsoft Livestream and Image]

At last, the Missile Defense Agency Airborne Laser has killed an actual ballistic missile in mid-air. The best part: They recorded it in video. This is not Star Wars pew-pew. It actually looks like the Enterprise's phasers.

It happened February 11, 8:44 Pacific Standard Time, at the Point Mugu Naval Air Warfare Center-Weapons Division Sea Range off the central California coast. The missile—representing a SCUD—launched from a platform at sea. Second later, the Airborne Laser Test Bed's sensors—flying on a Boeing 747-400F—detected the launch, tracking its trajectory with a low-energy tracking laser. A second laser was focused ont he missile to measure the atmospheric disturbance, gathering data to achieve the perfect firing solution.

Seconds later, the ALTC unleashed its megawatt-class High Energy Laser, causing a massive structural failure in the missile as it was rising in the sky. In other words: Boom. The engagement took only two minutes, demonstrating that this weapon will be extremely useful in destroying waves of missiles, one after the other. Like Missile Command, but from the air. [Boeing and Lockheed Martin]

BUG 2.0, the second version of Bug Labs' Lego set for hardware hobbyists, is here, and it's two things the first one wasn't: blazing fast—and powerful as a Droid, to be specific—and ready for Android.

The newest version of the BUGBase, the brain and nerve center of any and all BUG-based Frankengadgets, has been upgraded to TI's OMAP 3 platform, bringing the base up to speed, in terms of processing power, with the likes of the Droid and Palm Pre. Now that the BUGBase has the power of a high-end smartphone, it's only appropriate that it'd support Android, which it does, and which gives any BUG device the potential, if not immediate access, to tap into the endless potential of the App Market.

There's no release date or price on the new BUGbase yet, but the transition should be seamless—though it'll replace your old BUGbase complete, any other BUG modules, be they touch displays, WI-Fi radios, GPS receivers or speakers, will work straight away. [Bug Labs via Crunchgear]

When Samsung first announced their Bada OS cellphone operating system I thought they were crazy. After seeing their flagship Bada OS phone—the Samsung Wave—in action, I don't think they are crazy anymore. They are suicidal.

I will have to try it myself, but just looking at this hands on is making me cringe. [Mobile Review]

AT&T, Orange, Telefónica, China Mobile, Verizon, Sprint, and several more carriers have announced the formation of the Wholesale Applications Community, which aims to create a viable alternative to Apple's walled-garden approach to apps.

They'll be joined on the hardware side by LG, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson as they attempt to create an open system for app development and distribution. What they lack in momentum they make up for in mass: combined, the alliance services more than three billion customers worldwide.

There's no question that apps are big business, especially for Apple, but to date it's been largely limited to Apple and, to a lesser extent, the Android Market. The Wholesale Applications Community plans to initially use JIL and OMTP BONDI requirements to work towards a common standard within a year. Eventually, they hope to establish a common standard where apps can be ported across mobile platforms.

The amount of fragmentation in the app world has only been increasing, so it should be a relief to developers and consumers to see an effort to streamline the process while at the same time opening it up. It'll be interesting, though, to see how quickly and effectively they can pull actual standards together. With that many chefs, it can be hard not to spoil the soup.

Leading Operators Unite to Unleash Global Apps Potential

Wholesale Applications Community to push apps market to over 3 billion customers with strong support by world-leading device manufacturers

BARCELONA, Spain—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Twenty-four leading telecommunications operators have formed the Wholesale Applications Community, an alliance to build an open platform that delivers applications to all mobile phone users.

"This approach is completely in line with the principles of the GSMA, and in fact leverages the work we have already undertaken on open network APIs (OneAPI). This is tremendously exciting news for our industry and will serve to catalyse the development of a range of innovative cross-device, cross-operator applications."

América Móvil, AT&T, Bharti Airtel, China Mobile, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, KT, mobilkom austria group, MTN Group, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, Orascom Telecom, Softbank Mobile, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telenor Group, TeliaSonera, SingTel, SK Telecom, Sprint, Verizon Wireless, VimpelCom, Vodafone and Wind are committed to create an ecosystem for the development and distribution of mobile and internet applications irrespective of device or technology.

Together, these operators have access to over three billion customers around the world. The GSMA and three of the world's largest device manufacturers – LG Electronics, Samsung and Sony Ericsson – also support this initiative.

The Wholesale Applications Community aims to unite a fragmented marketplace and create an open industry platform that benefits everybody – from applications developers and network operators to mobile phone users themselves.

The alliance's stated goal is to create a wholesale applications ecosystem that – from day one – will establish a simple route to market for developers to deliver the latest innovative applications and services to the widest possible base of customers around the world. In the immediate future the alliance will seek to unite members' developer communities and create a single, harmonised point of entry to make it easy for developers to join.

"The GSMA is fully supportive the Wholesale Applications Community, which will build a new, open ecosystem to spur the creation of applications that can be used regardless of device, operating system or operator," said Rob Conway, CEO and Member of the Board, GSMA. "This approach is completely in line with the principles of the GSMA, and in fact leverages the work we have already undertaken on open network APIs (OneAPI). This is tremendously exciting news for our industry and will serve to catalyse the development of a range of innovative cross-device, cross-operator applications."

Jonathan Arber, Senior Research Analyst at independent analyst house, IDC, said: "Attracting and retaining developers is vital for any application store offering to succeed. However, mobile application developers currently face a high level of fragmentation in the industry, in terms of both technology platforms, and individual operators' working practices. Developers want to meet the largest possible addressable market, as efficiently and painlessly as possible, and the Wholesale Applications Community initiative can meet these criteria by providing a simple, single point of access to a large number of operator storefronts. The initiative should also help to drive uptake of existing, open standards among developers, operators and manufacturers, thereby reducing fragmentation and benefiting the whole industry."

The alliance plans to initially use both the JIL and OMTP BONDI requirements, evolving these standards into a common standard within the next 12 months. Ultimately, we will collectively work with the W3C for a common standard based on our converged solution to truly ensure developers can create applications that port across mobile device platforms, and in the future between fixed and mobile devices.

The alliance will serve as one point of contact for the industry and is open to all relevant parties – from telecommunications operators and device manufacturers to internet service providers and application software developers. For more information go to http://www.wholesaleappcommunity.com or email info@wholesaleappcommunity.com.