Microsoft unveils new mobile alliances

Microsoft used the first day of this year's 3GSM World Congress to promote new alliances with large mobile hardware players.

But the Redmond giant has its work cut out in getting its software into the majority of the world's handsets.

Nokia, which currently enjoys over a third of the global market, prefers the rival Symbian operating system.

Symbian also has the financial backing of companies such as Ericsson, Motorola and Panasonic, further illustrating what the PC giant is up against.

At 3GSM today Samsung joined the alliance, paying £17m for a five per cent stake in Symbian, further denting Microsoft's ambitions.

Nethertheless, Juha Christensen, corporate vice president of the mobility group at Microsoft, trumpeted the new deals.

He told 3GSM delegates that Microsoft had just signed a mobile original equipment manufacturer deal with Wistrom, which makes some of Dell's hardware products.

This will see it build Microsoft's new Smartphones, which will be powered by Intel chips and run Windows. Microsoft hopes these will help increase its share in the mobile market.

Microsoft has recently made much of its involvement in the launch of Orange's full-colour SPV Multi-media Messaging Service and HTML internet phone.

Christensen said that Microsoft would use this reference design to launch a new Pocket PC with Samsung.

It will also soon launch a European-wide smartphone with German operator T-Mobile, which will compete squarely against Orange's SPV. T-Mobile said it would add its own services to the device.

Microsoft's hardware and software reference design for this deal is similar in look to the Orange SPV, and will also use microprocessors from Intel running Pocket Office and Pocket PC.

Although the Orange SPV, which has been nominated at the 3GSM Awards, has been acclaimed as a groundbreaker, because it offers many data and picture services and allows users to surf the public internet with a large colour screen, it has many shortcomings.

For instance, users cannot access web-based email from providers such as Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL with the current browser. Orange has stated that Freeserve is its "preferred" webmail connection.

In addition, websites that use frames cannot be accessed, and the keyboard has tiny keys which make it difficult to navigate while surfing.