Cibenix, the well known Symbian developers have announced "Access Point" - a solution targeted at mobile operators to brand and customise Smartphones.
Access Point is a software solution through which operators can optimise handsets, increasing the operator's presence on the handset through branding and customisations. Using Access Point operators have the opportunity to differentiate their mobile phone offerings, grow brand awareness, and boost usage of revenue generating products and services. The solution provides an 'always on' channel through which the operator has access to its customers.
More details are available at the recently updated Cibenix Website http://www.cibenix.com/
One thing that concerns me about operators using Always-On technology is whether or not the user will be charged for receiving stuff they don't want, like, would I be charged for Vodafone letting me know that a new product is now available in their online shop?
Which of course wouldn;t be a problem if Orange still had their original SMS pricing structure. When they launched, to send SMS was �5 a month, and that let you send unlimited texts.
But of course, in todays market when they have much more spare capacity on the network to do this, they're going to extract only 40 texts for �5...
Pity.
I have to say I'm not sure how popular this srt of thing will be with the end users. I think it largely depends on the user type. The knowledgable power user won't like this, but the novice user might not care / mind.
I think it could popular with the operators - anything that increases ARPU will be good for them, and it be nice to see a Symbian developer doing well.
Rafe
Tha majority of services are cost driven - ie the aim is to increase the ARPU in any way possible (Average Revenu Per User - seeing as Rafe didn't welcome the newbies to the HOTA (The Hell of Techinal Acronyms). Anything that gets people spending money will encourage networks to support certain phones, so this software can only be a good thting for Nokia and the Networks.
I'm never going to install it though.