Ericsson, Motorola and Siemens have announced plans to develop an
industry initiative to define a universal mobile games platform,
using existing and emerging standards. They expect it to help
mobile operators offer a broad selection of games content and to
provide developers with a standardised platform.
Mobile operators and developers of mobile games are faced with
an overwhelming array of choices for mobile game services and lack
a platform that is open, standard and extensible. Without such a
platform, operators face greater complexity and cost in offering a
wide range of games that access their network functionality, such
as billing, authentication and location services.
The new initiative will focus initial efforts on agreeing upon
open Applications Programming Interfaces (APIs) and a Software
Development Kit (SDK), which, once developed, will be available to
software developers subject to license. The three companies expect
to have specifications available in the third quarter of this
year.
Once the initiative is formally launched, Ericsson, Motorola and
Siemens plan to work with other industry leaders and innovators to
extend the benefits of this universal games platform, including
mobile phone and infrastructure vendors, platform technology
providers, games developers, mobile operators, games service
providers and systems integrators.
"We're seeing that developers of mobile games are resorting to
writing their own platforms or having to multiply the efforts to
support many platforms," said Tim Krauskopf, vice president and
general manager of Core Solutions for Motorola's Internet Software
and Content Group. "As a result, costs are increasing and
distribution options are limited. As an industry we need to provide
an integrated development environment that unites mobile networks,
devices and game servers as a mass market games console."
"One of the Siemens IC Mobile objectives is to make it possible
for users in Tokyo to sit and play a multi-player game with some
friends in Washington and Munich at the same time, on different
networks and platforms, with various models of mobile phones," said
Thorsten Heins, President of Solutions within the Siemens
Information and Communication Mobile Group.
Ericsson, Motorola, and Siemens have agreed to work with
development tools organisation Metrowerks to support this platform
with the company's CodeWarrior Integrated Development Environment
(IDE). CodeWarrior is used by the majority of developers for Sony
Playstation 2, Nintendo GameCube, and Palm OS, and also supports
Java and Symbian.
Mobile giants support WAP/internet convergence
Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson, Siemens and other industry leaders in
the mobile communications and content industries last week
announced that they are supporting XHTML (Extensible Hyper Text
Markup Language) as the format for the future evolution of mobile
services. The companies also expressed their intention to develop
products, content and services based on the XHTML language. XHTML
is described as the natural evolution of the Wireless Application
Protocol (WAP), which converges WAP with the fixed internet.
In addition to handset manufacturers, mobile operators have also
announced support for XHTML, including Vodafone and Orange.
