Study results:
* 8% of all mobile users globally use MIM, with the highest number of users in Hong Kong (23%)
* now 11 out of every 100 messages sent by mobile devices or fixed PC globally are instant messages
* among the people who use MIM, it is the most used feature on their phone: 61% use it daily, compared to only 55% who use SMS and only 12% use email on their phone daily

Also in China and some developing countries, MIM adoption is leapfrogging other communication means.

Mobile Instant Messaging a threat for SMS?
These findings challenge the strategies of the mobile operators in European countries that have heavily benefited from SMS usage. Do they try and keep consumers focused on SMS to maintain their revenue base, or offer consumers more choice in messaging? With increasing internet functionality on new mobile phones, and MIM’s strong mass market appeal, operators may have no choice but to promote this feature more widely.

Lots of good news there on what the mobile future might look like for Europe and America.

Now two years later (in November 2007) Google announced their Open Handset Alliance:

• http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/

Instead of using the standards-based Java Micro Edition (JME) as an engine to run Java applications, Google wrote its own virtual machine for Android, calling it Dalvik. There are technical advantages and disadvantages to using Dalvik, developers say, but technology may not have been the driver for Google.

Google most likely built Dalvik as a way to get around licensing issues with Sun that would have come with using JME, said Stefano Mazzocchi, a developer and board member at Apache Labs.

Phone makers that incorporate JME into their phones must license the technology from Sun if they intend to make any modifications to it, Mazzocchi said. A phone maker could freely use JME under an open source license if it shares innovations to the software with the community, but most large handset makers are reluctant to do that, he said.

Rather than require phone makers to license JME as part of Android, Mazzocchi said, Google built its own virtual machine. Dalvik converts Java bytecodes into Dalvik bytecodes.

Some might now ask “What about all the operators who’ve joined the alliance?”. Honestly, I have no idea. Why would carriers join a venture that proposes to finally give customers the advantage?. I really really hope that it will be open and that carriers won’t start removing bits and pieces of freedom.

Now since we’ve hit the subject of devices, apparently HTC will be the first to offer us one, somewhere in the first half of 2008. Palm, who’ve been trying to create their own linux-based mobile operating system but repeatedly failed to deliver, said they wouldn’t be switching to Android. They will, still, integrate Google applications in their devices.

• http://code.google.com/android/
• http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rYozIZOgDk

Nokia Siemens Networks said the test confirms that LTE performance requirements can be met using 3GPP standardized technologies and it realized data rates of more than 100 Mega bits per second over distances of several hundred meters, while maintaining excellent throughput at the edge of typical urban mobile radio cells.

Source: http://www.convergedigest.com/Wireless/broadbandwirelessarticle.asp?ID=23361

see: http://www.ctia.org/blog/