Witness the first Ukrainian International Mobile Monday hosted by QArea Group (www.QArea.com) and Talent Control (www.TalentControl.com).

Kyiv, Ukraine -- (ReleaseWire) -- 09/22/2006 -- Mobile Monday is an open business community of mobile professionals uniting the representatives of different companies in IT, mobile and telecommunication industries. Mobile developers, service providers, mobile content providers and mobile software developers come together on Mobile Mondays to share their vision of local mobile markets and discuss their globalization. Mobile Monday conferences enable companies just entering the high-tech market as well as experienced players to expand their business network, share experience and find common cooperation opportunities.

This year Mobile Monday reached Ukraine, the country which has already proved itself to be the most dynamic in Europe. In 2005, the number of its mobile users grew twice; two new mobile operators introduced their services to Ukrainians and won great positions. Major 'mobile players' launched EDGE, CDMA, 3G technologies and organized the most active PR campaigns which involved the companies in politics, sports, international affairs... Now the mobile potential of Ukraine has been acknowledged by the world mobile community. On September 25 we are going to discover what is happening on Ukrainian mobile market... Are there any innovations and does 'mobile Ukraine' have ambitions?

We welcome such speakers as Stephen Ives (Great Britain), Taptu, Founder and CEO; Dirk Avau (Belgium), BirchBob, Founder; Oksana Ferchuk (Ukraine), Telesystems of Ukraine, Marketing and Sales Director; Anatoliy Akulenko (Ukraine), PrivatBank, Head of Privat:Mobile and Kristina Chaykovskaya, PrivatBank, Head of Technologies Development.

Our special thanks goes to Jari Tammisto from Finland, the Founder of Mobile Monday Community who will come for Mobile Monday launch in Ukraine!

We will discuss: Key trends in mobile technology; 3G and 4G; Mobile tariff trends; Mobile music; Mobile security and passwording, etc.

Would like to know more? Visit the official MoMo Ukraine website:
www.MobileMonday.com.ua

Mobile Monday Ukraine presentation is available here:
www.mobilemonday.com.ua/mobilemonday-presentation.html

Looking forward to meeting you at Mobile Monday Ukraine!

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

Perspectives of Wireless Marketing Wars - Who will Be the Winner?

Kharkov, Ukraine -- (ReleaseWire) -- 06/02/2006 -- According to the research held by analytics company Canalys the market of "smart" mobile devices in Europe, Near East and Africa grows more rapidly than market of mobile phones. Within the first half of 2005 9.6 million of smartphones and PDAs were sold compared to 3.6 million during the same period of the previous year. Such trend is observed worldwide – almost 70 million full feature handsets are sold worldwide. According to analysts the two main processes in progress stipulate such growth at the moment. On the one hand, ordinary users interchange their old smartphones and PDAs to newer ones. On the other hand, there is an upsurge in interest in mobile E-mail and extended abilities of smart mobile devices from companies and corporations.

Modern smart mobile systems are to be: always available (small sized / handy), always On (optimized memory usage, minimal battery use), extensible (new software can be added if necessary), affordable, and of various form factors. Moreover, a smart mobile device should combine the maximum of mobile technologies available at the moment: GPS, VoIP, Bluetooth, IrDa, GPRS/EDGE, Wi-Fi, mobile E-mail, support of HTTP protocol, MP3 etc. This is a vast domain for competition among manufacturers of operation systems for smartphones and PDAs.

There are several very large players in this market: Symbian OS, BREW OS, Blackberry OS, Windows Mobile OS and Palm OS etc.

Experts' Area
Ulf Morys, General Manager at Gameloft GmbH:

" - Symbian: more important in the future, but still niche market (Nokia market share ca. 33 % overall; not more than 1/3 of this Symbian phones & some other Symbian phones). Overall optimistic estimate: ca. 10 % of total newly sold phone base.
- BlackBerry: interesting for business / productivity applications; no mass market.
- WindowsCE: difficult to judge. Microsoft will keep pushing it's platform, but results were often unsatisfactory in the past; make sure that the partners can actually bill for applications delivered to this platform. We've seen problems with this.
- BREW: real mass market potential in US and Chinese market, not very relevant for European market."

SYMBIAN

SYMBIAN – is a software licensing company that develops and supplies the advanced, open, standard operating system – Symbian OS – for data-enabled mobile phones and PDAs.

As of September 2005 60 phones that run under Symbian OS from eight manufacturers are shipped worldwide and a further 56 phones from eleven manufacturers (among them Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, BenQ and Motorola) were in development. Symbian OS is an undisputed sales leader in Europe and has a strong market share in other countries. Currently Symbian's market share is 55.9 per cent from worldwide sales (according to IDC analytics company), at that 82 per cent of devices were manufactured by Nokia (in whole since 2005 beginning there were sold approximately 34 million data enabled devices with Symbian OS on board).

Experts' Area

Philip Solis, ABI Research senior analyst, author of the study "Smartphones: The Market for Smartphones and Smartphone Operating Systems":

"Symbian's chief advantages are that it is easy to build applications for, and that it has a large developer community. Disadvantages are that Symbian is primarily limited to Nokia handsets, and its market is concentrated in "GSM-heavy" regions."

19 of 60 devices with Symbian OS support WCDMA. By the way, smartphone Nokia 6680 is recognized a 3G world bestseller telephone.

Key features of Symbian OS

Rich suite of application engines – the suite includes engines for contacts, schedule, messaging, browsing, utility and system control; OBEX for exchanging objects such as appointments (using vCalendar) and business cards (vCard); integrated APIs for data management, text, clipboard and graphics
Browsing – supports WAP 1.2.1 for mobile browsing
Messaging – multimedia messaging (MMS), enhanced messaging (EMS) and SMS; internet mail using POP3, IMAP4, SMTP and MHTML; attachments; fax
Multimedia – audio and video support for recording, playback and streaming; image conversion
Graphics – direct access to screen and keyboard for high performance; graphics accelerator API
Communications protocols – wide-area networking stacks including TCP/IP (dual mode IPv4/v6) and WAP, personal area networking support include infrared (IrDA), Bluetooth® wireless technology and USB; support is also provided for multihoming capabilities and link layer Quality-of-Service (QoS) on GPRS/UMTS networks
Mobile telephony – Symbian OS is ready for the 3G market with support for GSM circuit switched voice and data (CSD and EDGE ECSD) and packet-based data (GPRS and EDGE EGPRS); CDMA circuit switched voice, data and packet-based data (IS-95, cdma2000 1x, and WCDMA); SIM, RUIM and UICC Toolkit; other standards can be implemented by licensees through extensible APIs of the telephony subsystem
International support – conforms to Unicode Standard version 3.0
Data synchronization – over-the-air (OTA) synchronization support using SyncML; PC-based synchronization over serial, Bluetooth® wireless technology, Infrared and USB; a PC Connectivity framework providing the ability to transfer files and synchronize PIM data
Security – full encryption and certificate management, secure protocols (HTTPS, WTLS and SSL and TLS), WIM framework and certificate-based application installation
Developing for Symbian OS – content development options include: C++, Java (J2ME) MIDP 2.0 and PersonalJava 1.1.1a (with JavaPhone 1.0 option), and WAP; tools are available for building C++ and Java applications and ROMs with support for on-target debugging
User Inputs – generic input mechanism supporting full keyboard, 0-9*# (numeric mobile phone keypad), voice, handwriting recognition and predictive text input.

BREW

BREW - Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless is a combination OS, application platform, and marketing system. BREW started with QUALCOMM-based CDMA chipsets and technology – a vast market – but BREW is independent of the wireless technology utilized by a particular handset or network and can support other wireless technologies. Ideally, BREW can work with any device, and Qualcomm is planning to port it to Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). Qualcomm is trying to remove the gap between GSM and CDMA operators. As CDMA strengthened hand, the GSM lobby propped its own version of CDMA which they named WCDMA (Wideband CDMA). WCDMA has been launched in a group of countries (80 operators in 29 countries), and many more are gearing to launch it within this year, it is already successfully running in countries like Korea, Japan, China, India, Brazil and in some parts of North America.

So far prevalent in the CDMA domain, BREW is gradually transiting to the GSM bastion of Europe as the continent's operators introduce 3G services based on WCDMA (by the end of year 2005 the number of WCDMA networks users worldwide increased by 2,6 times compared to December 31, 2004 and reached 43,81 million users). Such a scenario could make Qualcomm a worldwide flag carrier in mobile market. In all, 40 commercial BREW device manufacturers (Audiovox, Kyocera, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, BenQ etc.) offer over 135 BREW-enabled devices – as of January, 2006 according to Qualcomm. Almost 10% of all handsets shipped worldwide are BREW compatible and the number of application downloads (May 2005) exceeds 300 million. The success of BREW has been built on CDMA platforms of major mobile operators, including Verizon Wireless, China Unicom, Telstra and KDDI.

Regardless of platform, BREW requires little memory (150KB), which makes BREW applications workable even on low-end phones.

BREW provides basic capabilities for such advanced services as GPS, VoIP, Bluetooth 1.1, MP3 and MIDI support, video recording and playback, multimedia streaming, e-mail. The set of BREW services includes communication capabilities of TCP/UDP sockets, HTTP protocol support, SMS-MMS services, extended telephony capabilities. BREW supports several programming languages including Java, and via extensions BREW understands C/C++, interactive animation Flash and XML.

The Wall Street Journal paralleled BREW with Microsoft Windows in wireless communication domain.

Experts' Area

Victoria Alexandrova, Project Manager, PDA applications Department of QArea Company: "Who I see a winner? Symbian, of course. It is convenient, applicable, multi functional and easy for understanding. However, if I were in the USA I definitely would rather use BlackBerry, since they provide top quality service."

BLACKBERRY

BLACKBERRY – is a proprietary operating system, provided by RIM (Research in Motion, Canada), for the BlackBerry devices and BlackBerry enabled devices (BlackBerry email is already on a few handsets including Siemens SK65, Nokia 6820/6822, Motorola MPx220). BlackBerry is one of the leading wireless solutions, which allows users to stay connected with wireless access to email, corporate data, phone, web and organizer features. The true power of BlackBerry is mailbox integration. BlackBerry can integrate seamlessly with a user's existing corporate or personal email account providing a wireless extension of their regular e-mailbox.

The first BlackBerry was released in early 1999. The first BlackBerry with integrated cell phone, as well as the first BlackBerry sold outside of North America was released in 2001, using the European GSM/GPRS standard. RIM at the moment has a very dominant position in the mobile email market. BlackBerry is used worldwide, available from 95 wireless carriers in 40 countries. In November 2004, RIM announced the number of subscribers to the BlackBerry service to have reached two million, having doubled within ten months. Proceeding their steady growth, RIM announced an additional one million subscribers in May 2005, only six months after having reached two million.

Experts' Area

Rudy de Waele, CEO at Random One (R1):

"The market is going more Symbian due to the strategic moves Symbian did with S60 platform, delivering Symbian to various devices of different brand manufacturers and Nokia's latest partnership with Vodafone to increase the use of S60 as a standard software platform.

Windows Mobile is going to catch up bit by bit, they have the market advantage in US and they can benefit from the Microsoft PC/Mobile synchronization that becomes more and more popular and is a crucial element for the success of mobile data services, but I don't see them getting quickly at the same level of Symbian on a global level, it's going to take at least 4-5 years for them to catch-up, if ever they will...

Meanwhile I don't see a bright future for Palm OS, neither BREW, though BREW is still quite strong in the market due to Qualcomm strength on the market.

Nobody can compete with Symbian as of now, their competitors will have to come up with a stronger OS and that doesn't look obvious.

At last, don't forget about Linux who has a lot of potential, specifically in mobile, I see a bright and growing future for them."

No wonder, RIM manufactures a top notch device (with BlackBerry OS on board) that is secure, stable, and dominates market share with state and local government, the military, and with commercial corporations. In 2005 RIM was the first largest PDA supplier, and their technology BlackBerry occupied the second place among OS manufacturers giving Microsoft product the go-by.

RIM develops its own software for its devices, using C++ and Java technology. Third party developers applications must be digitally signed, that guarantees the application authorship.

Available services are: Wireless Email Service, Wireless Calendar Service, Wireless Internet (HTML and WAP formats) Services, Voice and SMS, Mobile Data Service, Attachment Service, Instant Messenger, GPS Service, Bluetooth etc.

The full feature handsets market is hard to predict, however almost all analysts predict steady and increasing growth of this market (which is observed at the moment). Each manufacturer aspires to create a common OS to globalize and standardize application development, distribution and management (as they say) to develop applications for all but not for each distinct device. Some people welcome such opportunity and some are bothered by possible monopolization and subsequent abuses in this domain. What is observed at the moment that each of the manufacturers had occupied a distinct characteristic niche, where he is successful, and already from there with mixed success tries to "conquer" the mobile wireless world.

Experts' Area

Alexei Golovashov, Senior QA Engineer, QArea Group:

"BlackBerry? One of its main advantages is an advanced ergonomics both of the device itself and its software. The user interface, as of today, I suppose, is one of the best among developed for PDA devices. While its main disadvantage is absence of memory card. Absence of the latter means that it can not be used for other purposes, it is narrow directed. I use my Symbian as MP3 player and to watch movies. I will not be able to use BlackBerry for that even if I want to. BlackBerry is convenient only for business domain, I guess, while Symbian also can be used as a game platform, and its a rather essential part of users who use it that way. BREW, from my point of view, has no bright future at all. J2ME is that well-developed that nobody pays attention to BREW. Furthermore, all BREW applications are to be certified, that complicates their usage and distribution," - says Alexei Golovashov, QArea's Senior QA Engineer.

What then

The whole world, and wireless market in particular, moves toward high speeds, multiple functions and extended business possibilities. 3G networks is the next inevitable stage of mobile market development. It provides plenty of capabilities both for business and entertainment, communication and data transfer, Internet access and mobile e-mailing. Most of 3G devices should combine all available 3G technologies to be competitive. This factor will also affect the development of devices and operating systems for them. As we can see, the mobile market requires a device that could fullest reveal the capabilities of next generation mobile networks 3G and 4G. These numbers are dramatic confirmation of 3G leading position: 173 Commercial 3G Operators in 75 Countries worldwide (as of February 02, 2006), over 228 million reported 3G CDMA subscribers (as of November 30, 2005), 826 models of 3G devices worldwide. The industry standard for 3G wireless networks consists of 5 operating modes – three of them are based on CDMA technology: CDMA2000, WCDMA (UMTS) and TD-SCDMA. In this light BREW OS has a great opportunity to become a leader, though Nokia 6680 under Symbian OS is a 3G world bestseller telephone. The services by 3G carriers are quite actual already – 80% of British mobile users are ready to pay for mobile TV service, nothing to say about GPS, high-speed packet data access and high quality voice services.

Still large companies, financial giants, transnational corporations and government institutions adhere to the tried technologies – they use BlackBerry – undisputed leader in enterprise mobile solutions for mobile professionals and seek no alternative for it. However, if You still want an alternative for You BlackBerry You should be set for paying a pretty penny of some $500 for a new device and a new connection and it is not easy at all to find an equal substitution.

And let us don't forget that more players like Windows Mobile OS and Linux OS are on their way and hit their stride.

Undoubtedly, there's still a long way to go: Symbian powered nearly 34 million devices last year, more than double what Microsoft was able to ship, but the gap is narrowing.

MS provided an adequate tool set for the developers to develop software for their platform. In many ways they are helping to open up software innovation on devices. While developers for Symbian OS quite often complain of its being bad documented and too many OS versions. Microsoft's long legacy includes an understanding of the Developer and providing Developers tools. Symbian is a newcomer. Still, we shouldn't forget about the power of open source: Why would a Developer want to restrict themselves into a platform with a proprietary software code? Some experts consider that just the developer support is going to be key in who wins in the consumer market place.

Much also depends on marketing and promotion: Symbian's operating system is used in many top-end business phones today, because of its support for features such as PIM, voice-conferencing, push email and Web access. Nokia phone stands for world recognized brand and image phone – and it does pay dividends. To have Nokia's smartphone is almost the same as to drive Mercedes.

The potential of growing markets should also be considered: the demand for mobile phones in India, China, Eastern Europe and Africa is not a new phenomenon. Just in time enter a growing market and you can lead the race (Industry analysts forecast that 80% of the next billion mobile phone customers will come from emerging markets).

This is a niche market, all around. We say Europe – we mean Symbian, we say USA – we mean Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and BREW. BREW – is limited to CDMA markets (US and Chinese markets), Blackberry – is closely tied to business and corporate clients, Symbian is prevailing mainly in Europe: it turns out they have nothing to "brew". I hope none of them comes to dominate, since that is a recipe for stagnation; the 3 equally balanced would be perfect for fair competition and product development. We can not provide adequate predictions for someone's success or failure. It will be just a forecast.

All is left is to guess who to place stake on …

Authors:

Serge Bocharov
Oksana Lutikova
Eugene Kovalik

info@QArea.com

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

Kharkov, Ukraine -- (ReleaseWire) -- 06/02/2006 -- According to the research held by analytics company Canalys the market of "smart" mobile devices in Europe, Near East and Africa grows more rapidly than market of mobile phones. Within the first half of 2005 9.6 million of smartphones and PDAs were sold compared to 3.6 million during the same period of the previous year. Such trend is observed worldwide – almost 70 million full feature handsets are sold worldwide. According to analysts the two main processes in progress stipulate such growth at the moment. On the one hand, ordinary users interchange their old smartphones and PDAs to newer ones. On the other hand, there is an upsurge in interest in mobile E-mail and extended abilities of smart mobile devices from companies and corporations.

Modern smart mobile systems are to be: always available (small sized / handy), always On (optimized memory usage, minimal battery use), extensible (new software can be added if necessary), affordable, and of various form factors. Moreover, a smart mobile device should combine the maximum of mobile technologies available at the moment: GPS, VoIP, Bluetooth, IrDa, GPRS/EDGE, Wi-Fi, mobile E-mail, support of HTTP protocol, MP3 etc. This is a vast domain for competition among manufacturers of operation systems for smartphones and PDAs.

There are several very large players in this market: Symbian OS, BREW OS, Blackberry OS, Windows Mobile OS and Palm OS etc.

Experts' Area

Ulf Morys, General Manager at Gameloft GmbH:

" - Symbian: more important in the future, but still niche market (Nokia market share ca. 33 % overall; not more than 1/3 of this Symbian phones & some other Symbian phones). Overall optimistic estimate: ca. 10 % of total newly sold phone base.

- BlackBerry: interesting for business / productivity applications; no mass market.

- WindowsCE: difficult to judge. Microsoft will keep pushing it's platform, but results were often unsatisfactory in the past; make sure that the partners can actually bill for applications delivered to this platform. We've seen problems with this.

- BREW: real mass market potential in US and Chinese market, not very relevant for European market."

SYMBIAN

SYMBIAN – is a software licensing company that develops and supplies the advanced, open, standard operating system – Symbian OS – for data-enabled mobile phones and PDAs.

As of September 2005 60 phones that run under Symbian OS from eight manufacturers are shipped worldwide and a further 56 phones from eleven manufacturers (among them Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, BenQ and Motorola) were in development. Symbian OS is an undisputed sales leader in Europe and has a strong market share in other countries. Currently Symbian's market share is 55.9 per cent from worldwide sales (according to IDC analytics company), at that 82 per cent of devices were manufactured by Nokia (in whole since 2005 beginning there were sold approximately 34 million data enabled devices with Symbian OS on board).

Experts' Area

Philip Solis, ABI Research senior analyst, author of the study "Smartphones: The Market for Smartphones and Smartphone Operating Systems":

"Symbian's chief advantages are that it is easy to build applications for, and that it has a large developer community. Disadvantages are that Symbian is primarily limited to Nokia handsets, and its market is concentrated in "GSM-heavy" regions."

19 of 60 devices with Symbian OS support WCDMA. By the way, smartphone Nokia 6680 is recognized a 3G world bestseller telephone.

Key features of Symbian OS

Rich suite of application engines – the suite includes engines for contacts, schedule, messaging, browsing, utility and system control; OBEX for exchanging objects such as appointments (using vCalendar) and business cards (vCard); integrated APIs for data management, text, clipboard and graphics

Browsing – supports WAP 1.2.1 for mobile browsing

Messaging – multimedia messaging (MMS), enhanced messaging (EMS) and SMS; internet mail using POP3, IMAP4, SMTP and MHTML; attachments; fax

Multimedia – audio and video support for recording, playback and streaming; image conversion

Graphics – direct access to screen and keyboard for high performance; graphics accelerator API

Communications protocols – wide-area networking stacks including TCP/IP (dual mode IPv4/v6) and WAP, personal area networking support include infrared (IrDA), Bluetooth® wireless technology and USB; support is also provided for multihoming capabilities and link layer Quality-of-Service (QoS) on GPRS/UMTS networks

Mobile telephony – Symbian OS is ready for the 3G market with support for GSM circuit switched voice and data (CSD and EDGE ECSD) and packet-based data (GPRS and EDGE EGPRS); CDMA circuit switched voice, data and packet-based data (IS-95, cdma2000 1x, and WCDMA); SIM, RUIM and UICC Toolkit; other standards can be implemented by licensees through extensible APIs of the telephony subsystem

International support – conforms to Unicode Standard version 3.0

Data synchronization – over-the-air (OTA) synchronization support using SyncML; PC-based synchronization over serial, Bluetooth® wireless technology, Infrared and USB; a PC Connectivity framework providing the ability to transfer files and synchronize PIM data

Security – full encryption and certificate management, secure protocols (HTTPS, WTLS and SSL and TLS), WIM framework and certificate-based application installation

Developing for Symbian OS – content development options include: C++, Java (J2ME) MIDP 2.0 and PersonalJava 1.1.1a (with JavaPhone 1.0 option), and WAP; tools are available for building C++ and Java applications and ROMs with support for on-target debugging

User Inputs – generic input mechanism supporting full keyboard, 0-9*# (numeric mobile phone keypad), voice, handwriting recognition and predictive text input.

BREW

BREW - Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless is a combination OS, application platform, and marketing system. BREW started with QUALCOMM-based CDMA chipsets and technology – a vast market – but BREW is independent of the wireless technology utilized by a particular handset or network and can support other wireless technologies. Ideally, BREW can work with any device, and Qualcomm is planning to port it to Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). Qualcomm is trying to remove the gap between GSM and CDMA operators. As CDMA strengthened hand, the GSM lobby propped its own version of CDMA which they named WCDMA (Wideband CDMA). WCDMA has been launched in a group of countries (80 operators in 29 countries), and many more are gearing to launch it within this year, it is already successfully running in countries like Korea, Japan, China, India, Brazil and in some parts of North America.

So far prevalent in the CDMA domain, BREW is gradually transiting to the GSM bastion of Europe as the continent's operators introduce 3G services based on WCDMA (by the end of year 2005 the number of WCDMA networks users worldwide increased by 2,6 times compared to December 31, 2004 and reached 43,81 million users). Such a scenario could make Qualcomm a worldwide flag carrier in mobile market. In all, 40 commercial BREW device manufacturers (Audiovox, Kyocera, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, BenQ etc.) offer over 135 BREW-enabled devices – as of January, 2006 according to Qualcomm. Almost 10% of all handsets shipped worldwide are BREW compatible and the number of application downloads (May 2005) exceeds 300 million. The success of BREW has been built on CDMA platforms of major mobile operators, including Verizon Wireless, China Unicom, Telstra and KDDI.

Regardless of platform, BREW requires little memory (150KB), which makes BREW applications workable even on low-end phones.

BREW provides basic capabilities for such advanced services as GPS, VoIP, Bluetooth 1.1, MP3 and MIDI support, video recording and playback, multimedia streaming, e-mail. The set of BREW services includes communication capabilities of TCP/UDP sockets, HTTP protocol support, SMS-MMS services, extended telephony capabilities. BREW supports several programming languages including Java, and via extensions BREW understands C/C++, interactive animation Flash and XML.

The Wall Street Journal paralleled BREW with Microsoft Windows in wireless communication domain.

Experts' Area

Victoria Alexandrova, Project Manager, PDA applications Department of QArea Company: "Who I see a winner? Symbian, of course. It is convenient, applicable, multi functional and easy for understanding. However, if I were in the USA I definitely would rather use BlackBerry, since they provide top quality service."

BLACKBERRY

BLACKBERRY – is a proprietary operating system, provided by RIM (Research in Motion, Canada), for the BlackBerry devices and BlackBerry enabled devices (BlackBerry email is already on a few handsets including Siemens SK65, Nokia 6820/6822, Motorola MPx220). BlackBerry is one of the leading wireless solutions, which allows users to stay connected with wireless access to email, corporate data, phone, web and organizer features. The true power of BlackBerry is mailbox integration. BlackBerry can integrate seamlessly with a user's existing corporate or personal email account providing a wireless extension of their regular e-mailbox.

The first BlackBerry was released in early 1999. The first BlackBerry with integrated cell phone, as well as the first BlackBerry sold outside of North America was released in 2001, using the European GSM/GPRS standard. RIM at the moment has a very dominant position in the mobile email market. BlackBerry is used worldwide, available from 95 wireless carriers in 40 countries. In November 2004, RIM announced the number of subscribers to the BlackBerry service to have reached two million, having doubled within ten months. Proceeding their steady growth, RIM announced an additional one million subscribers in May 2005, only six months after having reached two million.

Experts' Area

Rudy de Waele, CEO at Random One (R1):

"The market is going more Symbian due to the strategic moves Symbian did with S60 platform, delivering Symbian to various devices of different brand manufacturers and Nokia's latest partnership with Vodafone to increase the use of S60 as a standard software platform.

Windows Mobile is going to catch up bit by bit, they have the market advantage in US and they can benefit from the Microsoft PC/Mobile synchronization that becomes more and more popular and is a crucial element for the success of mobile data services, but I don't see them getting quickly at the same level of Symbian on a global level, it's going to take at least 4-5 years for them to catch-up, if ever they will...

Meanwhile I don't see a bright future for Palm OS, neither BREW, though BREW is still quite strong in the market due to Qualcomm strength on the market.

Nobody can compete with Symbian as of now, their competitors will have to come up with a stronger OS and that doesn't look obvious.

At last, don't forget about Linux who has a lot of potential, specifically in mobile, I see a bright and growing future for them."

No wonder, RIM manufactures a top notch device (with BlackBerry OS on board) that is secure, stable, and dominates market share with state and local government, the military, and with commercial corporations. In 2005 RIM was the first largest PDA supplier, and their technology BlackBerry occupied the second place among OS manufacturers giving Microsoft product the go-by.

RIM develops its own software for its devices, using C++ and Java technology. Third party developers applications must be digitally signed, that guarantees the application authorship.

Available services are: Wireless Email Service, Wireless Calendar Service, Wireless Internet (HTML and WAP formats) Services, Voice and SMS, Mobile Data Service, Attachment Service, Instant Messenger, GPS Service, Bluetooth etc.

The full feature handsets market is hard to predict, however almost all analysts predict steady and increasing growth of this market (which is observed at the moment). Each manufacturer aspires to create a common OS to globalize and standardize application development, distribution and management (as they say) to develop applications for all but not for each distinct device. Some people welcome such opportunity and some are bothered by possible monopolization and subsequent abuses in this domain. What is observed at the moment that each of the manufacturers had occupied a distinct characteristic niche, where he is successful, and already from there with mixed success tries to "conquer" the mobile wireless world.

Experts' Area

Alexei Golovashov, Senior QA Engineer, QArea Group:

"BlackBerry? One of its main advantages is an advanced ergonomics both of the device itself and its software. The user interface, as of today, I suppose, is one of the best among developed for PDA devices. While its main disadvantage is absence of memory card. Absence of the latter means that it can not be used for other purposes, it is narrow directed. I use my Symbian as MP3 player and to watch movies. I will not be able to use BlackBerry for that even if I want to. BlackBerry is convenient only for business domain, I guess, while Symbian also can be used as a game platform, and its a rather essential part of users who use it that way. BREW, from my point of view, has no bright future at all. J2ME is that well-developed that nobody pays attention to BREW. Furthermore, all BREW applications are to be certified, that complicates their usage and distribution," - says Alexei Golovashov, QArea's Senior QA Engineer.

What then

The whole world, and wireless market in particular, moves toward high speeds, multiple functions and extended business possibilities. 3G networks is the next inevitable stage of mobile market development. It provides plenty of capabilities both for business and entertainment, communication and data transfer, Internet access and mobile e-mailing. Most of 3G devices should combine all available 3G technologies to be competitive. This factor will also affect the development of devices and operating systems for them. As we can see, the mobile market requires a device that could fullest reveal the capabilities of next generation mobile networks 3G and 4G. These numbers are dramatic confirmation of 3G leading position: 173 Commercial 3G Operators in 75 Countries worldwide (as of February 02, 2006), over 228 million reported 3G CDMA subscribers (as of November 30, 2005), 826 models of 3G devices worldwide. The industry standard for 3G wireless networks consists of 5 operating modes – three of them are based on CDMA technology: CDMA2000, WCDMA (UMTS) and TD-SCDMA. In this light BREW OS has a great opportunity to become a leader, though Nokia 6680 under Symbian OS is a 3G world bestseller telephone. The services by 3G carriers are quite actual already – 80% of British mobile users are ready to pay for mobile TV service, nothing to say about GPS, high-speed packet data access and high quality voice services.

Still large companies, financial giants, transnational corporations and government institutions adhere to the tried technologies – they use BlackBerry – undisputed leader in enterprise mobile solutions for mobile professionals and seek no alternative for it. However, if You still want an alternative for You BlackBerry You should be set for paying a pretty penny of some $500 for a new device and a new connection and it is not easy at all to find an equal substitution.

And let us don't forget that more players like Windows Mobile OS and Linux OS are on their way and hit their stride.

Undoubtedly, there's still a long way to go: Symbian powered nearly 34 million devices last year, more than double what Microsoft was able to ship, but the gap is narrowing.

MS provided an adequate tool set for the developers to develop software for their platform. In many ways they are helping to open up software innovation on devices. While developers for Symbian OS quite often complain of its being bad documented and too many OS versions. Microsoft's long legacy includes an understanding of the Developer and providing Developers tools. Symbian is a newcomer. Still, we shouldn't forget about the power of open source: Why would a Developer want to restrict themselves into a platform with a proprietary software code? Some experts consider that just the developer support is going to be key in who wins in the consumer market place.

Much also depends on marketing and promotion: Symbian's operating system is used in many top-end business phones today, because of its support for features such as PIM, voice-conferencing, push email and Web access. Nokia phone stands for world recognized brand and image phone – and it does pay dividends. To have Nokia's smartphone is almost the same as to drive Mercedes.

The potential of growing markets should also be considered: the demand for mobile phones in India, China, Eastern Europe and Africa is not a new phenomenon. Just in time enter a growing market and you can lead the race (Industry analysts forecast that 80% of the next billion mobile phone customers will come from emerging markets).

This is a niche market, all around. We say Europe – we mean Symbian, we say USA – we mean Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and BREW. BREW – is limited to CDMA markets (US and Chinese markets), Blackberry – is closely tied to business and corporate clients, Symbian is prevailing mainly in Europe: it turns out they have nothing to "brew". I hope none of them comes to dominate, since that is a recipe for stagnation; the 3 equally balanced would be perfect for fair competition and product development. We can not provide adequate predictions for someone's success or failure. It will be just a forecast.

All is left is to guess who to place stake on …

Authors:

Serge Bocharov

Oksana Lutikova

Eugene Kovalik

info@QArea.com

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

Kharkov, Ukraine -- (ReleaseWire) -- 06/02/2006 -- According to the research held by analytics company Canalys the market of "smart" mobile devices in Europe, Near East and Africa grows more rapidly than market of mobile phones. Within the first half of 2005 9.6 million of smartphones and PDAs were sold compared to 3.6 million during the same period of the previous year. Such trend is observed worldwide – almost 70 million full feature handsets are sold worldwide. According to analysts the two main processes in progress stipulate such growth at the moment. On the one hand, ordinary users interchange their old smartphones and PDAs to newer ones. On the other hand, there is an upsurge in interest in mobile E-mail and extended abilities of smart mobile devices from companies and corporations.

Modern smart mobile systems are to be: always available (small sized / handy), always On (optimized memory usage, minimal battery use), extensible (new software can be added if necessary), affordable, and of various form factors. Moreover, a smart mobile device should combine the maximum of mobile technologies available at the moment: GPS, VoIP, Bluetooth, IrDa, GPRS/EDGE, Wi-Fi, mobile E-mail, support of HTTP protocol, MP3 etc. This is a vast domain for competition among manufacturers of operation systems for smartphones and PDAs.

There are several very large players in this market: Symbian OS, BREW OS, Blackberry OS, Windows Mobile OS and Palm OS etc.

Experts' Area

Ulf Morys, General Manager at Gameloft GmbH:

" - Symbian: more important in the future, but still niche market (Nokia market share ca. 33 % overall; not more than 1/3 of this Symbian phones & some other Symbian phones). Overall optimistic estimate: ca. 10 % of total newly sold phone base.

- BlackBerry: interesting for business / productivity applications; no mass market.

- WindowsCE: difficult to judge. Microsoft will keep pushing it's platform, but results were often unsatisfactory in the past; make sure that the partners can actually bill for applications delivered to this platform. We've seen problems with this.

- BREW: real mass market potential in US and Chinese market, not very relevant for European market."

SYMBIAN

SYMBIAN – is a software licensing company that develops and supplies the advanced, open, standard operating system – Symbian OS – for data-enabled mobile phones and PDAs.

As of September 2005 60 phones that run under Symbian OS from eight manufacturers are shipped worldwide and a further 56 phones from eleven manufacturers (among them Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, BenQ and Motorola) were in development. Symbian OS is an undisputed sales leader in Europe and has a strong market share in other countries. Currently Symbian's market share is 55.9 per cent from worldwide sales (according to IDC analytics company), at that 82 per cent of devices were manufactured by Nokia (in whole since 2005 beginning there were sold approximately 34 million data enabled devices with Symbian OS on board).

Experts' Area

Philip Solis, ABI Research senior analyst, author of the study "Smartphones: The Market for Smartphones and Smartphone Operating Systems":

"Symbian's chief advantages are that it is easy to build applications for, and that it has a large developer community. Disadvantages are that Symbian is primarily limited to Nokia handsets, and its market is concentrated in "GSM-heavy" regions."

19 of 60 devices with Symbian OS support WCDMA. By the way, smartphone Nokia 6680 is recognized a 3G world bestseller telephone.

Key features of Symbian OS

Rich suite of application engines – the suite includes engines for contacts, schedule, messaging, browsing, utility and system control; OBEX for exchanging objects such as appointments (using vCalendar) and business cards (vCard); integrated APIs for data management, text, clipboard and graphics

Browsing – supports WAP 1.2.1 for mobile browsing

Messaging – multimedia messaging (MMS), enhanced messaging (EMS) and SMS; internet mail using POP3, IMAP4, SMTP and MHTML; attachments; fax

Multimedia – audio and video support for recording, playback and streaming; image conversion

Graphics – direct access to screen and keyboard for high performance; graphics accelerator API

Communications protocols – wide-area networking stacks including TCP/IP (dual mode IPv4/v6) and WAP, personal area networking support include infrared (IrDA), Bluetooth® wireless technology and USB; support is also provided for multihoming capabilities and link layer Quality-of-Service (QoS) on GPRS/UMTS networks

Mobile telephony – Symbian OS is ready for the 3G market with support for GSM circuit switched voice and data (CSD and EDGE ECSD) and packet-based data (GPRS and EDGE EGPRS); CDMA circuit switched voice, data and packet-based data (IS-95, cdma2000 1x, and WCDMA); SIM, RUIM and UICC Toolkit; other standards can be implemented by licensees through extensible APIs of the telephony subsystem

International support – conforms to Unicode Standard version 3.0

Data synchronization – over-the-air (OTA) synchronization support using SyncML; PC-based synchronization over serial, Bluetooth® wireless technology, Infrared and USB; a PC Connectivity framework providing the ability to transfer files and synchronize PIM data

Security – full encryption and certificate management, secure protocols (HTTPS, WTLS and SSL and TLS), WIM framework and certificate-based application installation

Developing for Symbian OS – content development options include: C++, Java (J2ME) MIDP 2.0 and PersonalJava 1.1.1a (with JavaPhone 1.0 option), and WAP; tools are available for building C++ and Java applications and ROMs with support for on-target debugging

User Inputs – generic input mechanism supporting full keyboard, 0-9*# (numeric mobile phone keypad), voice, handwriting recognition and predictive text input.

BREW

BREW - Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless is a combination OS, application platform, and marketing system. BREW started with QUALCOMM-based CDMA chipsets and technology – a vast market – but BREW is independent of the wireless technology utilized by a particular handset or network and can support other wireless technologies. Ideally, BREW can work with any device, and Qualcomm is planning to port it to Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). Qualcomm is trying to remove the gap between GSM and CDMA operators. As CDMA strengthened hand, the GSM lobby propped its own version of CDMA which they named WCDMA (Wideband CDMA). WCDMA has been launched in a group of countries (80 operators in 29 countries), and many more are gearing to launch it within this year, it is already successfully running in countries like Korea, Japan, China, India, Brazil and in some parts of North America.

So far prevalent in the CDMA domain, BREW is gradually transiting to the GSM bastion of Europe as the continent's operators introduce 3G services based on WCDMA (by the end of year 2005 the number of WCDMA networks users worldwide increased by 2,6 times compared to December 31, 2004 and reached 43,81 million users). Such a scenario could make Qualcomm a worldwide flag carrier in mobile market. In all, 40 commercial BREW device manufacturers (Audiovox, Kyocera, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, BenQ etc.) offer over 135 BREW-enabled devices – as of January, 2006 according to Qualcomm. Almost 10% of all handsets shipped worldwide are BREW compatible and the number of application downloads (May 2005) exceeds 300 million. The success of BREW has been built on CDMA platforms of major mobile operators, including Verizon Wireless, China Unicom, Telstra and KDDI.

Regardless of platform, BREW requires little memory (150KB), which makes BREW applications workable even on low-end phones.

BREW provides basic capabilities for such advanced services as GPS, VoIP, Bluetooth 1.1, MP3 and MIDI support, video recording and playback, multimedia streaming, e-mail. The set of BREW services includes communication capabilities of TCP/UDP sockets, HTTP protocol support, SMS-MMS services, extended telephony capabilities. BREW supports several programming languages including Java, and via extensions BREW understands C/C++, interactive animation Flash and XML.

The Wall Street Journal paralleled BREW with Microsoft Windows in wireless communication domain.

Experts' Area

Victoria Alexandrova, Project Manager, PDA applications Department of QArea Company: "Who I see a winner? Symbian, of course. It is convenient, applicable, multi functional and easy for understanding. However, if I were in the USA I definitely would rather use BlackBerry, since they provide top quality service."

BLACKBERRY

BLACKBERRY – is a proprietary operating system, provided by RIM (Research in Motion, Canada), for the BlackBerry devices and BlackBerry enabled devices (BlackBerry email is already on a few handsets including Siemens SK65, Nokia 6820/6822, Motorola MPx220). BlackBerry is one of the leading wireless solutions, which allows users to stay connected with wireless access to email, corporate data, phone, web and organizer features. The true power of BlackBerry is mailbox integration. BlackBerry can integrate seamlessly with a user's existing corporate or personal email account providing a wireless extension of their regular e-mailbox.

The first BlackBerry was released in early 1999. The first BlackBerry with integrated cell phone, as well as the first BlackBerry sold outside of North America was released in 2001, using the European GSM/GPRS standard. RIM at the moment has a very dominant position in the mobile email market. BlackBerry is used worldwide, available from 95 wireless carriers in 40 countries. In November 2004, RIM announced the number of subscribers to the BlackBerry service to have reached two million, having doubled within ten months. Proceeding their steady growth, RIM announced an additional one million subscribers in May 2005, only six months after having reached two million.

Experts' Area

Rudy de Waele, CEO at Random One (R1):

"The market is going more Symbian due to the strategic moves Symbian did with S60 platform, delivering Symbian to various devices of different brand manufacturers and Nokia's latest partnership with Vodafone to increase the use of S60 as a standard software platform.

Windows Mobile is going to catch up bit by bit, they have the market advantage in US and they can benefit from the Microsoft PC/Mobile synchronization that becomes more and more popular and is a crucial element for the success of mobile data services, but I don't see them getting quickly at the same level of Symbian on a global level, it's going to take at least 4-5 years for them to catch-up, if ever they will...

Meanwhile I don't see a bright future for Palm OS, neither BREW, though BREW is still quite strong in the market due to Qualcomm strength on the market.

Nobody can compete with Symbian as of now, their competitors will have to come up with a stronger OS and that doesn't look obvious.

At last, don't forget about Linux who has a lot of potential, specifically in mobile, I see a bright and growing future for them."

No wonder, RIM manufactures a top notch device (with BlackBerry OS on board) that is secure, stable, and dominates market share with state and local government, the military, and with commercial corporations. In 2005 RIM was the first largest PDA supplier, and their technology BlackBerry occupied the second place among OS manufacturers giving Microsoft product the go-by.

RIM develops its own software for its devices, using C++ and Java technology. Third party developers applications must be digitally signed, that guarantees the application authorship.

Available services are: Wireless Email Service, Wireless Calendar Service, Wireless Internet (HTML and WAP formats) Services, Voice and SMS, Mobile Data Service, Attachment Service, Instant Messenger, GPS Service, Bluetooth etc.

The full feature handsets market is hard to predict, however almost all analysts predict steady and increasing growth of this market (which is observed at the moment). Each manufacturer aspires to create a common OS to globalize and standardize application development, distribution and management (as they say) to develop applications for all but not for each distinct device. Some people welcome such opportunity and some are bothered by possible monopolization and subsequent abuses in this domain. What is observed at the moment that each of the manufacturers had occupied a distinct characteristic niche, where he is successful, and already from there with mixed success tries to "conquer" the mobile wireless world.

Experts' Area

Alexei Golovashov, Senior QA Engineer, QArea Group:

"BlackBerry? One of its main advantages is an advanced ergonomics both of the device itself and its software. The user interface, as of today, I suppose, is one of the best among developed for PDA devices. While its main disadvantage is absence of memory card. Absence of the latter means that it can not be used for other purposes, it is narrow directed. I use my Symbian as MP3 player and to watch movies. I will not be able to use BlackBerry for that even if I want to. BlackBerry is convenient only for business domain, I guess, while Symbian also can be used as a game platform, and its a rather essential part of users who use it that way. BREW, from my point of view, has no bright future at all. J2ME is that well-developed that nobody pays attention to BREW. Furthermore, all BREW applications are to be certified, that complicates their usage and distribution," - says Alexei Golovashov, QArea's Senior QA Engineer.

What then

The whole world, and wireless market in particular, moves toward high speeds, multiple functions and extended business possibilities. 3G networks is the next inevitable stage of mobile market development. It provides plenty of capabilities both for business and entertainment, communication and data transfer, Internet access and mobile e-mailing. Most of 3G devices should combine all available 3G technologies to be competitive. This factor will also affect the development of devices and operating systems for them. As we can see, the mobile market requires a device that could fullest reveal the capabilities of next generation mobile networks 3G and 4G. These numbers are dramatic confirmation of 3G leading position: 173 Commercial 3G Operators in 75 Countries worldwide (as of February 02, 2006), over 228 million reported 3G CDMA subscribers (as of November 30, 2005), 826 models of 3G devices worldwide. The industry standard for 3G wireless networks consists of 5 operating modes – three of them are based on CDMA technology: CDMA2000, WCDMA (UMTS) and TD-SCDMA. In this light BREW OS has a great opportunity to become a leader, though Nokia 6680 under Symbian OS is a 3G world bestseller telephone. The services by 3G carriers are quite actual already – 80% of British mobile users are ready to pay for mobile TV service, nothing to say about GPS, high-speed packet data access and high quality voice services.

Still large companies, financial giants, transnational corporations and government institutions adhere to the tried technologies – they use BlackBerry – undisputed leader in enterprise mobile solutions for mobile professionals and seek no alternative for it. However, if You still want an alternative for You BlackBerry You should be set for paying a pretty penny of some $500 for a new device and a new connection and it is not easy at all to find an equal substitution.

And let us don't forget that more players like Windows Mobile OS and Linux OS are on their way and hit their stride.

Undoubtedly, there's still a long way to go: Symbian powered nearly 34 million devices last year, more than double what Microsoft was able to ship, but the gap is narrowing.

MS provided an adequate tool set for the developers to develop software for their platform. In many ways they are helping to open up software innovation on devices. While developers for Symbian OS quite often complain of its being bad documented and too many OS versions. Microsoft's long legacy includes an understanding of the Developer and providing Developers tools. Symbian is a newcomer. Still, we shouldn't forget about the power of open source: Why would a Developer want to restrict themselves into a platform with a proprietary software code? Some experts consider that just the developer support is going to be key in who wins in the consumer market place.

Much also depends on marketing and promotion: Symbian's operating system is used in many top-end business phones today, because of its support for features such as PIM, voice-conferencing, push email and Web access. Nokia phone stands for world recognized brand and image phone – and it does pay dividends. To have Nokia's smartphone is almost the same as to drive Mercedes.

The potential of growing markets should also be considered: the demand for mobile phones in India, China, Eastern Europe and Africa is not a new phenomenon. Just in time enter a growing market and you can lead the race (Industry analysts forecast that 80% of the next billion mobile phone customers will come from emerging markets).

This is a niche market, all around. We say Europe – we mean Symbian, we say USA – we mean Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and BREW. BREW – is limited to CDMA markets (US and Chinese markets), Blackberry – is closely tied to business and corporate clients, Symbian is prevailing mainly in Europe: it turns out they have nothing to "brew". I hope none of them comes to dominate, since that is a recipe for stagnation; the 3 equally balanced would be perfect for fair competition and product development. We can not provide adequate predictions for someone's success or failure. It will be just a forecast.

All is left is to guess who to place stake on …

Authors:

Serge Bocharov

Oksana Lutikova

Eugene Kovalik

info@QArea.com

This year 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona brought all together all the people, newest ideas, technologies and products in the PDA and mobile phone industry. This year it stretched from February 13 till February 16 and gathered about 50,000 people. The attendance in the first day of this year Congress was bigger than the total attendance of last year's 3GSM in Cannes. 1,900 media representatives were near the action and were broadcasting the latest news from the source. 40% increase was shown in the exhibited companies also, this year they were 962. The 3GSM World Congress will be held again in Barcelona next year.

Among the most attendible exhibitors were Samsung, Nokia, Motorola, BenQ-Siemens, Sagem, LG, NEC, HP, Pantech and others.

Among the mobile handheld technologies there can be observed 2 successful trends: to-slimize-and-stuff-with-new-technologies and to make 3G-and-rich-media technologies affordable in low-end devices. The first category includes offers from Samsung, Motorola and Nokia mainly and NEC: supporting WiBro, HSDPA, T-DMB, building-in 3.2 to 5 megapixel cameras, raising internal memory up to the skies of 128 MB. The tendency to slim phones of the key idea of i-mode NEC clamshells. The phone is 13.6mm thick. They have EDGE connectivity standard, 1.3 megapixel camera, MP3 player, Bluetooth and 54 MB internal memory, WAP. Also there are some cute features announced, yet of doubtful value except but for entertainment purposes: text pronouncing feature, which can read SMS messages with its metallic voice with Pantech phone. Sharp and Toshiba presented 2.4" VGA displays. Current top of the line high-resolution displays used in the mobile phones are QVGA (240x320 pixels).

As usual the variety of designs is breathtaking.

Among OSs, Windows Mobile 5.0 is winning this span since it comes on most intriguing and promising models, like new HP quad-band communicator hw6900 and thin Windows smartphone - i-mate SmartFlip by HTC Star Trek platform.

Even the low-end handhelds aim high offering no more no less but 3G video broadcasting and high resolution cameras.

Anyway with the above tendencies, these are entertainment, TV-broadcasting, rich media, photoediting tools, business applications and security issues that are to be of major headache with content providers for these new essentials.

In this context of special interest and essentiality was QArea's presentation of their creativity in mobile GUI development, mobile animation and Flash interactive design. Of special interest were QArea's knowledgebase and experience in mobile security, mobile banking solutions and various entertainment software, both in the aspect of development and testing services.

Well appraised were QArea's skills and non-trivial approaches presented at 3GSM World Congress collected when developing embedded software for telecommunications industry.

About QArea: QArea is the one of the largest offshore software development companies in Eastern Europe since 2001. Its primary focus is brought upon application development for handheld devices (j2me development, Symbian, WinCE / Windows Mobile, Palm devices) and mobile web application development. Also, QArea cultivates strong .NET and Java teams performing standalone and web-application development and testing services.

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

Kharkov, Ukraine -- (ReleaseWire) -- 06/02/2006 -- According to the research held by analytics company Canalys the market of "smart" mobile devices in Europe, Near East and Africa grows more rapidly than market of mobile phones. Within the first half of 2005 9.6 million of smartphones and PDAs were sold compared to 3.6 million during the same period of the previous year. Such trend is observed worldwide – almost 70 million full feature handsets are sold worldwide. According to analysts the two main processes in progress stipulate such growth at the moment. On the one hand, ordinary users interchange their old smartphones and PDAs to newer ones. On the other hand, there is an upsurge in interest in mobile E-mail and extended abilities of smart mobile devices from companies and corporations.

Modern smart mobile systems are to be: always available (small sized / handy), always On (optimized memory usage, minimal battery use), extensible (new software can be added if necessary), affordable, and of various form factors. Moreover, a smart mobile device should combine the maximum of mobile technologies available at the moment: GPS, VoIP, Bluetooth, IrDa, GPRS/EDGE, Wi-Fi, mobile E-mail, support of HTTP protocol, MP3 etc. This is a vast domain for competition among manufacturers of operation systems for smartphones and PDAs.

There are several very large players in this market: Symbian OS, BREW OS, Blackberry OS, Windows Mobile OS and Palm OS etc.

Experts' Area

Ulf Morys, General Manager at Gameloft GmbH:

" - Symbian: more important in the future, but still niche market (Nokia market share ca. 33 % overall; not more than 1/3 of this Symbian phones & some other Symbian phones). Overall optimistic estimate: ca. 10 % of total newly sold phone base.

- BlackBerry: interesting for business / productivity applications; no mass market.

- WindowsCE: difficult to judge. Microsoft will keep pushing it's platform, but results were often unsatisfactory in the past; make sure that the partners can actually bill for applications delivered to this platform. We've seen problems with this.

- BREW: real mass market potential in US and Chinese market, not very relevant for European market."

SYMBIAN

SYMBIAN – is a software licensing company that develops and supplies the advanced, open, standard operating system – Symbian OS – for data-enabled mobile phones and PDAs.

As of September 2005 60 phones that run under Symbian OS from eight manufacturers are shipped worldwide and a further 56 phones from eleven manufacturers (among them Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, BenQ and Motorola) were in development. Symbian OS is an undisputed sales leader in Europe and has a strong market share in other countries. Currently Symbian's market share is 55.9 per cent from worldwide sales (according to IDC analytics company), at that 82 per cent of devices were manufactured by Nokia (in whole since 2005 beginning there were sold approximately 34 million data enabled devices with Symbian OS on board).

Experts' Area

Philip Solis, ABI Research senior analyst, author of the study "Smartphones: The Market for Smartphones and Smartphone Operating Systems":

"Symbian's chief advantages are that it is easy to build applications for, and that it has a large developer community. Disadvantages are that Symbian is primarily limited to Nokia handsets, and its market is concentrated in "GSM-heavy" regions."

19 of 60 devices with Symbian OS support WCDMA. By the way, smartphone Nokia 6680 is recognized a 3G world bestseller telephone.

Key features of Symbian OS

Rich suite of application engines – the suite includes engines for contacts, schedule, messaging, browsing, utility and system control; OBEX for exchanging objects such as appointments (using vCalendar) and business cards (vCard); integrated APIs for data management, text, clipboard and graphics

Browsing – supports WAP 1.2.1 for mobile browsing

Messaging – multimedia messaging (MMS), enhanced messaging (EMS) and SMS; internet mail using POP3, IMAP4, SMTP and MHTML; attachments; fax

Multimedia – audio and video support for recording, playback and streaming; image conversion

Graphics – direct access to screen and keyboard for high performance; graphics accelerator API

Communications protocols – wide-area networking stacks including TCP/IP (dual mode IPv4/v6) and WAP, personal area networking support include infrared (IrDA), Bluetooth® wireless technology and USB; support is also provided for multihoming capabilities and link layer Quality-of-Service (QoS) on GPRS/UMTS networks

Mobile telephony – Symbian OS is ready for the 3G market with support for GSM circuit switched voice and data (CSD and EDGE ECSD) and packet-based data (GPRS and EDGE EGPRS); CDMA circuit switched voice, data and packet-based data (IS-95, cdma2000 1x, and WCDMA); SIM, RUIM and UICC Toolkit; other standards can be implemented by licensees through extensible APIs of the telephony subsystem

International support – conforms to Unicode Standard version 3.0

Data synchronization – over-the-air (OTA) synchronization support using SyncML; PC-based synchronization over serial, Bluetooth® wireless technology, Infrared and USB; a PC Connectivity framework providing the ability to transfer files and synchronize PIM data

Security – full encryption and certificate management, secure protocols (HTTPS, WTLS and SSL and TLS), WIM framework and certificate-based application installation

Developing for Symbian OS – content development options include: C++, Java (J2ME) MIDP 2.0 and PersonalJava 1.1.1a (with JavaPhone 1.0 option), and WAP; tools are available for building C++ and Java applications and ROMs with support for on-target debugging

User Inputs – generic input mechanism supporting full keyboard, 0-9*# (numeric mobile phone keypad), voice, handwriting recognition and predictive text input.

BREW

BREW - Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless is a combination OS, application platform, and marketing system. BREW started with QUALCOMM-based CDMA chipsets and technology – a vast market – but BREW is independent of the wireless technology utilized by a particular handset or network and can support other wireless technologies. Ideally, BREW can work with any device, and Qualcomm is planning to port it to Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). Qualcomm is trying to remove the gap between GSM and CDMA operators. As CDMA strengthened hand, the GSM lobby propped its own version of CDMA which they named WCDMA (Wideband CDMA). WCDMA has been launched in a group of countries (80 operators in 29 countries), and many more are gearing to launch it within this year, it is already successfully running in countries like Korea, Japan, China, India, Brazil and in some parts of North America.

So far prevalent in the CDMA domain, BREW is gradually transiting to the GSM bastion of Europe as the continent's operators introduce 3G services based on WCDMA (by the end of year 2005 the number of WCDMA networks users worldwide increased by 2,6 times compared to December 31, 2004 and reached 43,81 million users). Such a scenario could make Qualcomm a worldwide flag carrier in mobile market. In all, 40 commercial BREW device manufacturers (Audiovox, Kyocera, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, BenQ etc.) offer over 135 BREW-enabled devices – as of January, 2006 according to Qualcomm. Almost 10% of all handsets shipped worldwide are BREW compatible and the number of application downloads (May 2005) exceeds 300 million. The success of BREW has been built on CDMA platforms of major mobile operators, including Verizon Wireless, China Unicom, Telstra and KDDI.

Regardless of platform, BREW requires little memory (150KB), which makes BREW applications workable even on low-end phones.

BREW provides basic capabilities for such advanced services as GPS, VoIP, Bluetooth 1.1, MP3 and MIDI support, video recording and playback, multimedia streaming, e-mail. The set of BREW services includes communication capabilities of TCP/UDP sockets, HTTP protocol support, SMS-MMS services, extended telephony capabilities. BREW supports several programming languages including Java, and via extensions BREW understands C/C++, interactive animation Flash and XML.

The Wall Street Journal paralleled BREW with Microsoft Windows in wireless communication domain.

Experts' Area

Victoria Alexandrova, Project Manager, PDA applications Department of QArea Company: "Who I see a winner? Symbian, of course. It is convenient, applicable, multi functional and easy for understanding. However, if I were in the USA I definitely would rather use BlackBerry, since they provide top quality service."

BLACKBERRY

BLACKBERRY – is a proprietary operating system, provided by RIM (Research in Motion, Canada), for the BlackBerry devices and BlackBerry enabled devices (BlackBerry email is already on a few handsets including Siemens SK65, Nokia 6820/6822, Motorola MPx220). BlackBerry is one of the leading wireless solutions, which allows users to stay connected with wireless access to email, corporate data, phone, web and organizer features. The true power of BlackBerry is mailbox integration. BlackBerry can integrate seamlessly with a user's existing corporate or personal email account providing a wireless extension of their regular e-mailbox.

The first BlackBerry was released in early 1999. The first BlackBerry with integrated cell phone, as well as the first BlackBerry sold outside of North America was released in 2001, using the European GSM/GPRS standard. RIM at the moment has a very dominant position in the mobile email market. BlackBerry is used worldwide, available from 95 wireless carriers in 40 countries. In November 2004, RIM announced the number of subscribers to the BlackBerry service to have reached two million, having doubled within ten months. Proceeding their steady growth, RIM announced an additional one million subscribers in May 2005, only six months after having reached two million.

Experts' Area

Rudy de Waele, CEO at Random One (R1):

"The market is going more Symbian due to the strategic moves Symbian did with S60 platform, delivering Symbian to various devices of different brand manufacturers and Nokia's latest partnership with Vodafone to increase the use of S60 as a standard software platform.

Windows Mobile is going to catch up bit by bit, they have the market advantage in US and they can benefit from the Microsoft PC/Mobile synchronization that becomes more and more popular and is a crucial element for the success of mobile data services, but I don't see them getting quickly at the same level of Symbian on a global level, it's going to take at least 4-5 years for them to catch-up, if ever they will...

Meanwhile I don't see a bright future for Palm OS, neither BREW, though BREW is still quite strong in the market due to Qualcomm strength on the market.

Nobody can compete with Symbian as of now, their competitors will have to come up with a stronger OS and that doesn't look obvious.

At last, don't forget about Linux who has a lot of potential, specifically in mobile, I see a bright and growing future for them."

No wonder, RIM manufactures a top notch device (with BlackBerry OS on board) that is secure, stable, and dominates market share with state and local government, the military, and with commercial corporations. In 2005 RIM was the first largest PDA supplier, and their technology BlackBerry occupied the second place among OS manufacturers giving Microsoft product the go-by.

RIM develops its own software for its devices, using C++ and Java technology. Third party developers applications must be digitally signed, that guarantees the application authorship.

Available services are: Wireless Email Service, Wireless Calendar Service, Wireless Internet (HTML and WAP formats) Services, Voice and SMS, Mobile Data Service, Attachment Service, Instant Messenger, GPS Service, Bluetooth etc.

The full feature handsets market is hard to predict, however almost all analysts predict steady and increasing growth of this market (which is observed at the moment). Each manufacturer aspires to create a common OS to globalize and standardize application development, distribution and management (as they say) to develop applications for all but not for each distinct device. Some people welcome such opportunity and some are bothered by possible monopolization and subsequent abuses in this domain. What is observed at the moment that each of the manufacturers had occupied a distinct characteristic niche, where he is successful, and already from there with mixed success tries to "conquer" the mobile wireless world.

Experts' Area

Alexei Golovashov, Senior QA Engineer, QArea Group:

"BlackBerry? One of its main advantages is an advanced ergonomics both of the device itself and its software. The user interface, as of today, I suppose, is one of the best among developed for PDA devices. While its main disadvantage is absence of memory card. Absence of the latter means that it can not be used for other purposes, it is narrow directed. I use my Symbian as MP3 player and to watch movies. I will not be able to use BlackBerry for that even if I want to. BlackBerry is convenient only for business domain, I guess, while Symbian also can be used as a game platform, and its a rather essential part of users who use it that way. BREW, from my point of view, has no bright future at all. J2ME is that well-developed that nobody pays attention to BREW. Furthermore, all BREW applications are to be certified, that complicates their usage and distribution," - says Alexei Golovashov, QArea's Senior QA Engineer.

What then

The whole world, and wireless market in particular, moves toward high speeds, multiple functions and extended business possibilities. 3G networks is the next inevitable stage of mobile market development. It provides plenty of capabilities both for business and entertainment, communication and data transfer, Internet access and mobile e-mailing. Most of 3G devices should combine all available 3G technologies to be competitive. This factor will also affect the development of devices and operating systems for them. As we can see, the mobile market requires a device that could fullest reveal the capabilities of next generation mobile networks 3G and 4G. These numbers are dramatic confirmation of 3G leading position: 173 Commercial 3G Operators in 75 Countries worldwide (as of February 02, 2006), over 228 million reported 3G CDMA subscribers (as of November 30, 2005), 826 models of 3G devices worldwide. The industry standard for 3G wireless networks consists of 5 operating modes – three of them are based on CDMA technology: CDMA2000, WCDMA (UMTS) and TD-SCDMA. In this light BREW OS has a great opportunity to become a leader, though Nokia 6680 under Symbian OS is a 3G world bestseller telephone. The services by 3G carriers are quite actual already – 80% of British mobile users are ready to pay for mobile TV service, nothing to say about GPS, high-speed packet data access and high quality voice services.

Still large companies, financial giants, transnational corporations and government institutions adhere to the tried technologies – they use BlackBerry – undisputed leader in enterprise mobile solutions for mobile professionals and seek no alternative for it. However, if You still want an alternative for You BlackBerry You should be set for paying a pretty penny of some $500 for a new device and a new connection and it is not easy at all to find an equal substitution.

And let us don't forget that more players like Windows Mobile OS and Linux OS are on their way and hit their stride.

Undoubtedly, there's still a long way to go: Symbian powered nearly 34 million devices last year, more than double what Microsoft was able to ship, but the gap is narrowing.

MS provided an adequate tool set for the developers to develop software for their platform. In many ways they are helping to open up software innovation on devices. While developers for Symbian OS quite often complain of its being bad documented and too many OS versions. Microsoft's long legacy includes an understanding of the Developer and providing Developers tools. Symbian is a newcomer. Still, we shouldn't forget about the power of open source: Why would a Developer want to restrict themselves into a platform with a proprietary software code? Some experts consider that just the developer support is going to be key in who wins in the consumer market place.

Much also depends on marketing and promotion: Symbian's operating system is used in many top-end business phones today, because of its support for features such as PIM, voice-conferencing, push email and Web access. Nokia phone stands for world recognized brand and image phone – and it does pay dividends. To have Nokia's smartphone is almost the same as to drive Mercedes.

The potential of growing markets should also be considered: the demand for mobile phones in India, China, Eastern Europe and Africa is not a new phenomenon. Just in time enter a growing market and you can lead the race (Industry analysts forecast that 80% of the next billion mobile phone customers will come from emerging markets).

This is a niche market, all around. We say Europe – we mean Symbian, we say USA – we mean Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and BREW. BREW – is limited to CDMA markets (US and Chinese markets), Blackberry – is closely tied to business and corporate clients, Symbian is prevailing mainly in Europe: it turns out they have nothing to "brew". I hope none of them comes to dominate, since that is a recipe for stagnation; the 3 equally balanced would be perfect for fair competition and product development. We can not provide adequate predictions for someone's success or failure. It will be just a forecast.

All is left is to guess who to place stake on …

Authors:

Serge Bocharov

Oksana Lutikova

Eugene Kovalik

info@QArea.com

This year 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona brought all together all the people, newest ideas, technologies and products in the PDA and mobile phone industry. This year it stretched from February 13 till February 16 and gathered about 50,000 people. The attendance in the first day of this year Congress was bigger than the total attendance of last year's 3GSM in Cannes. 1,900 media representatives were near the action and were broadcasting the latest news from the source. 40% increase was shown in the exhibited companies also, this year they were 962. The 3GSM World Congress will be held again in Barcelona next year.

Among the most attendible exhibitors were Samsung, Nokia, Motorola, BenQ-Siemens, Sagem, LG, NEC, HP, Pantech and others.

Among the mobile handheld technologies there can be observed 2 successful trends: to-slimize-and-stuff-with-new-technologies and to make 3G-and-rich-media technologies affordable in low-end devices. The first category includes offers from Samsung, Motorola and Nokia mainly and NEC: supporting WiBro, HSDPA, T-DMB, building-in 3.2 to 5 megapixel cameras, raising internal memory up to the skies of 128 MB. The tendency to slim phones of the key idea of i-mode NEC clamshells. The phone is 13.6mm thick. They have EDGE connectivity standard, 1.3 megapixel camera, MP3 player, Bluetooth and 54 MB internal memory, WAP. Also there are some cute features announced, yet of doubtful value except but for entertainment purposes: text pronouncing feature, which can read SMS messages with its metallic voice with Pantech phone. Sharp and Toshiba presented 2.4" VGA displays. Current top of the line high-resolution displays used in the mobile phones are QVGA (240x320 pixels).

As usual the variety of designs is breathtaking.

Among OSs, Windows Mobile 5.0 is winning this span since it comes on most intriguing and promising models, like new HP quad-band communicator hw6900 and thin Windows smartphone - i-mate SmartFlip by HTC Star Trek platform.

Even the low-end handhelds aim high offering no more no less but 3G video broadcasting and high resolution cameras.

Anyway with the above tendencies, these are entertainment, TV-broadcasting, rich media, photoediting tools, business applications and security issues that are to be of major headache with content providers for these new essentials.

In this context of special interest and essentiality was QArea's presentation of their creativity in mobile GUI development, mobile animation and Flash interactive design. Of special interest were QArea's knowledgebase and experience in mobile security, mobile banking solutions and various entertainment software, both in the aspect of development and testing services.

Well appraised were QArea's skills and non-trivial approaches presented at 3GSM World Congress collected when developing embedded software for telecommunications industry.

About QArea: QArea is the one of the largest offshore software development companies in Eastern Europe since 2001. Its primary focus is brought upon application development for handheld devices (j2me development, Symbian, WinCE / Windows Mobile, Palm devices) and mobile web application development. Also, QArea cultivates strong .NET and Java teams performing standalone and web-application development and testing services.

3GSM World Congress will take place in Barcelona 13-16 of February 2006.

3GSM Congress is a dedicated event covering mobile technologies, wireless networks and mechanism of their providing, starting with basic communication and network operability support systems through wireless handhelds users utilize in their everyday life, as well as personified content which makes PDAs and mobile phones ever convenient tools for business and leisure.

"Without a doubt, 3GSM World Congress 2005 has been the most well-attended, most exciting and most important gathering ever for the mobile industry," explained Bill Gajda, Chief Marketing Officer at the GSM Association. "We look forward to welcoming everyone to Barcelona in 2006, where we're sure that we can transplant the best of Cannes' 'village' atmosphere into the Fira de Barcelona's vibrant space."

3GSM Congress is the largest conference and exhibition event of its kind. This year alone the event attracted over 32,000 of the most senior executives with a vested interest in the wireless industry. 2006 is said to be bigger than the one of 2005 and is a not to be missed for any executive serious about the opportunities that lie ahead in this business.

This year, 2006, the world's premier mobile event is making 3GSM World Congress history with record breaking pre-registrations. 962 companies have signed up as exhibitors, showcasing their latest mobile products, services and solutions - a massive 40% increase from last year! 50,000 visitors are also expected in Barcelona.

The keynote speakers are: Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, President & COO, (CEO Elect), Nokia, Arun Sarin, CEO, Vodafone Group, Sanjiv Ahuja, CEO, Orange Group and others.

Among mainstream topics are: innovations in GSM, delivering of multimedia through handsets, mobile TV and Radio content, gaming content and opportunities for service providers and players, 3G and WCDMA technologies, mobile security and others.

Offshore software development company QArea will present its extended experience in software development and testing services for PDA & Mobile. Since 2001 QArea is a key company in Ukraine professionally and full time engaged in PDA & Mobile application development, porting and testing. Being committed to providing custom software of the highest quality QArea contributed to success of many well-known companies mainly located in the US and West Europe.

PDA & Mobile domain in QArea is presented by Windows CE/Windows Mobile, Symbian, J2ME. QArea develops and ports software for entertainment and business providing standalone, client/server and WAP applications and WAP portal solutions engaging a vast variety of wireless connection technologies as GPS, WAP, GPRS, Bluetooth, IrDA, or Wi-Fi.

About QArea: QArea is the one of the largest offshore software development companies in Eastern Europe since 2001. Its primary focus is brought upon application development for handheld devices, (j2me development), Symbian, WinCE (Windows Mobile), Palm devices and related. Also, QArea cultivates strong .NET and Java development teams performing standalone and web-application development services.

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

Kharkov, Ukraine -- (ReleaseWire) -- 06/02/2006 -- According to the research held by analytics company Canalys the market of "smart" mobile devices in Europe, Near East and Africa grows more rapidly than market of mobile phones. Within the first half of 2005 9.6 million of smartphones and PDAs were sold compared to 3.6 million during the same period of the previous year. Such trend is observed worldwide – almost 70 million full feature handsets are sold worldwide. According to analysts the two main processes in progress stipulate such growth at the moment. On the one hand, ordinary users interchange their old smartphones and PDAs to newer ones. On the other hand, there is an upsurge in interest in mobile E-mail and extended abilities of smart mobile devices from companies and corporations.

Modern smart mobile systems are to be: always available (small sized / handy), always On (optimized memory usage, minimal battery use), extensible (new software can be added if necessary), affordable, and of various form factors. Moreover, a smart mobile device should combine the maximum of mobile technologies available at the moment: GPS, VoIP, Bluetooth, IrDa, GPRS/EDGE, Wi-Fi, mobile E-mail, support of HTTP protocol, MP3 etc. This is a vast domain for competition among manufacturers of operation systems for smartphones and PDAs.

There are several very large players in this market: Symbian OS, BREW OS, Blackberry OS, Windows Mobile OS and Palm OS etc.

Experts' Area

Ulf Morys, General Manager at Gameloft GmbH:

" - Symbian: more important in the future, but still niche market (Nokia market share ca. 33 % overall; not more than 1/3 of this Symbian phones & some other Symbian phones). Overall optimistic estimate: ca. 10 % of total newly sold phone base.

- BlackBerry: interesting for business / productivity applications; no mass market.

- WindowsCE: difficult to judge. Microsoft will keep pushing it's platform, but results were often unsatisfactory in the past; make sure that the partners can actually bill for applications delivered to this platform. We've seen problems with this.

- BREW: real mass market potential in US and Chinese market, not very relevant for European market."

SYMBIAN

SYMBIAN – is a software licensing company that develops and supplies the advanced, open, standard operating system – Symbian OS – for data-enabled mobile phones and PDAs.

As of September 2005 60 phones that run under Symbian OS from eight manufacturers are shipped worldwide and a further 56 phones from eleven manufacturers (among them Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, BenQ and Motorola) were in development. Symbian OS is an undisputed sales leader in Europe and has a strong market share in other countries. Currently Symbian's market share is 55.9 per cent from worldwide sales (according to IDC analytics company), at that 82 per cent of devices were manufactured by Nokia (in whole since 2005 beginning there were sold approximately 34 million data enabled devices with Symbian OS on board).

Experts' Area

Philip Solis, ABI Research senior analyst, author of the study "Smartphones: The Market for Smartphones and Smartphone Operating Systems":

"Symbian's chief advantages are that it is easy to build applications for, and that it has a large developer community. Disadvantages are that Symbian is primarily limited to Nokia handsets, and its market is concentrated in "GSM-heavy" regions."

19 of 60 devices with Symbian OS support WCDMA. By the way, smartphone Nokia 6680 is recognized a 3G world bestseller telephone.

Key features of Symbian OS

Rich suite of application engines – the suite includes engines for contacts, schedule, messaging, browsing, utility and system control; OBEX for exchanging objects such as appointments (using vCalendar) and business cards (vCard); integrated APIs for data management, text, clipboard and graphics

Browsing – supports WAP 1.2.1 for mobile browsing

Messaging – multimedia messaging (MMS), enhanced messaging (EMS) and SMS; internet mail using POP3, IMAP4, SMTP and MHTML; attachments; fax

Multimedia – audio and video support for recording, playback and streaming; image conversion

Graphics – direct access to screen and keyboard for high performance; graphics accelerator API

Communications protocols – wide-area networking stacks including TCP/IP (dual mode IPv4/v6) and WAP, personal area networking support include infrared (IrDA), Bluetooth® wireless technology and USB; support is also provided for multihoming capabilities and link layer Quality-of-Service (QoS) on GPRS/UMTS networks

Mobile telephony – Symbian OS is ready for the 3G market with support for GSM circuit switched voice and data (CSD and EDGE ECSD) and packet-based data (GPRS and EDGE EGPRS); CDMA circuit switched voice, data and packet-based data (IS-95, cdma2000 1x, and WCDMA); SIM, RUIM and UICC Toolkit; other standards can be implemented by licensees through extensible APIs of the telephony subsystem

International support – conforms to Unicode Standard version 3.0

Data synchronization – over-the-air (OTA) synchronization support using SyncML; PC-based synchronization over serial, Bluetooth® wireless technology, Infrared and USB; a PC Connectivity framework providing the ability to transfer files and synchronize PIM data

Security – full encryption and certificate management, secure protocols (HTTPS, WTLS and SSL and TLS), WIM framework and certificate-based application installation

Developing for Symbian OS – content development options include: C++, Java (J2ME) MIDP 2.0 and PersonalJava 1.1.1a (with JavaPhone 1.0 option), and WAP; tools are available for building C++ and Java applications and ROMs with support for on-target debugging

User Inputs – generic input mechanism supporting full keyboard, 0-9*# (numeric mobile phone keypad), voice, handwriting recognition and predictive text input.

BREW

BREW - Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless is a combination OS, application platform, and marketing system. BREW started with QUALCOMM-based CDMA chipsets and technology – a vast market – but BREW is independent of the wireless technology utilized by a particular handset or network and can support other wireless technologies. Ideally, BREW can work with any device, and Qualcomm is planning to port it to Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). Qualcomm is trying to remove the gap between GSM and CDMA operators. As CDMA strengthened hand, the GSM lobby propped its own version of CDMA which they named WCDMA (Wideband CDMA). WCDMA has been launched in a group of countries (80 operators in 29 countries), and many more are gearing to launch it within this year, it is already successfully running in countries like Korea, Japan, China, India, Brazil and in some parts of North America.

So far prevalent in the CDMA domain, BREW is gradually transiting to the GSM bastion of Europe as the continent's operators introduce 3G services based on WCDMA (by the end of year 2005 the number of WCDMA networks users worldwide increased by 2,6 times compared to December 31, 2004 and reached 43,81 million users). Such a scenario could make Qualcomm a worldwide flag carrier in mobile market. In all, 40 commercial BREW device manufacturers (Audiovox, Kyocera, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, BenQ etc.) offer over 135 BREW-enabled devices – as of January, 2006 according to Qualcomm. Almost 10% of all handsets shipped worldwide are BREW compatible and the number of application downloads (May 2005) exceeds 300 million. The success of BREW has been built on CDMA platforms of major mobile operators, including Verizon Wireless, China Unicom, Telstra and KDDI.

Regardless of platform, BREW requires little memory (150KB), which makes BREW applications workable even on low-end phones.

BREW provides basic capabilities for such advanced services as GPS, VoIP, Bluetooth 1.1, MP3 and MIDI support, video recording and playback, multimedia streaming, e-mail. The set of BREW services includes communication capabilities of TCP/UDP sockets, HTTP protocol support, SMS-MMS services, extended telephony capabilities. BREW supports several programming languages including Java, and via extensions BREW understands C/C++, interactive animation Flash and XML.

The Wall Street Journal paralleled BREW with Microsoft Windows in wireless communication domain.

Experts' Area

Victoria Alexandrova, Project Manager, PDA applications Department of QArea Company: "Who I see a winner? Symbian, of course. It is convenient, applicable, multi functional and easy for understanding. However, if I were in the USA I definitely would rather use BlackBerry, since they provide top quality service."

BLACKBERRY

BLACKBERRY – is a proprietary operating system, provided by RIM (Research in Motion, Canada), for the BlackBerry devices and BlackBerry enabled devices (BlackBerry email is already on a few handsets including Siemens SK65, Nokia 6820/6822, Motorola MPx220). BlackBerry is one of the leading wireless solutions, which allows users to stay connected with wireless access to email, corporate data, phone, web and organizer features. The true power of BlackBerry is mailbox integration. BlackBerry can integrate seamlessly with a user's existing corporate or personal email account providing a wireless extension of their regular e-mailbox.

The first BlackBerry was released in early 1999. The first BlackBerry with integrated cell phone, as well as the first BlackBerry sold outside of North America was released in 2001, using the European GSM/GPRS standard. RIM at the moment has a very dominant position in the mobile email market. BlackBerry is used worldwide, available from 95 wireless carriers in 40 countries. In November 2004, RIM announced the number of subscribers to the BlackBerry service to have reached two million, having doubled within ten months. Proceeding their steady growth, RIM announced an additional one million subscribers in May 2005, only six months after having reached two million.

Experts' Area

Rudy de Waele, CEO at Random One (R1):

"The market is going more Symbian due to the strategic moves Symbian did with S60 platform, delivering Symbian to various devices of different brand manufacturers and Nokia's latest partnership with Vodafone to increase the use of S60 as a standard software platform.

Windows Mobile is going to catch up bit by bit, they have the market advantage in US and they can benefit from the Microsoft PC/Mobile synchronization that becomes more and more popular and is a crucial element for the success of mobile data services, but I don't see them getting quickly at the same level of Symbian on a global level, it's going to take at least 4-5 years for them to catch-up, if ever they will...

Meanwhile I don't see a bright future for Palm OS, neither BREW, though BREW is still quite strong in the market due to Qualcomm strength on the market.

Nobody can compete with Symbian as of now, their competitors will have to come up with a stronger OS and that doesn't look obvious.

At last, don't forget about Linux who has a lot of potential, specifically in mobile, I see a bright and growing future for them."

No wonder, RIM manufactures a top notch device (with BlackBerry OS on board) that is secure, stable, and dominates market share with state and local government, the military, and with commercial corporations. In 2005 RIM was the first largest PDA supplier, and their technology BlackBerry occupied the second place among OS manufacturers giving Microsoft product the go-by.

RIM develops its own software for its devices, using C++ and Java technology. Third party developers applications must be digitally signed, that guarantees the application authorship.

Available services are: Wireless Email Service, Wireless Calendar Service, Wireless Internet (HTML and WAP formats) Services, Voice and SMS, Mobile Data Service, Attachment Service, Instant Messenger, GPS Service, Bluetooth etc.

The full feature handsets market is hard to predict, however almost all analysts predict steady and increasing growth of this market (which is observed at the moment). Each manufacturer aspires to create a common OS to globalize and standardize application development, distribution and management (as they say) to develop applications for all but not for each distinct device. Some people welcome such opportunity and some are bothered by possible monopolization and subsequent abuses in this domain. What is observed at the moment that each of the manufacturers had occupied a distinct characteristic niche, where he is successful, and already from there with mixed success tries to "conquer" the mobile wireless world.

Experts' Area

Alexei Golovashov, Senior QA Engineer, QArea Group:

"BlackBerry? One of its main advantages is an advanced ergonomics both of the device itself and its software. The user interface, as of today, I suppose, is one of the best among developed for PDA devices. While its main disadvantage is absence of memory card. Absence of the latter means that it can not be used for other purposes, it is narrow directed. I use my Symbian as MP3 player and to watch movies. I will not be able to use BlackBerry for that even if I want to. BlackBerry is convenient only for business domain, I guess, while Symbian also can be used as a game platform, and its a rather essential part of users who use it that way. BREW, from my point of view, has no bright future at all. J2ME is that well-developed that nobody pays attention to BREW. Furthermore, all BREW applications are to be certified, that complicates their usage and distribution," - says Alexei Golovashov, QArea's Senior QA Engineer.

What then

The whole world, and wireless market in particular, moves toward high speeds, multiple functions and extended business possibilities. 3G networks is the next inevitable stage of mobile market development. It provides plenty of capabilities both for business and entertainment, communication and data transfer, Internet access and mobile e-mailing. Most of 3G devices should combine all available 3G technologies to be competitive. This factor will also affect the development of devices and operating systems for them. As we can see, the mobile market requires a device that could fullest reveal the capabilities of next generation mobile networks 3G and 4G. These numbers are dramatic confirmation of 3G leading position: 173 Commercial 3G Operators in 75 Countries worldwide (as of February 02, 2006), over 228 million reported 3G CDMA subscribers (as of November 30, 2005), 826 models of 3G devices worldwide. The industry standard for 3G wireless networks consists of 5 operating modes – three of them are based on CDMA technology: CDMA2000, WCDMA (UMTS) and TD-SCDMA. In this light BREW OS has a great opportunity to become a leader, though Nokia 6680 under Symbian OS is a 3G world bestseller telephone. The services by 3G carriers are quite actual already – 80% of British mobile users are ready to pay for mobile TV service, nothing to say about GPS, high-speed packet data access and high quality voice services.

Still large companies, financial giants, transnational corporations and government institutions adhere to the tried technologies – they use BlackBerry – undisputed leader in enterprise mobile solutions for mobile professionals and seek no alternative for it. However, if You still want an alternative for You BlackBerry You should be set for paying a pretty penny of some $500 for a new device and a new connection and it is not easy at all to find an equal substitution.

And let us don't forget that more players like Windows Mobile OS and Linux OS are on their way and hit their stride.

Undoubtedly, there's still a long way to go: Symbian powered nearly 34 million devices last year, more than double what Microsoft was able to ship, but the gap is narrowing.

MS provided an adequate tool set for the developers to develop software for their platform. In many ways they are helping to open up software innovation on devices. While developers for Symbian OS quite often complain of its being bad documented and too many OS versions. Microsoft's long legacy includes an understanding of the Developer and providing Developers tools. Symbian is a newcomer. Still, we shouldn't forget about the power of open source: Why would a Developer want to restrict themselves into a platform with a proprietary software code? Some experts consider that just the developer support is going to be key in who wins in the consumer market place.

Much also depends on marketing and promotion: Symbian's operating system is used in many top-end business phones today, because of its support for features such as PIM, voice-conferencing, push email and Web access. Nokia phone stands for world recognized brand and image phone – and it does pay dividends. To have Nokia's smartphone is almost the same as to drive Mercedes.

The potential of growing markets should also be considered: the demand for mobile phones in India, China, Eastern Europe and Africa is not a new phenomenon. Just in time enter a growing market and you can lead the race (Industry analysts forecast that 80% of the next billion mobile phone customers will come from emerging markets).

This is a niche market, all around. We say Europe – we mean Symbian, we say USA – we mean Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and BREW. BREW – is limited to CDMA markets (US and Chinese markets), Blackberry – is closely tied to business and corporate clients, Symbian is prevailing mainly in Europe: it turns out they have nothing to "brew". I hope none of them comes to dominate, since that is a recipe for stagnation; the 3 equally balanced would be perfect for fair competition and product development. We can not provide adequate predictions for someone's success or failure. It will be just a forecast.

All is left is to guess who to place stake on …

Authors:

Serge Bocharov

Oksana Lutikova

Eugene Kovalik

info@QArea.com

This year 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona brought all together all the people, newest ideas, technologies and products in the PDA and mobile phone industry. This year it stretched from February 13 till February 16 and gathered about 50,000 people. The attendance in the first day of this year Congress was bigger than the total attendance of last year's 3GSM in Cannes. 1,900 media representatives were near the action and were broadcasting the latest news from the source. 40% increase was shown in the exhibited companies also, this year they were 962. The 3GSM World Congress will be held again in Barcelona next year.

Among the most attendible exhibitors were Samsung, Nokia, Motorola, BenQ-Siemens, Sagem, LG, NEC, HP, Pantech and others.

Among the mobile handheld technologies there can be observed 2 successful trends: to-slimize-and-stuff-with-new-technologies and to make 3G-and-rich-media technologies affordable in low-end devices. The first category includes offers from Samsung, Motorola and Nokia mainly and NEC: supporting WiBro, HSDPA, T-DMB, building-in 3.2 to 5 megapixel cameras, raising internal memory up to the skies of 128 MB. The tendency to slim phones of the key idea of i-mode NEC clamshells. The phone is 13.6mm thick. They have EDGE connectivity standard, 1.3 megapixel camera, MP3 player, Bluetooth and 54 MB internal memory, WAP. Also there are some cute features announced, yet of doubtful value except but for entertainment purposes: text pronouncing feature, which can read SMS messages with its metallic voice with Pantech phone. Sharp and Toshiba presented 2.4" VGA displays. Current top of the line high-resolution displays used in the mobile phones are QVGA (240x320 pixels).

As usual the variety of designs is breathtaking.

Among OSs, Windows Mobile 5.0 is winning this span since it comes on most intriguing and promising models, like new HP quad-band communicator hw6900 and thin Windows smartphone - i-mate SmartFlip by HTC Star Trek platform.

Even the low-end handhelds aim high offering no more no less but 3G video broadcasting and high resolution cameras.

Anyway with the above tendencies, these are entertainment, TV-broadcasting, rich media, photoediting tools, business applications and security issues that are to be of major headache with content providers for these new essentials.

In this context of special interest and essentiality was QArea's presentation of their creativity in mobile GUI development, mobile animation and Flash interactive design. Of special interest were QArea's knowledgebase and experience in mobile security, mobile banking solutions and various entertainment software, both in the aspect of development and testing services.

Well appraised were QArea's skills and non-trivial approaches presented at 3GSM World Congress collected when developing embedded software for telecommunications industry.

About QArea: QArea is the one of the largest offshore software development companies in Eastern Europe since 2001. Its primary focus is brought upon application development for handheld devices (j2me development, Symbian, WinCE / Windows Mobile, Palm devices) and mobile web application development. Also, QArea cultivates strong .NET and Java teams performing standalone and web-application development and testing services.

3GSM World Congress will take place in Barcelona 13-16 of February 2006.

3GSM Congress is a dedicated event covering mobile technologies, wireless networks and mechanism of their providing, starting with basic communication and network operability support systems through wireless handhelds users utilize in their everyday life, as well as personified content which makes PDAs and mobile phones ever convenient tools for business and leisure.

"Without a doubt, 3GSM World Congress 2005 has been the most well-attended, most exciting and most important gathering ever for the mobile industry," explained Bill Gajda, Chief Marketing Officer at the GSM Association. "We look forward to welcoming everyone to Barcelona in 2006, where we're sure that we can transplant the best of Cannes' 'village' atmosphere into the Fira de Barcelona's vibrant space."

3GSM Congress is the largest conference and exhibition event of its kind. This year alone the event attracted over 32,000 of the most senior executives with a vested interest in the wireless industry. 2006 is said to be bigger than the one of 2005 and is a not to be missed for any executive serious about the opportunities that lie ahead in this business.

This year, 2006, the world's premier mobile event is making 3GSM World Congress history with record breaking pre-registrations. 962 companies have signed up as exhibitors, showcasing their latest mobile products, services and solutions - a massive 40% increase from last year! 50,000 visitors are also expected in Barcelona.

The keynote speakers are: Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, President & COO, (CEO Elect), Nokia, Arun Sarin, CEO, Vodafone Group, Sanjiv Ahuja, CEO, Orange Group and others.

Among mainstream topics are: innovations in GSM, delivering of multimedia through handsets, mobile TV and Radio content, gaming content and opportunities for service providers and players, 3G and WCDMA technologies, mobile security and others.

Offshore software development company QArea will present its extended experience in software development and testing services for PDA & Mobile. Since 2001 QArea is a key company in Ukraine professionally and full time engaged in PDA & Mobile application development, porting and testing. Being committed to providing custom software of the highest quality QArea contributed to success of many well-known companies mainly located in the US and West Europe.

PDA & Mobile domain in QArea is presented by Windows CE/Windows Mobile, Symbian, J2ME. QArea develops and ports software for entertainment and business providing standalone, client/server and WAP applications and WAP portal solutions engaging a vast variety of wireless connection technologies as GPS, WAP, GPRS, Bluetooth, IrDA, or Wi-Fi.

About QArea: QArea is the one of the largest offshore software development companies in Eastern Europe since 2001. Its primary focus is brought upon application development for handheld devices, (j2me development), Symbian, WinCE (Windows Mobile), Palm devices and related. Also, QArea cultivates strong .NET and Java development teams performing standalone and web-application development services.

QArea, an offshore software development company made a presentation at the Second Ukrainian Outsourcing Forum which took place in Kyiv on November 29-30, 2005. The II Ukrainian Outsourcing Forum was organized by Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative, a leading Ukrainian alliance in Offshore Software Development and the IT industry (www.hi-tech.org.ua). The subject of the presentation performed by, Eugene Kovalik, QArea's Sales and Marketing Director, was Kharkiv Leadership at Ukrainian IT Outsourcing Market.

In the report, the main idea was in delivering the essential information on Kharkiv leadership potential in supplying the biggest pool of certified software developers and qualified related professionals, already existing professionals pool, statistics on software offshore outsourcing market players in Kharkiv region, unique IT and data security branch organizations located in Kharkiv.

Particularly resonant was the fragment of the report dealing with Kharkiv contributed technologies and essential business models and trends, like ODC and BOT, and their extremely short time-to-market and starting time.

In the II Ukrainian Outsourcing Forum the following Ukrainian-based companies took part as contributors: QArea Group, Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative, Ukrainian Association of Software Vendors (UAPPO), Mirasoft Group, Lohika Systems, Inc., Infinity Internet Institute, Infopulse Ukraine, GSC Game World, Bonus Technology, Sunbay Software Crimea, InterLink Ltd., Program-Ace LLC, Lava Computer MFG, Inc., Kvazar-Mikro, Baker & McKenzie, TechnoPark Corp., IT Personnel, rabota.com.ua, Addforce/Ancor.

Also, in the II Ukrainian Outsourcing Forum, participated and contributed the following foreign organizations: Austrian Federation for the Information Industry (Austria), Softjourn, Inc. (USA), University of Jyvаskylа (Finland), RUSSE (Russia), LifeRepair.com (USA), Anergy Ltd. (England), Scandinavian HOUSE (Norway), EPAM Systems Inc. (USA).

About QArea: QArea is the one of the largest offshore software development companies in Eastern Europe since 2001. Its primary focus is brought upon application development for handheld devices, (j2me development), Symbian, WinCE (Windows Mobile), Palm devices and related. Also, QArea cultivates strong .NET and Java development teams performing standalone and web-application development services.

About Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative (www.hi-tech.org.ua): Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative is a leading Ukrainian alliance in Offshore Software Development and IT industry.

Objectives of the Initiative:

- presentation of Ukrainian market of offshore outsourcing services;

- accumulation of international contacts in order to establish cooperation in IT development sphere;

- Partners Screening and Selection Service as well as BPO in Ukraine;

- organization of meetings between Ukrainian and foreign companies;

- formation of investment for the progress of Ukrainian software development.

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

Kharkov, Ukraine -- (ReleaseWire) -- 06/02/2006 -- According to the research held by analytics company Canalys the market of "smart" mobile devices in Europe, Near East and Africa grows more rapidly than market of mobile phones. Within the first half of 2005 9.6 million of smartphones and PDAs were sold compared to 3.6 million during the same period of the previous year. Such trend is observed worldwide – almost 70 million full feature handsets are sold worldwide. According to analysts the two main processes in progress stipulate such growth at the moment. On the one hand, ordinary users interchange their old smartphones and PDAs to newer ones. On the other hand, there is an upsurge in interest in mobile E-mail and extended abilities of smart mobile devices from companies and corporations.

Modern smart mobile systems are to be: always available (small sized / handy), always On (optimized memory usage, minimal battery use), extensible (new software can be added if necessary), affordable, and of various form factors. Moreover, a smart mobile device should combine the maximum of mobile technologies available at the moment: GPS, VoIP, Bluetooth, IrDa, GPRS/EDGE, Wi-Fi, mobile E-mail, support of HTTP protocol, MP3 etc. This is a vast domain for competition among manufacturers of operation systems for smartphones and PDAs.

There are several very large players in this market: Symbian OS, BREW OS, Blackberry OS, Windows Mobile OS and Palm OS etc.

Experts' Area

Ulf Morys, General Manager at Gameloft GmbH:

" - Symbian: more important in the future, but still niche market (Nokia market share ca. 33 % overall; not more than 1/3 of this Symbian phones & some other Symbian phones). Overall optimistic estimate: ca. 10 % of total newly sold phone base.

- BlackBerry: interesting for business / productivity applications; no mass market.

- WindowsCE: difficult to judge. Microsoft will keep pushing it's platform, but results were often unsatisfactory in the past; make sure that the partners can actually bill for applications delivered to this platform. We've seen problems with this.

- BREW: real mass market potential in US and Chinese market, not very relevant for European market."

SYMBIAN

SYMBIAN – is a software licensing company that develops and supplies the advanced, open, standard operating system – Symbian OS – for data-enabled mobile phones and PDAs.

As of September 2005 60 phones that run under Symbian OS from eight manufacturers are shipped worldwide and a further 56 phones from eleven manufacturers (among them Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, BenQ and Motorola) were in development. Symbian OS is an undisputed sales leader in Europe and has a strong market share in other countries. Currently Symbian's market share is 55.9 per cent from worldwide sales (according to IDC analytics company), at that 82 per cent of devices were manufactured by Nokia (in whole since 2005 beginning there were sold approximately 34 million data enabled devices with Symbian OS on board).

Experts' Area

Philip Solis, ABI Research senior analyst, author of the study "Smartphones: The Market for Smartphones and Smartphone Operating Systems":

"Symbian's chief advantages are that it is easy to build applications for, and that it has a large developer community. Disadvantages are that Symbian is primarily limited to Nokia handsets, and its market is concentrated in "GSM-heavy" regions."

19 of 60 devices with Symbian OS support WCDMA. By the way, smartphone Nokia 6680 is recognized a 3G world bestseller telephone.

Key features of Symbian OS

Rich suite of application engines – the suite includes engines for contacts, schedule, messaging, browsing, utility and system control; OBEX for exchanging objects such as appointments (using vCalendar) and business cards (vCard); integrated APIs for data management, text, clipboard and graphics

Browsing – supports WAP 1.2.1 for mobile browsing

Messaging – multimedia messaging (MMS), enhanced messaging (EMS) and SMS; internet mail using POP3, IMAP4, SMTP and MHTML; attachments; fax

Multimedia – audio and video support for recording, playback and streaming; image conversion

Graphics – direct access to screen and keyboard for high performance; graphics accelerator API

Communications protocols – wide-area networking stacks including TCP/IP (dual mode IPv4/v6) and WAP, personal area networking support include infrared (IrDA), Bluetooth® wireless technology and USB; support is also provided for multihoming capabilities and link layer Quality-of-Service (QoS) on GPRS/UMTS networks

Mobile telephony – Symbian OS is ready for the 3G market with support for GSM circuit switched voice and data (CSD and EDGE ECSD) and packet-based data (GPRS and EDGE EGPRS); CDMA circuit switched voice, data and packet-based data (IS-95, cdma2000 1x, and WCDMA); SIM, RUIM and UICC Toolkit; other standards can be implemented by licensees through extensible APIs of the telephony subsystem

International support – conforms to Unicode Standard version 3.0

Data synchronization – over-the-air (OTA) synchronization support using SyncML; PC-based synchronization over serial, Bluetooth® wireless technology, Infrared and USB; a PC Connectivity framework providing the ability to transfer files and synchronize PIM data

Security – full encryption and certificate management, secure protocols (HTTPS, WTLS and SSL and TLS), WIM framework and certificate-based application installation

Developing for Symbian OS – content development options include: C++, Java (J2ME) MIDP 2.0 and PersonalJava 1.1.1a (with JavaPhone 1.0 option), and WAP; tools are available for building C++ and Java applications and ROMs with support for on-target debugging

User Inputs – generic input mechanism supporting full keyboard, 0-9*# (numeric mobile phone keypad), voice, handwriting recognition and predictive text input.

BREW

BREW - Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless is a combination OS, application platform, and marketing system. BREW started with QUALCOMM-based CDMA chipsets and technology – a vast market – but BREW is independent of the wireless technology utilized by a particular handset or network and can support other wireless technologies. Ideally, BREW can work with any device, and Qualcomm is planning to port it to Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). Qualcomm is trying to remove the gap between GSM and CDMA operators. As CDMA strengthened hand, the GSM lobby propped its own version of CDMA which they named WCDMA (Wideband CDMA). WCDMA has been launched in a group of countries (80 operators in 29 countries), and many more are gearing to launch it within this year, it is already successfully running in countries like Korea, Japan, China, India, Brazil and in some parts of North America.

So far prevalent in the CDMA domain, BREW is gradually transiting to the GSM bastion of Europe as the continent's operators introduce 3G services based on WCDMA (by the end of year 2005 the number of WCDMA networks users worldwide increased by 2,6 times compared to December 31, 2004 and reached 43,81 million users). Such a scenario could make Qualcomm a worldwide flag carrier in mobile market. In all, 40 commercial BREW device manufacturers (Audiovox, Kyocera, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, BenQ etc.) offer over 135 BREW-enabled devices – as of January, 2006 according to Qualcomm. Almost 10% of all handsets shipped worldwide are BREW compatible and the number of application downloads (May 2005) exceeds 300 million. The success of BREW has been built on CDMA platforms of major mobile operators, including Verizon Wireless, China Unicom, Telstra and KDDI.

Regardless of platform, BREW requires little memory (150KB), which makes BREW applications workable even on low-end phones.

BREW provides basic capabilities for such advanced services as GPS, VoIP, Bluetooth 1.1, MP3 and MIDI support, video recording and playback, multimedia streaming, e-mail. The set of BREW services includes communication capabilities of TCP/UDP sockets, HTTP protocol support, SMS-MMS services, extended telephony capabilities. BREW supports several programming languages including Java, and via extensions BREW understands C/C++, interactive animation Flash and XML.

The Wall Street Journal paralleled BREW with Microsoft Windows in wireless communication domain.

Experts' Area

Victoria Alexandrova, Project Manager, PDA applications Department of QArea Company: "Who I see a winner? Symbian, of course. It is convenient, applicable, multi functional and easy for understanding. However, if I were in the USA I definitely would rather use BlackBerry, since they provide top quality service."

BLACKBERRY

BLACKBERRY – is a proprietary operating system, provided by RIM (Research in Motion, Canada), for the BlackBerry devices and BlackBerry enabled devices (BlackBerry email is already on a few handsets including Siemens SK65, Nokia 6820/6822, Motorola MPx220). BlackBerry is one of the leading wireless solutions, which allows users to stay connected with wireless access to email, corporate data, phone, web and organizer features. The true power of BlackBerry is mailbox integration. BlackBerry can integrate seamlessly with a user's existing corporate or personal email account providing a wireless extension of their regular e-mailbox.

The first BlackBerry was released in early 1999. The first BlackBerry with integrated cell phone, as well as the first BlackBerry sold outside of North America was released in 2001, using the European GSM/GPRS standard. RIM at the moment has a very dominant position in the mobile email market. BlackBerry is used worldwide, available from 95 wireless carriers in 40 countries. In November 2004, RIM announced the number of subscribers to the BlackBerry service to have reached two million, having doubled within ten months. Proceeding their steady growth, RIM announced an additional one million subscribers in May 2005, only six months after having reached two million.

Experts' Area

Rudy de Waele, CEO at Random One (R1):

"The market is going more Symbian due to the strategic moves Symbian did with S60 platform, delivering Symbian to various devices of different brand manufacturers and Nokia's latest partnership with Vodafone to increase the use of S60 as a standard software platform.

Windows Mobile is going to catch up bit by bit, they have the market advantage in US and they can benefit from the Microsoft PC/Mobile synchronization that becomes more and more popular and is a crucial element for the success of mobile data services, but I don't see them getting quickly at the same level of Symbian on a global level, it's going to take at least 4-5 years for them to catch-up, if ever they will...

Meanwhile I don't see a bright future for Palm OS, neither BREW, though BREW is still quite strong in the market due to Qualcomm strength on the market.

Nobody can compete with Symbian as of now, their competitors will have to come up with a stronger OS and that doesn't look obvious.

At last, don't forget about Linux who has a lot of potential, specifically in mobile, I see a bright and growing future for them."

No wonder, RIM manufactures a top notch device (with BlackBerry OS on board) that is secure, stable, and dominates market share with state and local government, the military, and with commercial corporations. In 2005 RIM was the first largest PDA supplier, and their technology BlackBerry occupied the second place among OS manufacturers giving Microsoft product the go-by.

RIM develops its own software for its devices, using C++ and Java technology. Third party developers applications must be digitally signed, that guarantees the application authorship.

Available services are: Wireless Email Service, Wireless Calendar Service, Wireless Internet (HTML and WAP formats) Services, Voice and SMS, Mobile Data Service, Attachment Service, Instant Messenger, GPS Service, Bluetooth etc.

The full feature handsets market is hard to predict, however almost all analysts predict steady and increasing growth of this market (which is observed at the moment). Each manufacturer aspires to create a common OS to globalize and standardize application development, distribution and management (as they say) to develop applications for all but not for each distinct device. Some people welcome such opportunity and some are bothered by possible monopolization and subsequent abuses in this domain. What is observed at the moment that each of the manufacturers had occupied a distinct characteristic niche, where he is successful, and already from there with mixed success tries to "conquer" the mobile wireless world.

Experts' Area

Alexei Golovashov, Senior QA Engineer, QArea Group:

"BlackBerry? One of its main advantages is an advanced ergonomics both of the device itself and its software. The user interface, as of today, I suppose, is one of the best among developed for PDA devices. While its main disadvantage is absence of memory card. Absence of the latter means that it can not be used for other purposes, it is narrow directed. I use my Symbian as MP3 player and to watch movies. I will not be able to use BlackBerry for that even if I want to. BlackBerry is convenient only for business domain, I guess, while Symbian also can be used as a game platform, and its a rather essential part of users who use it that way. BREW, from my point of view, has no bright future at all. J2ME is that well-developed that nobody pays attention to BREW. Furthermore, all BREW applications are to be certified, that complicates their usage and distribution," - says Alexei Golovashov, QArea's Senior QA Engineer.

What then

The whole world, and wireless market in particular, moves toward high speeds, multiple functions and extended business possibilities. 3G networks is the next inevitable stage of mobile market development. It provides plenty of capabilities both for business and entertainment, communication and data transfer, Internet access and mobile e-mailing. Most of 3G devices should combine all available 3G technologies to be competitive. This factor will also affect the development of devices and operating systems for them. As we can see, the mobile market requires a device that could fullest reveal the capabilities of next generation mobile networks 3G and 4G. These numbers are dramatic confirmation of 3G leading position: 173 Commercial 3G Operators in 75 Countries worldwide (as of February 02, 2006), over 228 million reported 3G CDMA subscribers (as of November 30, 2005), 826 models of 3G devices worldwide. The industry standard for 3G wireless networks consists of 5 operating modes – three of them are based on CDMA technology: CDMA2000, WCDMA (UMTS) and TD-SCDMA. In this light BREW OS has a great opportunity to become a leader, though Nokia 6680 under Symbian OS is a 3G world bestseller telephone. The services by 3G carriers are quite actual already – 80% of British mobile users are ready to pay for mobile TV service, nothing to say about GPS, high-speed packet data access and high quality voice services.

Still large companies, financial giants, transnational corporations and government institutions adhere to the tried technologies – they use BlackBerry – undisputed leader in enterprise mobile solutions for mobile professionals and seek no alternative for it. However, if You still want an alternative for You BlackBerry You should be set for paying a pretty penny of some $500 for a new device and a new connection and it is not easy at all to find an equal substitution.

And let us don't forget that more players like Windows Mobile OS and Linux OS are on their way and hit their stride.

Undoubtedly, there's still a long way to go: Symbian powered nearly 34 million devices last year, more than double what Microsoft was able to ship, but the gap is narrowing.

MS provided an adequate tool set for the developers to develop software for their platform. In many ways they are helping to open up software innovation on devices. While developers for Symbian OS quite often complain of its being bad documented and too many OS versions. Microsoft's long legacy includes an understanding of the Developer and providing Developers tools. Symbian is a newcomer. Still, we shouldn't forget about the power of open source: Why would a Developer want to restrict themselves into a platform with a proprietary software code? Some experts consider that just the developer support is going to be key in who wins in the consumer market place.

Much also depends on marketing and promotion: Symbian's operating system is used in many top-end business phones today, because of its support for features such as PIM, voice-conferencing, push email and Web access. Nokia phone stands for world recognized brand and image phone – and it does pay dividends. To have Nokia's smartphone is almost the same as to drive Mercedes.

The potential of growing markets should also be considered: the demand for mobile phones in India, China, Eastern Europe and Africa is not a new phenomenon. Just in time enter a growing market and you can lead the race (Industry analysts forecast that 80% of the next billion mobile phone customers will come from emerging markets).

This is a niche market, all around. We say Europe – we mean Symbian, we say USA – we mean Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and BREW. BREW – is limited to CDMA markets (US and Chinese markets), Blackberry – is closely tied to business and corporate clients, Symbian is prevailing mainly in Europe: it turns out they have nothing to "brew". I hope none of them comes to dominate, since that is a recipe for stagnation; the 3 equally balanced would be perfect for fair competition and product development. We can not provide adequate predictions for someone's success or failure. It will be just a forecast.

All is left is to guess who to place stake on …

Authors:

Serge Bocharov

Oksana Lutikova

Eugene Kovalik

info@QArea.com

This year 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona brought all together all the people, newest ideas, technologies and products in the PDA and mobile phone industry. This year it stretched from February 13 till February 16 and gathered about 50,000 people. The attendance in the first day of this year Congress was bigger than the total attendance of last year's 3GSM in Cannes. 1,900 media representatives were near the action and were broadcasting the latest news from the source. 40% increase was shown in the exhibited companies also, this year they were 962. The 3GSM World Congress will be held again in Barcelona next year.

Among the most attendible exhibitors were Samsung, Nokia, Motorola, BenQ-Siemens, Sagem, LG, NEC, HP, Pantech and others.

Among the mobile handheld technologies there can be observed 2 successful trends: to-slimize-and-stuff-with-new-technologies and to make 3G-and-rich-media technologies affordable in low-end devices. The first category includes offers from Samsung, Motorola and Nokia mainly and NEC: supporting WiBro, HSDPA, T-DMB, building-in 3.2 to 5 megapixel cameras, raising internal memory up to the skies of 128 MB. The tendency to slim phones of the key idea of i-mode NEC clamshells. The phone is 13.6mm thick. They have EDGE connectivity standard, 1.3 megapixel camera, MP3 player, Bluetooth and 54 MB internal memory, WAP. Also there are some cute features announced, yet of doubtful value except but for entertainment purposes: text pronouncing feature, which can read SMS messages with its metallic voice with Pantech phone. Sharp and Toshiba presented 2.4" VGA displays. Current top of the line high-resolution displays used in the mobile phones are QVGA (240x320 pixels).

As usual the variety of designs is breathtaking.

Among OSs, Windows Mobile 5.0 is winning this span since it comes on most intriguing and promising models, like new HP quad-band communicator hw6900 and thin Windows smartphone - i-mate SmartFlip by HTC Star Trek platform.

Even the low-end handhelds aim high offering no more no less but 3G video broadcasting and high resolution cameras.

Anyway with the above tendencies, these are entertainment, TV-broadcasting, rich media, photoediting tools, business applications and security issues that are to be of major headache with content providers for these new essentials.

In this context of special interest and essentiality was QArea's presentation of their creativity in mobile GUI development, mobile animation and Flash interactive design. Of special interest were QArea's knowledgebase and experience in mobile security, mobile banking solutions and various entertainment software, both in the aspect of development and testing services.

Well appraised were QArea's skills and non-trivial approaches presented at 3GSM World Congress collected when developing embedded software for telecommunications industry.

About QArea: QArea is the one of the largest offshore software development companies in Eastern Europe since 2001. Its primary focus is brought upon application development for handheld devices (j2me development, Symbian, WinCE / Windows Mobile, Palm devices) and mobile web application development. Also, QArea cultivates strong .NET and Java teams performing standalone and web-application development and testing services.

3GSM World Congress will take place in Barcelona 13-16 of February 2006.

3GSM Congress is a dedicated event covering mobile technologies, wireless networks and mechanism of their providing, starting with basic communication and network operability support systems through wireless handhelds users utilize in their everyday life, as well as personified content which makes PDAs and mobile phones ever convenient tools for business and leisure.

"Without a doubt, 3GSM World Congress 2005 has been the most well-attended, most exciting and most important gathering ever for the mobile industry," explained Bill Gajda, Chief Marketing Officer at the GSM Association. "We look forward to welcoming everyone to Barcelona in 2006, where we're sure that we can transplant the best of Cannes' 'village' atmosphere into the Fira de Barcelona's vibrant space."

3GSM Congress is the largest conference and exhibition event of its kind. This year alone the event attracted over 32,000 of the most senior executives with a vested interest in the wireless industry. 2006 is said to be bigger than the one of 2005 and is a not to be missed for any executive serious about the opportunities that lie ahead in this business.

This year, 2006, the world's premier mobile event is making 3GSM World Congress history with record breaking pre-registrations. 962 companies have signed up as exhibitors, showcasing their latest mobile products, services and solutions - a massive 40% increase from last year! 50,000 visitors are also expected in Barcelona.

The keynote speakers are: Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, President & COO, (CEO Elect), Nokia, Arun Sarin, CEO, Vodafone Group, Sanjiv Ahuja, CEO, Orange Group and others.

Among mainstream topics are: innovations in GSM, delivering of multimedia through handsets, mobile TV and Radio content, gaming content and opportunities for service providers and players, 3G and WCDMA technologies, mobile security and others.

Offshore software development company QArea will present its extended experience in software development and testing services for PDA & Mobile. Since 2001 QArea is a key company in Ukraine professionally and full time engaged in PDA & Mobile application development, porting and testing. Being committed to providing custom software of the highest quality QArea contributed to success of many well-known companies mainly located in the US and West Europe.

PDA & Mobile domain in QArea is presented by Windows CE/Windows Mobile, Symbian, J2ME. QArea develops and ports software for entertainment and business providing standalone, client/server and WAP applications and WAP portal solutions engaging a vast variety of wireless connection technologies as GPS, WAP, GPRS, Bluetooth, IrDA, or Wi-Fi.

About QArea: QArea is the one of the largest offshore software development companies in Eastern Europe since 2001. Its primary focus is brought upon application development for handheld devices, (j2me development), Symbian, WinCE (Windows Mobile), Palm devices and related. Also, QArea cultivates strong .NET and Java development teams performing standalone and web-application development services.

QArea, an offshore software development company made a presentation at the Second Ukrainian Outsourcing Forum which took place in Kyiv on November 29-30, 2005. The II Ukrainian Outsourcing Forum was organized by Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative, a leading Ukrainian alliance in Offshore Software Development and the IT industry (www.hi-tech.org.ua). The subject of the presentation performed by, Eugene Kovalik, QArea's Sales and Marketing Director, was Kharkiv Leadership at Ukrainian IT Outsourcing Market.

In the report, the main idea was in delivering the essential information on Kharkiv leadership potential in supplying the biggest pool of certified software developers and qualified related professionals, already existing professionals pool, statistics on software offshore outsourcing market players in Kharkiv region, unique IT and data security branch organizations located in Kharkiv.

Particularly resonant was the fragment of the report dealing with Kharkiv contributed technologies and essential business models and trends, like ODC and BOT, and their extremely short time-to-market and starting time.

In the II Ukrainian Outsourcing Forum the following Ukrainian-based companies took part as contributors: QArea Group, Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative, Ukrainian Association of Software Vendors (UAPPO), Mirasoft Group, Lohika Systems, Inc., Infinity Internet Institute, Infopulse Ukraine, GSC Game World, Bonus Technology, Sunbay Software Crimea, InterLink Ltd., Program-Ace LLC, Lava Computer MFG, Inc., Kvazar-Mikro, Baker & McKenzie, TechnoPark Corp., IT Personnel, rabota.com.ua, Addforce/Ancor.

Also, in the II Ukrainian Outsourcing Forum, participated and contributed the following foreign organizations: Austrian Federation for the Information Industry (Austria), Softjourn, Inc. (USA), University of Jyvаskylа (Finland), RUSSE (Russia), LifeRepair.com (USA), Anergy Ltd. (England), Scandinavian HOUSE (Norway), EPAM Systems Inc. (USA).

About QArea: QArea is the one of the largest offshore software development companies in Eastern Europe since 2001. Its primary focus is brought upon application development for handheld devices, (j2me development), Symbian, WinCE (Windows Mobile), Palm devices and related. Also, QArea cultivates strong .NET and Java development teams performing standalone and web-application development services.

About Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative (www.hi-tech.org.ua): Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative is a leading Ukrainian alliance in Offshore Software Development and IT industry.

Objectives of the Initiative:

- presentation of Ukrainian market of offshore outsourcing services;

- accumulation of international contacts in order to establish cooperation in IT development sphere;

- Partners Screening and Selection Service as well as BPO in Ukraine;

- organization of meetings between Ukrainian and foreign companies;

- formation of investment for the progress of Ukrainian software development.

QArea, an offshore software development company has successfully finished the first two software development projects for non-verbal persons. The software development program was outsourced by Sym Systems Corporation, an American company producing augmentative speech devices assisting those who require alternative forms of communication. QArea's marketing support was provided by Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative, a leading Ukrainian alliance in Offshore Software Development and the IT industry (www.hi-tech.org.ua).

The E-Talk Tablet device by Sym Systems Corporation is a portable speech device for anyone who has lost the ability to speak. The E-Talk is a Tablet PC based on Windows XP - so in addition to being a speech generating device, it also supports a large number of applications designed for the PC. The E-Talk Tablet uses the E-Talk 3 Software System, providing word prediction, multiple languages, and the ability to completely customize the display.

The E-Talk is controlled by tapping on the front panel or it can use a variety of switch access methods. The E-Talk features a dynamic display software that allows the custom communication system to be easily created for nearly any user. The selection can be made from pictures mixed with text, completely picture based, or completely text based formats. It comes with changeable keypad overlays, including the entire alphabet and common words and phrases. The box "speaks" the word, letter or phrase by simply pressing a key. A user who still has vocal capabilities can record all the selections in their own voice. Yet, for those who have lost their own voice still there are no language barriers. Because one can digitally record any voice (man's, woman's or child's), the E-Talk can speak in any language.

About QArea: QArea is the one of the largest offshore software development companies in Eastern Europe since 2001. Its primary focus is brought upon application development for handheld devices, ( j2me development ), Symbian, WinCE (Windows Mobile), Palm devices and related. Also, QArea cultivates strong .NET and Java development teams performing standalone and web-application development services.

About Sym Systems Corporation: Sym Systems Corporation is a US company dealing with embedded systems and producing augmentative speech devices assisting those who require alternative forms of communication. The company has collected vast experience in project outsourcing to Indian and Ukrainian companies and now has opted for Ukraine in a matter of strategic development of its production capabilities.

About Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative (www.hi-tech.org.ua): Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative is a leading Ukrainian alliance in Offshore Software Development and IT industry.

Objectives of the Initiative:

- presentation of Ukrainian market of offshore outsourcing services;

- accumulation of international contacts in order to establish cooperation in IT development sphere;

- Partners Screening and Selection Service as well as BPO in Ukraine;

- organization of meetings between Ukrainian and foreign companies;

- formation of investment for the progress of Ukrainian software development.

Contacts:

Eugene Kovalik

Sales and Marketing Director

QArea

Tel: +38 057 702-1-701

http://www.qarea.com

info@qarea.com

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

Kharkov, Ukraine -- (ReleaseWire) -- 06/02/2006 -- According to the research held by analytics company Canalys the market of "smart" mobile devices in Europe, Near East and Africa grows more rapidly than market of mobile phones. Within the first half of 2005 9.6 million of smartphones and PDAs were sold compared to 3.6 million during the same period of the previous year. Such trend is observed worldwide – almost 70 million full feature handsets are sold worldwide. According to analysts the two main processes in progress stipulate such growth at the moment. On the one hand, ordinary users interchange their old smartphones and PDAs to newer ones. On the other hand, there is an upsurge in interest in mobile E-mail and extended abilities of smart mobile devices from companies and corporations.

Modern smart mobile systems are to be: always available (small sized / handy), always On (optimized memory usage, minimal battery use), extensible (new software can be added if necessary), affordable, and of various form factors. Moreover, a smart mobile device should combine the maximum of mobile technologies available at the moment: GPS, VoIP, Bluetooth, IrDa, GPRS/EDGE, Wi-Fi, mobile E-mail, support of HTTP protocol, MP3 etc. This is a vast domain for competition among manufacturers of operation systems for smartphones and PDAs.

There are several very large players in this market: Symbian OS, BREW OS, Blackberry OS, Windows Mobile OS and Palm OS etc.

Experts' Area

Ulf Morys, General Manager at Gameloft GmbH:

" - Symbian: more important in the future, but still niche market (Nokia market share ca. 33 % overall; not more than 1/3 of this Symbian phones & some other Symbian phones). Overall optimistic estimate: ca. 10 % of total newly sold phone base.

- BlackBerry: interesting for business / productivity applications; no mass market.

- WindowsCE: difficult to judge. Microsoft will keep pushing it's platform, but results were often unsatisfactory in the past; make sure that the partners can actually bill for applications delivered to this platform. We've seen problems with this.

- BREW: real mass market potential in US and Chinese market, not very relevant for European market."

SYMBIAN

SYMBIAN – is a software licensing company that develops and supplies the advanced, open, standard operating system – Symbian OS – for data-enabled mobile phones and PDAs.

As of September 2005 60 phones that run under Symbian OS from eight manufacturers are shipped worldwide and a further 56 phones from eleven manufacturers (among them Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, BenQ and Motorola) were in development. Symbian OS is an undisputed sales leader in Europe and has a strong market share in other countries. Currently Symbian's market share is 55.9 per cent from worldwide sales (according to IDC analytics company), at that 82 per cent of devices were manufactured by Nokia (in whole since 2005 beginning there were sold approximately 34 million data enabled devices with Symbian OS on board).

Experts' Area

Philip Solis, ABI Research senior analyst, author of the study "Smartphones: The Market for Smartphones and Smartphone Operating Systems":

"Symbian's chief advantages are that it is easy to build applications for, and that it has a large developer community. Disadvantages are that Symbian is primarily limited to Nokia handsets, and its market is concentrated in "GSM-heavy" regions."

19 of 60 devices with Symbian OS support WCDMA. By the way, smartphone Nokia 6680 is recognized a 3G world bestseller telephone.

Key features of Symbian OS

Rich suite of application engines – the suite includes engines for contacts, schedule, messaging, browsing, utility and system control; OBEX for exchanging objects such as appointments (using vCalendar) and business cards (vCard); integrated APIs for data management, text, clipboard and graphics

Browsing – supports WAP 1.2.1 for mobile browsing

Messaging – multimedia messaging (MMS), enhanced messaging (EMS) and SMS; internet mail using POP3, IMAP4, SMTP and MHTML; attachments; fax

Multimedia – audio and video support for recording, playback and streaming; image conversion

Graphics – direct access to screen and keyboard for high performance; graphics accelerator API

Communications protocols – wide-area networking stacks including TCP/IP (dual mode IPv4/v6) and WAP, personal area networking support include infrared (IrDA), Bluetooth® wireless technology and USB; support is also provided for multihoming capabilities and link layer Quality-of-Service (QoS) on GPRS/UMTS networks

Mobile telephony – Symbian OS is ready for the 3G market with support for GSM circuit switched voice and data (CSD and EDGE ECSD) and packet-based data (GPRS and EDGE EGPRS); CDMA circuit switched voice, data and packet-based data (IS-95, cdma2000 1x, and WCDMA); SIM, RUIM and UICC Toolkit; other standards can be implemented by licensees through extensible APIs of the telephony subsystem

International support – conforms to Unicode Standard version 3.0

Data synchronization – over-the-air (OTA) synchronization support using SyncML; PC-based synchronization over serial, Bluetooth® wireless technology, Infrared and USB; a PC Connectivity framework providing the ability to transfer files and synchronize PIM data

Security – full encryption and certificate management, secure protocols (HTTPS, WTLS and SSL and TLS), WIM framework and certificate-based application installation

Developing for Symbian OS – content development options include: C++, Java (J2ME) MIDP 2.0 and PersonalJava 1.1.1a (with JavaPhone 1.0 option), and WAP; tools are available for building C++ and Java applications and ROMs with support for on-target debugging

User Inputs – generic input mechanism supporting full keyboard, 0-9*# (numeric mobile phone keypad), voice, handwriting recognition and predictive text input.

BREW

BREW - Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless is a combination OS, application platform, and marketing system. BREW started with QUALCOMM-based CDMA chipsets and technology – a vast market – but BREW is independent of the wireless technology utilized by a particular handset or network and can support other wireless technologies. Ideally, BREW can work with any device, and Qualcomm is planning to port it to Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). Qualcomm is trying to remove the gap between GSM and CDMA operators. As CDMA strengthened hand, the GSM lobby propped its own version of CDMA which they named WCDMA (Wideband CDMA). WCDMA has been launched in a group of countries (80 operators in 29 countries), and many more are gearing to launch it within this year, it is already successfully running in countries like Korea, Japan, China, India, Brazil and in some parts of North America.

So far prevalent in the CDMA domain, BREW is gradually transiting to the GSM bastion of Europe as the continent's operators introduce 3G services based on WCDMA (by the end of year 2005 the number of WCDMA networks users worldwide increased by 2,6 times compared to December 31, 2004 and reached 43,81 million users). Such a scenario could make Qualcomm a worldwide flag carrier in mobile market. In all, 40 commercial BREW device manufacturers (Audiovox, Kyocera, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, BenQ etc.) offer over 135 BREW-enabled devices – as of January, 2006 according to Qualcomm. Almost 10% of all handsets shipped worldwide are BREW compatible and the number of application downloads (May 2005) exceeds 300 million. The success of BREW has been built on CDMA platforms of major mobile operators, including Verizon Wireless, China Unicom, Telstra and KDDI.

Regardless of platform, BREW requires little memory (150KB), which makes BREW applications workable even on low-end phones.

BREW provides basic capabilities for such advanced services as GPS, VoIP, Bluetooth 1.1, MP3 and MIDI support, video recording and playback, multimedia streaming, e-mail. The set of BREW services includes communication capabilities of TCP/UDP sockets, HTTP protocol support, SMS-MMS services, extended telephony capabilities. BREW supports several programming languages including Java, and via extensions BREW understands C/C++, interactive animation Flash and XML.

The Wall Street Journal paralleled BREW with Microsoft Windows in wireless communication domain.

Experts' Area

Victoria Alexandrova, Project Manager, PDA applications Department of QArea Company: "Who I see a winner? Symbian, of course. It is convenient, applicable, multi functional and easy for understanding. However, if I were in the USA I definitely would rather use BlackBerry, since they provide top quality service."

BLACKBERRY

BLACKBERRY – is a proprietary operating system, provided by RIM (Research in Motion, Canada), for the BlackBerry devices and BlackBerry enabled devices (BlackBerry email is already on a few handsets including Siemens SK65, Nokia 6820/6822, Motorola MPx220). BlackBerry is one of the leading wireless solutions, which allows users to stay connected with wireless access to email, corporate data, phone, web and organizer features. The true power of BlackBerry is mailbox integration. BlackBerry can integrate seamlessly with a user's existing corporate or personal email account providing a wireless extension of their regular e-mailbox.

The first BlackBerry was released in early 1999. The first BlackBerry with integrated cell phone, as well as the first BlackBerry sold outside of North America was released in 2001, using the European GSM/GPRS standard. RIM at the moment has a very dominant position in the mobile email market. BlackBerry is used worldwide, available from 95 wireless carriers in 40 countries. In November 2004, RIM announced the number of subscribers to the BlackBerry service to have reached two million, having doubled within ten months. Proceeding their steady growth, RIM announced an additional one million subscribers in May 2005, only six months after having reached two million.

Experts' Area

Rudy de Waele, CEO at Random One (R1):

"The market is going more Symbian due to the strategic moves Symbian did with S60 platform, delivering Symbian to various devices of different brand manufacturers and Nokia's latest partnership with Vodafone to increase the use of S60 as a standard software platform.

Windows Mobile is going to catch up bit by bit, they have the market advantage in US and they can benefit from the Microsoft PC/Mobile synchronization that becomes more and more popular and is a crucial element for the success of mobile data services, but I don't see them getting quickly at the same level of Symbian on a global level, it's going to take at least 4-5 years for them to catch-up, if ever they will...

Meanwhile I don't see a bright future for Palm OS, neither BREW, though BREW is still quite strong in the market due to Qualcomm strength on the market.

Nobody can compete with Symbian as of now, their competitors will have to come up with a stronger OS and that doesn't look obvious.

At last, don't forget about Linux who has a lot of potential, specifically in mobile, I see a bright and growing future for them."

No wonder, RIM manufactures a top notch device (with BlackBerry OS on board) that is secure, stable, and dominates market share with state and local government, the military, and with commercial corporations. In 2005 RIM was the first largest PDA supplier, and their technology BlackBerry occupied the second place among OS manufacturers giving Microsoft product the go-by.

RIM develops its own software for its devices, using C++ and Java technology. Third party developers applications must be digitally signed, that guarantees the application authorship.

Available services are: Wireless Email Service, Wireless Calendar Service, Wireless Internet (HTML and WAP formats) Services, Voice and SMS, Mobile Data Service, Attachment Service, Instant Messenger, GPS Service, Bluetooth etc.

The full feature handsets market is hard to predict, however almost all analysts predict steady and increasing growth of this market (which is observed at the moment). Each manufacturer aspires to create a common OS to globalize and standardize application development, distribution and management (as they say) to develop applications for all but not for each distinct device. Some people welcome such opportunity and some are bothered by possible monopolization and subsequent abuses in this domain. What is observed at the moment that each of the manufacturers had occupied a distinct characteristic niche, where he is successful, and already from there with mixed success tries to "conquer" the mobile wireless world.

Experts' Area

Alexei Golovashov, Senior QA Engineer, QArea Group:

"BlackBerry? One of its main advantages is an advanced ergonomics both of the device itself and its software. The user interface, as of today, I suppose, is one of the best among developed for PDA devices. While its main disadvantage is absence of memory card. Absence of the latter means that it can not be used for other purposes, it is narrow directed. I use my Symbian as MP3 player and to watch movies. I will not be able to use BlackBerry for that even if I want to. BlackBerry is convenient only for business domain, I guess, while Symbian also can be used as a game platform, and its a rather essential part of users who use it that way. BREW, from my point of view, has no bright future at all. J2ME is that well-developed that nobody pays attention to BREW. Furthermore, all BREW applications are to be certified, that complicates their usage and distribution," - says Alexei Golovashov, QArea's Senior QA Engineer.

What then

The whole world, and wireless market in particular, moves toward high speeds, multiple functions and extended business possibilities. 3G networks is the next inevitable stage of mobile market development. It provides plenty of capabilities both for business and entertainment, communication and data transfer, Internet access and mobile e-mailing. Most of 3G devices should combine all available 3G technologies to be competitive. This factor will also affect the development of devices and operating systems for them. As we can see, the mobile market requires a device that could fullest reveal the capabilities of next generation mobile networks 3G and 4G. These numbers are dramatic confirmation of 3G leading position: 173 Commercial 3G Operators in 75 Countries worldwide (as of February 02, 2006), over 228 million reported 3G CDMA subscribers (as of November 30, 2005), 826 models of 3G devices worldwide. The industry standard for 3G wireless networks consists of 5 operating modes – three of them are based on CDMA technology: CDMA2000, WCDMA (UMTS) and TD-SCDMA. In this light BREW OS has a great opportunity to become a leader, though Nokia 6680 under Symbian OS is a 3G world bestseller telephone. The services by 3G carriers are quite actual already – 80% of British mobile users are ready to pay for mobile TV service, nothing to say about GPS, high-speed packet data access and high quality voice services.

Still large companies, financial giants, transnational corporations and government institutions adhere to the tried technologies – they use BlackBerry – undisputed leader in enterprise mobile solutions for mobile professionals and seek no alternative for it. However, if You still want an alternative for You BlackBerry You should be set for paying a pretty penny of some $500 for a new device and a new connection and it is not easy at all to find an equal substitution.

And let us don't forget that more players like Windows Mobile OS and Linux OS are on their way and hit their stride.

Undoubtedly, there's still a long way to go: Symbian powered nearly 34 million devices last year, more than double what Microsoft was able to ship, but the gap is narrowing.

MS provided an adequate tool set for the developers to develop software for their platform. In many ways they are helping to open up software innovation on devices. While developers for Symbian OS quite often complain of its being bad documented and too many OS versions. Microsoft's long legacy includes an understanding of the Developer and providing Developers tools. Symbian is a newcomer. Still, we shouldn't forget about the power of open source: Why would a Developer want to restrict themselves into a platform with a proprietary software code? Some experts consider that just the developer support is going to be key in who wins in the consumer market place.

Much also depends on marketing and promotion: Symbian's operating system is used in many top-end business phones today, because of its support for features such as PIM, voice-conferencing, push email and Web access. Nokia phone stands for world recognized brand and image phone – and it does pay dividends. To have Nokia's smartphone is almost the same as to drive Mercedes.

The potential of growing markets should also be considered: the demand for mobile phones in India, China, Eastern Europe and Africa is not a new phenomenon. Just in time enter a growing market and you can lead the race (Industry analysts forecast that 80% of the next billion mobile phone customers will come from emerging markets).

This is a niche market, all around. We say Europe – we mean Symbian, we say USA – we mean Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and BREW. BREW – is limited to CDMA markets (US and Chinese markets), Blackberry – is closely tied to business and corporate clients, Symbian is prevailing mainly in Europe: it turns out they have nothing to "brew". I hope none of them comes to dominate, since that is a recipe for stagnation; the 3 equally balanced would be perfect for fair competition and product development. We can not provide adequate predictions for someone's success or failure. It will be just a forecast.

All is left is to guess who to place stake on …

Authors:

Serge Bocharov

Oksana Lutikova

Eugene Kovalik

info@QArea.com

This year 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona brought all together all the people, newest ideas, technologies and products in the PDA and mobile phone industry. This year it stretched from February 13 till February 16 and gathered about 50,000 people. The attendance in the first day of this year Congress was bigger than the total attendance of last year's 3GSM in Cannes. 1,900 media representatives were near the action and were broadcasting the latest news from the source. 40% increase was shown in the exhibited companies also, this year they were 962. The 3GSM World Congress will be held again in Barcelona next year.

Among the most attendible exhibitors were Samsung, Nokia, Motorola, BenQ-Siemens, Sagem, LG, NEC, HP, Pantech and others.

Among the mobile handheld technologies there can be observed 2 successful trends: to-slimize-and-stuff-with-new-technologies and to make 3G-and-rich-media technologies affordable in low-end devices. The first category includes offers from Samsung, Motorola and Nokia mainly and NEC: supporting WiBro, HSDPA, T-DMB, building-in 3.2 to 5 megapixel cameras, raising internal memory up to the skies of 128 MB. The tendency to slim phones of the key idea of i-mode NEC clamshells. The phone is 13.6mm thick. They have EDGE connectivity standard, 1.3 megapixel camera, MP3 player, Bluetooth and 54 MB internal memory, WAP. Also there are some cute features announced, yet of doubtful value except but for entertainment purposes: text pronouncing feature, which can read SMS messages with its metallic voice with Pantech phone. Sharp and Toshiba presented 2.4" VGA displays. Current top of the line high-resolution displays used in the mobile phones are QVGA (240x320 pixels).

As usual the variety of designs is breathtaking.

Among OSs, Windows Mobile 5.0 is winning this span since it comes on most intriguing and promising models, like new HP quad-band communicator hw6900 and thin Windows smartphone - i-mate SmartFlip by HTC Star Trek platform.

Even the low-end handhelds aim high offering no more no less but 3G video broadcasting and high resolution cameras.

Anyway with the above tendencies, these are entertainment, TV-broadcasting, rich media, photoediting tools, business applications and security issues that are to be of major headache with content providers for these new essentials.

In this context of special interest and essentiality was QArea's presentation of their creativity in mobile GUI development, mobile animation and Flash interactive design. Of special interest were QArea's knowledgebase and experience in mobile security, mobile banking solutions and various entertainment software, both in the aspect of development and testing services.

Well appraised were QArea's skills and non-trivial approaches presented at 3GSM World Congress collected when developing embedded software for telecommunications industry.

About QArea: QArea is the one of the largest offshore software development companies in Eastern Europe since 2001. Its primary focus is brought upon application development for handheld devices (j2me development, Symbian, WinCE / Windows Mobile, Palm devices) and mobile web application development. Also, QArea cultivates strong .NET and Java teams performing standalone and web-application development and testing services.

3GSM World Congress will take place in Barcelona 13-16 of February 2006.

3GSM Congress is a dedicated event covering mobile technologies, wireless networks and mechanism of their providing, starting with basic communication and network operability support systems through wireless handhelds users utilize in their everyday life, as well as personified content which makes PDAs and mobile phones ever convenient tools for business and leisure.

"Without a doubt, 3GSM World Congress 2005 has been the most well-attended, most exciting and most important gathering ever for the mobile industry," explained Bill Gajda, Chief Marketing Officer at the GSM Association. "We look forward to welcoming everyone to Barcelona in 2006, where we're sure that we can transplant the best of Cannes' 'village' atmosphere into the Fira de Barcelona's vibrant space."

3GSM Congress is the largest conference and exhibition event of its kind. This year alone the event attracted over 32,000 of the most senior executives with a vested interest in the wireless industry. 2006 is said to be bigger than the one of 2005 and is a not to be missed for any executive serious about the opportunities that lie ahead in this business.

This year, 2006, the world's premier mobile event is making 3GSM World Congress history with record breaking pre-registrations. 962 companies have signed up as exhibitors, showcasing their latest mobile products, services and solutions - a massive 40% increase from last year! 50,000 visitors are also expected in Barcelona.

The keynote speakers are: Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, President & COO, (CEO Elect), Nokia, Arun Sarin, CEO, Vodafone Group, Sanjiv Ahuja, CEO, Orange Group and others.

Among mainstream topics are: innovations in GSM, delivering of multimedia through handsets, mobile TV and Radio content, gaming content and opportunities for service providers and players, 3G and WCDMA technologies, mobile security and others.

Offshore software development company QArea will present its extended experience in software development and testing services for PDA & Mobile. Since 2001 QArea is a key company in Ukraine professionally and full time engaged in PDA & Mobile application development, porting and testing. Being committed to providing custom software of the highest quality QArea contributed to success of many well-known companies mainly located in the US and West Europe.

PDA & Mobile domain in QArea is presented by Windows CE/Windows Mobile, Symbian, J2ME. QArea develops and ports software for entertainment and business providing standalone, client/server and WAP applications and WAP portal solutions engaging a vast variety of wireless connection technologies as GPS, WAP, GPRS, Bluetooth, IrDA, or Wi-Fi.

About QArea: QArea is the one of the largest offshore software development companies in Eastern Europe since 2001. Its primary focus is brought upon application development for handheld devices, (j2me development), Symbian, WinCE (Windows Mobile), Palm devices and related. Also, QArea cultivates strong .NET and Java development teams performing standalone and web-application development services.

QArea, an offshore software development company made a presentation at the Second Ukrainian Outsourcing Forum which took place in Kyiv on November 29-30, 2005. The II Ukrainian Outsourcing Forum was organized by Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative, a leading Ukrainian alliance in Offshore Software Development and the IT industry (www.hi-tech.org.ua). The subject of the presentation performed by, Eugene Kovalik, QArea's Sales and Marketing Director, was Kharkiv Leadership at Ukrainian IT Outsourcing Market.

In the report, the main idea was in delivering the essential information on Kharkiv leadership potential in supplying the biggest pool of certified software developers and qualified related professionals, already existing professionals pool, statistics on software offshore outsourcing market players in Kharkiv region, unique IT and data security branch organizations located in Kharkiv.

Particularly resonant was the fragment of the report dealing with Kharkiv contributed technologies and essential business models and trends, like ODC and BOT, and their extremely short time-to-market and starting time.

In the II Ukrainian Outsourcing Forum the following Ukrainian-based companies took part as contributors: QArea Group, Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative, Ukrainian Association of Software Vendors (UAPPO), Mirasoft Group, Lohika Systems, Inc., Infinity Internet Institute, Infopulse Ukraine, GSC Game World, Bonus Technology, Sunbay Software Crimea, InterLink Ltd., Program-Ace LLC, Lava Computer MFG, Inc., Kvazar-Mikro, Baker & McKenzie, TechnoPark Corp., IT Personnel, rabota.com.ua, Addforce/Ancor.

Also, in the II Ukrainian Outsourcing Forum, participated and contributed the following foreign organizations: Austrian Federation for the Information Industry (Austria), Softjourn, Inc. (USA), University of Jyvаskylа (Finland), RUSSE (Russia), LifeRepair.com (USA), Anergy Ltd. (England), Scandinavian HOUSE (Norway), EPAM Systems Inc. (USA).

About QArea: QArea is the one of the largest offshore software development companies in Eastern Europe since 2001. Its primary focus is brought upon application development for handheld devices, (j2me development), Symbian, WinCE (Windows Mobile), Palm devices and related. Also, QArea cultivates strong .NET and Java development teams performing standalone and web-application development services.

About Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative (www.hi-tech.org.ua): Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative is a leading Ukrainian alliance in Offshore Software Development and IT industry.

Objectives of the Initiative:

- presentation of Ukrainian market of offshore outsourcing services;

- accumulation of international contacts in order to establish cooperation in IT development sphere;

- Partners Screening and Selection Service as well as BPO in Ukraine;

- organization of meetings between Ukrainian and foreign companies;

- formation of investment for the progress of Ukrainian software development.

QArea, an offshore software development company has successfully finished the first two software development projects for non-verbal persons. The software development program was outsourced by Sym Systems Corporation, an American company producing augmentative speech devices assisting those who require alternative forms of communication. QArea's marketing support was provided by Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative, a leading Ukrainian alliance in Offshore Software Development and the IT industry (www.hi-tech.org.ua).

The E-Talk Tablet device by Sym Systems Corporation is a portable speech device for anyone who has lost the ability to speak. The E-Talk is a Tablet PC based on Windows XP - so in addition to being a speech generating device, it also supports a large number of applications designed for the PC. The E-Talk Tablet uses the E-Talk 3 Software System, providing word prediction, multiple languages, and the ability to completely customize the display.

The E-Talk is controlled by tapping on the front panel or it can use a variety of switch access methods. The E-Talk features a dynamic display software that allows the custom communication system to be easily created for nearly any user. The selection can be made from pictures mixed with text, completely picture based, or completely text based formats. It comes with changeable keypad overlays, including the entire alphabet and common words and phrases. The box "speaks" the word, letter or phrase by simply pressing a key. A user who still has vocal capabilities can record all the selections in their own voice. Yet, for those who have lost their own voice still there are no language barriers. Because one can digitally record any voice (man's, woman's or child's), the E-Talk can speak in any language.

About QArea: QArea is the one of the largest offshore software development companies in Eastern Europe since 2001. Its primary focus is brought upon application development for handheld devices, ( j2me development ), Symbian, WinCE (Windows Mobile), Palm devices and related. Also, QArea cultivates strong .NET and Java development teams performing standalone and web-application development services.

About Sym Systems Corporation: Sym Systems Corporation is a US company dealing with embedded systems and producing augmentative speech devices assisting those who require alternative forms of communication. The company has collected vast experience in project outsourcing to Indian and Ukrainian companies and now has opted for Ukraine in a matter of strategic development of its production capabilities.

About Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative (www.hi-tech.org.ua): Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative is a leading Ukrainian alliance in Offshore Software Development and IT industry.

Objectives of the Initiative:

- presentation of Ukrainian market of offshore outsourcing services;

- accumulation of international contacts in order to establish cooperation in IT development sphere;

- Partners Screening and Selection Service as well as BPO in Ukraine;

- organization of meetings between Ukrainian and foreign companies;

- formation of investment for the progress of Ukrainian software development.

Contacts:

Eugene Kovalik

Sales and Marketing Director

QArea

Tel: +38 057 702-1-701

http://www.qarea.com

info@qarea.com

The Knights J2ME game will be available for Nokia Series 40 and 60; Siemens Series 55 and 65; SonyEricsson T610, 630, Z600; Motorola V Series; Samsung and Alcatel in the nearest future.

Knights is a unique knights tournament simulator for mobile phones which is quite uncomplicated, yet incorporates tactic and strategic planning elements.

The game parameters can be set via menu. Thus, the strategic core of the game is implemented.

The game goal is to beat the Champion.

The game scenario stipulates 4 successive tournament rounds. During the first round the four Houses fight, during the second one – the three Houses, during the second one – the two Houses, and during the forth one – you fight the Champion. Each House has its Leader and members. The player can move from a round to the successive one by beating the House Leader. By beating a House member the player can improve their fighting capabilities. The fighting is won by beating the Champion or failed after a set number of looses.

The tactics is implemented in a fighting tournament itself. The player can accelerate their Knight yet detriment of hitting accuracy. If both Knights have vitality points left the tournament goes on. The point of this phase is to set the fighting characteristics in the most efficient way.

The score is earned after the following formula: total vitality points taken away from the opponents / tournaments * rounds (4).

Game Controls:

5-accelerate

0-slow down

4-aim left

6-aim right

2-aim top

8-aim bottom

About QArea: QArea is the largest Ukrainian offshore software development company since 2001. Its primary focus is brought upon software development for Palm, WinCE, RIM (Blackberry), Symbian, Brew, J2ME-enabled devices and related.

http://www.QArea.com

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm

Kharkov, Ukraine -- (ReleaseWire) -- 06/02/2006 -- According to the research held by analytics company Canalys the market of "smart" mobile devices in Europe, Near East and Africa grows more rapidly than market of mobile phones. Within the first half of 2005 9.6 million of smartphones and PDAs were sold compared to 3.6 million during the same period of the previous year. Such trend is observed worldwide – almost 70 million full feature handsets are sold worldwide. According to analysts the two main processes in progress stipulate such growth at the moment. On the one hand, ordinary users interchange their old smartphones and PDAs to newer ones. On the other hand, there is an upsurge in interest in mobile E-mail and extended abilities of smart mobile devices from companies and corporations.

Modern smart mobile systems are to be: always available (small sized / handy), always On (optimized memory usage, minimal battery use), extensible (new software can be added if necessary), affordable, and of various form factors. Moreover, a smart mobile device should combine the maximum of mobile technologies available at the moment: GPS, VoIP, Bluetooth, IrDa, GPRS/EDGE, Wi-Fi, mobile E-mail, support of HTTP protocol, MP3 etc. This is a vast domain for competition among manufacturers of operation systems for smartphones and PDAs.

There are several very large players in this market: Symbian OS, BREW OS, Blackberry OS, Windows Mobile OS and Palm OS etc.

Experts' Area

Ulf Morys, General Manager at Gameloft GmbH:

" - Symbian: more important in the future, but still niche market (Nokia market share ca. 33 % overall; not more than 1/3 of this Symbian phones & some other Symbian phones). Overall optimistic estimate: ca. 10 % of total newly sold phone base.

- BlackBerry: interesting for business / productivity applications; no mass market.

- WindowsCE: difficult to judge. Microsoft will keep pushing it's platform, but results were often unsatisfactory in the past; make sure that the partners can actually bill for applications delivered to this platform. We've seen problems with this.

- BREW: real mass market potential in US and Chinese market, not very relevant for European market."

SYMBIAN

SYMBIAN – is a software licensing company that develops and supplies the advanced, open, standard operating system – Symbian OS – for data-enabled mobile phones and PDAs.

As of September 2005 60 phones that run under Symbian OS from eight manufacturers are shipped worldwide and a further 56 phones from eleven manufacturers (among them Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, BenQ and Motorola) were in development. Symbian OS is an undisputed sales leader in Europe and has a strong market share in other countries. Currently Symbian's market share is 55.9 per cent from worldwide sales (according to IDC analytics company), at that 82 per cent of devices were manufactured by Nokia (in whole since 2005 beginning there were sold approximately 34 million data enabled devices with Symbian OS on board).

Experts' Area

Philip Solis, ABI Research senior analyst, author of the study "Smartphones: The Market for Smartphones and Smartphone Operating Systems":

"Symbian's chief advantages are that it is easy to build applications for, and that it has a large developer community. Disadvantages are that Symbian is primarily limited to Nokia handsets, and its market is concentrated in "GSM-heavy" regions."

19 of 60 devices with Symbian OS support WCDMA. By the way, smartphone Nokia 6680 is recognized a 3G world bestseller telephone.

Key features of Symbian OS

Rich suite of application engines – the suite includes engines for contacts, schedule, messaging, browsing, utility and system control; OBEX for exchanging objects such as appointments (using vCalendar) and business cards (vCard); integrated APIs for data management, text, clipboard and graphics

Browsing – supports WAP 1.2.1 for mobile browsing

Messaging – multimedia messaging (MMS), enhanced messaging (EMS) and SMS; internet mail using POP3, IMAP4, SMTP and MHTML; attachments; fax

Multimedia – audio and video support for recording, playback and streaming; image conversion

Graphics – direct access to screen and keyboard for high performance; graphics accelerator API

Communications protocols – wide-area networking stacks including TCP/IP (dual mode IPv4/v6) and WAP, personal area networking support include infrared (IrDA), Bluetooth® wireless technology and USB; support is also provided for multihoming capabilities and link layer Quality-of-Service (QoS) on GPRS/UMTS networks

Mobile telephony – Symbian OS is ready for the 3G market with support for GSM circuit switched voice and data (CSD and EDGE ECSD) and packet-based data (GPRS and EDGE EGPRS); CDMA circuit switched voice, data and packet-based data (IS-95, cdma2000 1x, and WCDMA); SIM, RUIM and UICC Toolkit; other standards can be implemented by licensees through extensible APIs of the telephony subsystem

International support – conforms to Unicode Standard version 3.0

Data synchronization – over-the-air (OTA) synchronization support using SyncML; PC-based synchronization over serial, Bluetooth® wireless technology, Infrared and USB; a PC Connectivity framework providing the ability to transfer files and synchronize PIM data

Security – full encryption and certificate management, secure protocols (HTTPS, WTLS and SSL and TLS), WIM framework and certificate-based application installation

Developing for Symbian OS – content development options include: C++, Java (J2ME) MIDP 2.0 and PersonalJava 1.1.1a (with JavaPhone 1.0 option), and WAP; tools are available for building C++ and Java applications and ROMs with support for on-target debugging

User Inputs – generic input mechanism supporting full keyboard, 0-9*# (numeric mobile phone keypad), voice, handwriting recognition and predictive text input.

BREW

BREW - Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless is a combination OS, application platform, and marketing system. BREW started with QUALCOMM-based CDMA chipsets and technology – a vast market – but BREW is independent of the wireless technology utilized by a particular handset or network and can support other wireless technologies. Ideally, BREW can work with any device, and Qualcomm is planning to port it to Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). Qualcomm is trying to remove the gap between GSM and CDMA operators. As CDMA strengthened hand, the GSM lobby propped its own version of CDMA which they named WCDMA (Wideband CDMA). WCDMA has been launched in a group of countries (80 operators in 29 countries), and many more are gearing to launch it within this year, it is already successfully running in countries like Korea, Japan, China, India, Brazil and in some parts of North America.

So far prevalent in the CDMA domain, BREW is gradually transiting to the GSM bastion of Europe as the continent's operators introduce 3G services based on WCDMA (by the end of year 2005 the number of WCDMA networks users worldwide increased by 2,6 times compared to December 31, 2004 and reached 43,81 million users). Such a scenario could make Qualcomm a worldwide flag carrier in mobile market. In all, 40 commercial BREW device manufacturers (Audiovox, Kyocera, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, BenQ etc.) offer over 135 BREW-enabled devices – as of January, 2006 according to Qualcomm. Almost 10% of all handsets shipped worldwide are BREW compatible and the number of application downloads (May 2005) exceeds 300 million. The success of BREW has been built on CDMA platforms of major mobile operators, including Verizon Wireless, China Unicom, Telstra and KDDI.

Regardless of platform, BREW requires little memory (150KB), which makes BREW applications workable even on low-end phones.

BREW provides basic capabilities for such advanced services as GPS, VoIP, Bluetooth 1.1, MP3 and MIDI support, video recording and playback, multimedia streaming, e-mail. The set of BREW services includes communication capabilities of TCP/UDP sockets, HTTP protocol support, SMS-MMS services, extended telephony capabilities. BREW supports several programming languages including Java, and via extensions BREW understands C/C++, interactive animation Flash and XML.

The Wall Street Journal paralleled BREW with Microsoft Windows in wireless communication domain.

Experts' Area

Victoria Alexandrova, Project Manager, PDA applications Department of QArea Company: "Who I see a winner? Symbian, of course. It is convenient, applicable, multi functional and easy for understanding. However, if I were in the USA I definitely would rather use BlackBerry, since they provide top quality service."

BLACKBERRY

BLACKBERRY – is a proprietary operating system, provided by RIM (Research in Motion, Canada), for the BlackBerry devices and BlackBerry enabled devices (BlackBerry email is already on a few handsets including Siemens SK65, Nokia 6820/6822, Motorola MPx220). BlackBerry is one of the leading wireless solutions, which allows users to stay connected with wireless access to email, corporate data, phone, web and organizer features. The true power of BlackBerry is mailbox integration. BlackBerry can integrate seamlessly with a user's existing corporate or personal email account providing a wireless extension of their regular e-mailbox.

The first BlackBerry was released in early 1999. The first BlackBerry with integrated cell phone, as well as the first BlackBerry sold outside of North America was released in 2001, using the European GSM/GPRS standard. RIM at the moment has a very dominant position in the mobile email market. BlackBerry is used worldwide, available from 95 wireless carriers in 40 countries. In November 2004, RIM announced the number of subscribers to the BlackBerry service to have reached two million, having doubled within ten months. Proceeding their steady growth, RIM announced an additional one million subscribers in May 2005, only six months after having reached two million.

Experts' Area

Rudy de Waele, CEO at Random One (R1):

"The market is going more Symbian due to the strategic moves Symbian did with S60 platform, delivering Symbian to various devices of different brand manufacturers and Nokia's latest partnership with Vodafone to increase the use of S60 as a standard software platform.

Windows Mobile is going to catch up bit by bit, they have the market advantage in US and they can benefit from the Microsoft PC/Mobile synchronization that becomes more and more popular and is a crucial element for the success of mobile data services, but I don't see them getting quickly at the same level of Symbian on a global level, it's going to take at least 4-5 years for them to catch-up, if ever they will...

Meanwhile I don't see a bright future for Palm OS, neither BREW, though BREW is still quite strong in the market due to Qualcomm strength on the market.

Nobody can compete with Symbian as of now, their competitors will have to come up with a stronger OS and that doesn't look obvious.

At last, don't forget about Linux who has a lot of potential, specifically in mobile, I see a bright and growing future for them."

No wonder, RIM manufactures a top notch device (with BlackBerry OS on board) that is secure, stable, and dominates market share with state and local government, the military, and with commercial corporations. In 2005 RIM was the first largest PDA supplier, and their technology BlackBerry occupied the second place among OS manufacturers giving Microsoft product the go-by.

RIM develops its own software for its devices, using C++ and Java technology. Third party developers applications must be digitally signed, that guarantees the application authorship.

Available services are: Wireless Email Service, Wireless Calendar Service, Wireless Internet (HTML and WAP formats) Services, Voice and SMS, Mobile Data Service, Attachment Service, Instant Messenger, GPS Service, Bluetooth etc.

The full feature handsets market is hard to predict, however almost all analysts predict steady and increasing growth of this market (which is observed at the moment). Each manufacturer aspires to create a common OS to globalize and standardize application development, distribution and management (as they say) to develop applications for all but not for each distinct device. Some people welcome such opportunity and some are bothered by possible monopolization and subsequent abuses in this domain. What is observed at the moment that each of the manufacturers had occupied a distinct characteristic niche, where he is successful, and already from there with mixed success tries to "conquer" the mobile wireless world.

Experts' Area

Alexei Golovashov, Senior QA Engineer, QArea Group:

"BlackBerry? One of its main advantages is an advanced ergonomics both of the device itself and its software. The user interface, as of today, I suppose, is one of the best among developed for PDA devices. While its main disadvantage is absence of memory card. Absence of the latter means that it can not be used for other purposes, it is narrow directed. I use my Symbian as MP3 player and to watch movies. I will not be able to use BlackBerry for that even if I want to. BlackBerry is convenient only for business domain, I guess, while Symbian also can be used as a game platform, and its a rather essential part of users who use it that way. BREW, from my point of view, has no bright future at all. J2ME is that well-developed that nobody pays attention to BREW. Furthermore, all BREW applications are to be certified, that complicates their usage and distribution," - says Alexei Golovashov, QArea's Senior QA Engineer.

What then

The whole world, and wireless market in particular, moves toward high speeds, multiple functions and extended business possibilities. 3G networks is the next inevitable stage of mobile market development. It provides plenty of capabilities both for business and entertainment, communication and data transfer, Internet access and mobile e-mailing. Most of 3G devices should combine all available 3G technologies to be competitive. This factor will also affect the development of devices and operating systems for them. As we can see, the mobile market requires a device that could fullest reveal the capabilities of next generation mobile networks 3G and 4G. These numbers are dramatic confirmation of 3G leading position: 173 Commercial 3G Operators in 75 Countries worldwide (as of February 02, 2006), over 228 million reported 3G CDMA subscribers (as of November 30, 2005), 826 models of 3G devices worldwide. The industry standard for 3G wireless networks consists of 5 operating modes – three of them are based on CDMA technology: CDMA2000, WCDMA (UMTS) and TD-SCDMA. In this light BREW OS has a great opportunity to become a leader, though Nokia 6680 under Symbian OS is a 3G world bestseller telephone. The services by 3G carriers are quite actual already – 80% of British mobile users are ready to pay for mobile TV service, nothing to say about GPS, high-speed packet data access and high quality voice services.

Still large companies, financial giants, transnational corporations and government institutions adhere to the tried technologies – they use BlackBerry – undisputed leader in enterprise mobile solutions for mobile professionals and seek no alternative for it. However, if You still want an alternative for You BlackBerry You should be set for paying a pretty penny of some $500 for a new device and a new connection and it is not easy at all to find an equal substitution.

And let us don't forget that more players like Windows Mobile OS and Linux OS are on their way and hit their stride.

Undoubtedly, there's still a long way to go: Symbian powered nearly 34 million devices last year, more than double what Microsoft was able to ship, but the gap is narrowing.

MS provided an adequate tool set for the developers to develop software for their platform. In many ways they are helping to open up software innovation on devices. While developers for Symbian OS quite often complain of its being bad documented and too many OS versions. Microsoft's long legacy includes an understanding of the Developer and providing Developers tools. Symbian is a newcomer. Still, we shouldn't forget about the power of open source: Why would a Developer want to restrict themselves into a platform with a proprietary software code? Some experts consider that just the developer support is going to be key in who wins in the consumer market place.

Much also depends on marketing and promotion: Symbian's operating system is used in many top-end business phones today, because of its support for features such as PIM, voice-conferencing, push email and Web access. Nokia phone stands for world recognized brand and image phone – and it does pay dividends. To have Nokia's smartphone is almost the same as to drive Mercedes.

The potential of growing markets should also be considered: the demand for mobile phones in India, China, Eastern Europe and Africa is not a new phenomenon. Just in time enter a growing market and you can lead the race (Industry analysts forecast that 80% of the next billion mobile phone customers will come from emerging markets).

This is a niche market, all around. We say Europe – we mean Symbian, we say USA – we mean Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and BREW. BREW – is limited to CDMA markets (US and Chinese markets), Blackberry – is closely tied to business and corporate clients, Symbian is prevailing mainly in Europe: it turns out they have nothing to "brew". I hope none of them comes to dominate, since that is a recipe for stagnation; the 3 equally balanced would be perfect for fair competition and product development. We can not provide adequate predictions for someone's success or failure. It will be just a forecast.

All is left is to guess who to place stake on …

Authors:

Serge Bocharov

Oksana Lutikova

Eugene Kovalik

info@QArea.com

This year 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona brought all together all the people, newest ideas, technologies and products in the PDA and mobile phone industry. This year it stretched from February 13 till February 16 and gathered about 50,000 people. The attendance in the first day of this year Congress was bigger than the total attendance of last year's 3GSM in Cannes. 1,900 media representatives were near the action and were broadcasting the latest news from the source. 40% increase was shown in the exhibited companies also, this year they were 962. The 3GSM World Congress will be held again in Barcelona next year.

Among the most attendible exhibitors were Samsung, Nokia, Motorola, BenQ-Siemens, Sagem, LG, NEC, HP, Pantech and others.

Among the mobile handheld technologies there can be observed 2 successful trends: to-slimize-and-stuff-with-new-technologies and to make 3G-and-rich-media technologies affordable in low-end devices. The first category includes offers from Samsung, Motorola and Nokia mainly and NEC: supporting WiBro, HSDPA, T-DMB, building-in 3.2 to 5 megapixel cameras, raising internal memory up to the skies of 128 MB. The tendency to slim phones of the key idea of i-mode NEC clamshells. The phone is 13.6mm thick. They have EDGE connectivity standard, 1.3 megapixel camera, MP3 player, Bluetooth and 54 MB internal memory, WAP. Also there are some cute features announced, yet of doubtful value except but for entertainment purposes: text pronouncing feature, which can read SMS messages with its metallic voice with Pantech phone. Sharp and Toshiba presented 2.4" VGA displays. Current top of the line high-resolution displays used in the mobile phones are QVGA (240x320 pixels).

As usual the variety of designs is breathtaking.

Among OSs, Windows Mobile 5.0 is winning this span since it comes on most intriguing and promising models, like new HP quad-band communicator hw6900 and thin Windows smartphone - i-mate SmartFlip by HTC Star Trek platform.

Even the low-end handhelds aim high offering no more no less but 3G video broadcasting and high resolution cameras.

Anyway with the above tendencies, these are entertainment, TV-broadcasting, rich media, photoediting tools, business applications and security issues that are to be of major headache with content providers for these new essentials.

In this context of special interest and essentiality was QArea's presentation of their creativity in mobile GUI development, mobile animation and Flash interactive design. Of special interest were QArea's knowledgebase and experience in mobile security, mobile banking solutions and various entertainment software, both in the aspect of development and testing services.

Well appraised were QArea's skills and non-trivial approaches presented at 3GSM World Congress collected when developing embedded software for telecommunications industry.

About QArea: QArea is the one of the largest offshore software development companies in Eastern Europe since 2001. Its primary focus is brought upon application development for handheld devices (j2me development, Symbian, WinCE / Windows Mobile, Palm devices) and mobile web application development. Also, QArea cultivates strong .NET and Java teams performing standalone and web-application development and testing services.

3GSM World Congress will take place in Barcelona 13-16 of February 2006.

3GSM Congress is a dedicated event covering mobile technologies, wireless networks and mechanism of their providing, starting with basic communication and network operability support systems through wireless handhelds users utilize in their everyday life, as well as personified content which makes PDAs and mobile phones ever convenient tools for business and leisure.

"Without a doubt, 3GSM World Congress 2005 has been the most well-attended, most exciting and most important gathering ever for the mobile industry," explained Bill Gajda, Chief Marketing Officer at the GSM Association. "We look forward to welcoming everyone to Barcelona in 2006, where we're sure that we can transplant the best of Cannes' 'village' atmosphere into the Fira de Barcelona's vibrant space."

3GSM Congress is the largest conference and exhibition event of its kind. This year alone the event attracted over 32,000 of the most senior executives with a vested interest in the wireless industry. 2006 is said to be bigger than the one of 2005 and is a not to be missed for any executive serious about the opportunities that lie ahead in this business.

This year, 2006, the world's premier mobile event is making 3GSM World Congress history with record breaking pre-registrations. 962 companies have signed up as exhibitors, showcasing their latest mobile products, services and solutions - a massive 40% increase from last year! 50,000 visitors are also expected in Barcelona.

The keynote speakers are: Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, President & COO, (CEO Elect), Nokia, Arun Sarin, CEO, Vodafone Group, Sanjiv Ahuja, CEO, Orange Group and others.

Among mainstream topics are: innovations in GSM, delivering of multimedia through handsets, mobile TV and Radio content, gaming content and opportunities for service providers and players, 3G and WCDMA technologies, mobile security and others.

Offshore software development company QArea will present its extended experience in software development and testing services for PDA & Mobile. Since 2001 QArea is a key company in Ukraine professionally and full time engaged in PDA & Mobile application development, porting and testing. Being committed to providing custom software of the highest quality QArea contributed to success of many well-known companies mainly located in the US and West Europe.

PDA & Mobile domain in QArea is presented by Windows CE/Windows Mobile, Symbian, J2ME. QArea develops and ports software for entertainment and business providing standalone, client/server and WAP applications and WAP portal solutions engaging a vast variety of wireless connection technologies as GPS, WAP, GPRS, Bluetooth, IrDA, or Wi-Fi.

About QArea: QArea is the one of the largest offshore software development companies in Eastern Europe since 2001. Its primary focus is brought upon application development for handheld devices, (j2me development), Symbian, WinCE (Windows Mobile), Palm devices and related. Also, QArea cultivates strong .NET and Java development teams performing standalone and web-application development services.

QArea, an offshore software development company made a presentation at the Second Ukrainian Outsourcing Forum which took place in Kyiv on November 29-30, 2005. The II Ukrainian Outsourcing Forum was organized by Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative, a leading Ukrainian alliance in Offshore Software Development and the IT industry (www.hi-tech.org.ua). The subject of the presentation performed by, Eugene Kovalik, QArea's Sales and Marketing Director, was Kharkiv Leadership at Ukrainian IT Outsourcing Market.

In the report, the main idea was in delivering the essential information on Kharkiv leadership potential in supplying the biggest pool of certified software developers and qualified related professionals, already existing professionals pool, statistics on software offshore outsourcing market players in Kharkiv region, unique IT and data security branch organizations located in Kharkiv.

Particularly resonant was the fragment of the report dealing with Kharkiv contributed technologies and essential business models and trends, like ODC and BOT, and their extremely short time-to-market and starting time.

In the II Ukrainian Outsourcing Forum the following Ukrainian-based companies took part as contributors: QArea Group, Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative, Ukrainian Association of Software Vendors (UAPPO), Mirasoft Group, Lohika Systems, Inc., Infinity Internet Institute, Infopulse Ukraine, GSC Game World, Bonus Technology, Sunbay Software Crimea, InterLink Ltd., Program-Ace LLC, Lava Computer MFG, Inc., Kvazar-Mikro, Baker & McKenzie, TechnoPark Corp., IT Personnel, rabota.com.ua, Addforce/Ancor.

Also, in the II Ukrainian Outsourcing Forum, participated and contributed the following foreign organizations: Austrian Federation for the Information Industry (Austria), Softjourn, Inc. (USA), University of Jyvаskylа (Finland), RUSSE (Russia), LifeRepair.com (USA), Anergy Ltd. (England), Scandinavian HOUSE (Norway), EPAM Systems Inc. (USA).

About QArea: QArea is the one of the largest offshore software development companies in Eastern Europe since 2001. Its primary focus is brought upon application development for handheld devices, (j2me development), Symbian, WinCE (Windows Mobile), Palm devices and related. Also, QArea cultivates strong .NET and Java development teams performing standalone and web-application development services.

About Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative (www.hi-tech.org.ua): Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative is a leading Ukrainian alliance in Offshore Software Development and IT industry.

Objectives of the Initiative:

- presentation of Ukrainian market of offshore outsourcing services;

- accumulation of international contacts in order to establish cooperation in IT development sphere;

- Partners Screening and Selection Service as well as BPO in Ukraine;

- organization of meetings between Ukrainian and foreign companies;

- formation of investment for the progress of Ukrainian software development.

QArea, an offshore software development company has successfully finished the first two software development projects for non-verbal persons. The software development program was outsourced by Sym Systems Corporation, an American company producing augmentative speech devices assisting those who require alternative forms of communication. QArea's marketing support was provided by Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative, a leading Ukrainian alliance in Offshore Software Development and the IT industry (www.hi-tech.org.ua).

The E-Talk Tablet device by Sym Systems Corporation is a portable speech device for anyone who has lost the ability to speak. The E-Talk is a Tablet PC based on Windows XP - so in addition to being a speech generating device, it also supports a large number of applications designed for the PC. The E-Talk Tablet uses the E-Talk 3 Software System, providing word prediction, multiple languages, and the ability to completely customize the display.

The E-Talk is controlled by tapping on the front panel or it can use a variety of switch access methods. The E-Talk features a dynamic display software that allows the custom communication system to be easily created for nearly any user. The selection can be made from pictures mixed with text, completely picture based, or completely text based formats. It comes with changeable keypad overlays, including the entire alphabet and common words and phrases. The box "speaks" the word, letter or phrase by simply pressing a key. A user who still has vocal capabilities can record all the selections in their own voice. Yet, for those who have lost their own voice still there are no language barriers. Because one can digitally record any voice (man's, woman's or child's), the E-Talk can speak in any language.

About QArea: QArea is the one of the largest offshore software development companies in Eastern Europe since 2001. Its primary focus is brought upon application development for handheld devices, ( j2me development ), Symbian, WinCE (Windows Mobile), Palm devices and related. Also, QArea cultivates strong .NET and Java development teams performing standalone and web-application development services.

About Sym Systems Corporation: Sym Systems Corporation is a US company dealing with embedded systems and producing augmentative speech devices assisting those who require alternative forms of communication. The company has collected vast experience in project outsourcing to Indian and Ukrainian companies and now has opted for Ukraine in a matter of strategic development of its production capabilities.

About Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative (www.hi-tech.org.ua): Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative is a leading Ukrainian alliance in Offshore Software Development and IT industry.

Objectives of the Initiative:

- presentation of Ukrainian market of offshore outsourcing services;

- accumulation of international contacts in order to establish cooperation in IT development sphere;

- Partners Screening and Selection Service as well as BPO in Ukraine;

- organization of meetings between Ukrainian and foreign companies;

- formation of investment for the progress of Ukrainian software development.

Contacts:

Eugene Kovalik

Sales and Marketing Director

QArea

Tel: +38 057 702-1-701

http://www.qarea.com

info@qarea.com

The Knights J2ME game will be available for Nokia Series 40 and 60; Siemens Series 55 and 65; SonyEricsson T610, 630, Z600; Motorola V Series; Samsung and Alcatel in the nearest future.

Knights is a unique knights tournament simulator for mobile phones which is quite uncomplicated, yet incorporates tactic and strategic planning elements.

The game parameters can be set via menu. Thus, the strategic core of the game is implemented.

The game goal is to beat the Champion.

The game scenario stipulates 4 successive tournament rounds. During the first round the four Houses fight, during the second one – the three Houses, during the second one – the two Houses, and during the forth one – you fight the Champion. Each House has its Leader and members. The player can move from a round to the successive one by beating the House Leader. By beating a House member the player can improve their fighting capabilities. The fighting is won by beating the Champion or failed after a set number of looses.

The tactics is implemented in a fighting tournament itself. The player can accelerate their Knight yet detriment of hitting accuracy. If both Knights have vitality points left the tournament goes on. The point of this phase is to set the fighting characteristics in the most efficient way.

The score is earned after the following formula: total vitality points taken away from the opponents / tournaments * rounds (4).

Game Controls:

5-accelerate

0-slow down

4-aim left

6-aim right

2-aim top

8-aim bottom

About QArea: QArea is the largest Ukrainian offshore software development company since 2001. Its primary focus is brought upon software development for Palm, WinCE, RIM (Blackberry), Symbian, Brew, J2ME-enabled devices and related.

http://www.QArea.com

Kharkiv, Ukraine -- (SBWIRE) -- 09/27/2005 -- QArea, the leading developer and tester of applications for PDA's and smart phones also being the originator of the pioneering BugHuntress Test Suite for automated PDA applications testing, announces starting of its Inly Essence J2ME game porting for variety of mobile devices

The Inly Essence J2ME game will be available for Nokia Series 40 and 60; Siemens Series 55 and 65; SonyEricsson T610, 630, Z600; Motorola V Series; Samsung and Alcatel in the nearest future.

The Inly Essence J2ME game is a fighting arcade enhanced with RPG elements and non-linear scenario.

The idea of the game is quite close to Prince of Persia, yet, its distinctive feature is in a specific parameter of rage. It is this parameter that defines the striking power of the fighting characters, and it changes dependant on punches given or obtained.

The aim of the game is survive and destroy the Boss who is a dark and unnatural monster creature concealed in the dungeon deep under the earth and spreading the infectious rage disease. The player's task is reach to his hiding place room-by-room and destroy the monster Boss and his aids. There are 15 levels to be passed to reach the Boss.

The aim of the game is to survive and destroy the Boss who is a dark and unnatural monster creature concealed in the dungeon deep under the earth and spreading the infectious rage disease. The player's task is to reach to his hiding place room-by-room and destroy the monster Boss and his aids. There are 15 levels to be passed to reach the Boss.

The character has 7 aspects:

1. Speed

2. Vitality

3. Rage

4. Injury

5. Strength

6. Madness

7. Bloodiness

The same characters are attributable to Boss and Boss's aids. Yet, they are a bit weaker which is compensated by their number.

The control is performed by standard key layout and also duplicate performed by joystick:

4 – backward

6 – forward

7,9 – hit

1,3 – kick

5 – affect environment (use), while affect opponent – superkick (if sufficient rage level)

About QArea

QArea is the largest Ukrainian mobile offshore outsourcing company since 2001. Its primary focus is brought upon software development for Palm, WinCE, RIM (Blackberry), Symbian, Brew, J2ME-enabled devices and related.

Company sites:

http://www.QArea.com

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/release-3.htm