Nokia vs Openwave: Handhelds at dawn

WAP inventors long to join the group with no name...

Openwave chief executive Don Listwin has hit out at Nokia for excluding it from a mobile industry standards body. The as yet unnamed group announced in November, includes a long list of top industry names, including mm02, NTT DoCoMo, Fujitsu, Matsushita, Mitsubishi Electric, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Samsung, Sharp, Siemens, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba, Symbian and Vodafone Openwave is claiming that Nokia is abusing its market-leading position and unfairly excluding it from the group. He told the Financial Times Nokia is "trying to impose its own standard as the industry standard." Nokia hit back, claiming that Openwave and its previous incarnation, Phone.com, did not have an unblemished record on promoting open standards. However, they have promised to involve Openwave in the development of its as yet unnamed standards body in due course. As Phone.com, Openwave developed the technology that became the WAP standard, and its WAP browser technology is used by a number of mobile handset manufacturers, including Motorola. However, Nokia is moving into Phone.com's territory, licensing its WAP browser, as well as MMS, SMS, xHTML and SyncML technology and its Series 60 handset platform to rival handset manufacturers. Matsushita was the first to sign up to use them, announcing a deal last November.