Microsoft OneApp : Microsoft Introducing OneApp

The closest competitor to OneApp appears to be Opera Mini (<a href="http://www.opera.com/mini/" rel="nofollow">http://www.opera.com/mini/</a>) which is a full web browser for the same kind of small cheap cellphones which OneApp targets. Opera Mini is also client-server and pre-processes and compresses web pages on the server side, amongst other things, before the client sees them. The major difference would seem to be that Opera Mini provides access to the whole web, whereas OneApp is more of a walled garden, just running the 'apps' written for it's mini-platform.

This is actually pretty cool. From what I can gather from the website, this is basically a 150 KB client that can run on the low-power, feature-thin phones common in emerging markets (the kind of phones that cost $10-50 to make and that Nokia among others excels at).<p>The client offloads almost all processing and storage to carrier hosted servers. Kind of like X, ironically.

Brought to you by ... (drum roll) ...<p>Microsoft's Unlimited Potential group!<p>Yeah! Not the (dreaded) Limited Potential group. These are the Unlimited Group people.

It would be nice to be able to look at it rather than just perusing the very well built website...<p>This whole idea of rolling it out through telcos is horrible. Just make the damn thing available for download. It can't be that hard...

It is very interesting to see such a diligent focus on the low-end, small processor side of things. However, I don't think anyone got rich betting that technology wasn't constantly improving.

The OneApp client is almost guaranteed to be a Java Mobile Edition application, because that's the only widespread software platform for feature phones.<p>It's fairly ironic that Microsoft's "Unlimited Potential" group develops Java software... But perhaps they've been tasked specifically to unleash their potential by overcoming the traditional Microsoft NIH / Embrace&#38;Extend development paradigms.

&#62; OneApp’s very minimal on-phone footprint of just 150 KB makes installing it quick and easy. OneApp will launch only the parts of a mobile app that you want to use; that cuts down on additional installation time<p>Can the OneApp developers please spend some time working on Microsoft Office? Please?

It's interesting that they chose to write an app for Symbian. I wonder if other mobile OSes are to follow? Google already has a few things that run on Symbian, maps, search, etc. and a web page compressor that runs anywhere...

If I go to <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/oneapp/" rel="nofollow">http://www.microsoft.com/oneapp/</a><p>I get: The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred.

Top picture shows it running on a Nokia 6300, which is my day-to-day phone...<p>Come on North American carriers!

So it's a Mozilla Prism clone for cellphones?