BluePulse — Mobile Content Saviour?

BluePulse LogoOliver Starr — the “new guy” at MobHappy — has written a panegyric to BluePulse, an Australian company that claims to have a client which “lets you take the stuff you do on the internet with you on your mobile phone”.
Let me quote Oliver here…

The company has developed a proprietary technology platform called OADP (Open Application Delivery Platform) which when combined with their SPOT (Small Portable Object Technology), the company claims (and my experience so far as well as that of a number of people besides myself) confirm that their bold claim, that they’ve overcome the barriers of
* compatibility
* connectivity
* billing
* distribution
IS TRUE.

In the real world this means that regardless of phone or carrier, you can download their bluepulse software platform, install a few widgets that are available either free, can be developed by the end user or professional developers or purchased, and in just a few moments experience a substantially similar experience as any other user on any other phone and any other network.

The software is designed to work on Java (including MIDP1 and 2) and Symbian handsets, covering the last two years.
As far as I can make out the intention is for mobile content vendors to put their content on more devices without have to develop individually for each device — middleware for compatibility. It’s true the user will need the BluePulse client on their phone, but since it’s free the people selling the content can bundle that in. I think people may have to sign up individually with BluePulse, which is an extra step which will put some people off, but it could be that the sign-up process can be included with third-party content sales.
I can see the need for this, but there are other companies doing similar things…Oliver thinks BluePulse is better .
Some other opinions blogged:
What Am I Missing About Bluepulse?: Mike Rowehl didn’t see much in the developer toolkit. “No Javascript or other scripting languages, no real extension of the display language on the client side and no support for the interesting aspects of the existing spec, PNG images only! Overall a long step backwards and at least a short step to the side.”
Tom Hume Can’t See What BluePulse Does: The RSS newsreader seems quite nice and capable. It’s interesting having IM in there too, but the Bluepulse app itself seems to stick an extra layer of indirection between me and the things I want to do (talk to friends, read news) which wouldn’t be there if I just used standalone apps. Oh, and just wandering around for a few minutes looking at menus used up 60k of data charges. It doesn’t seem to cache much either – running through the app again seemed to run up a similar quantity again.
The BluePulse Blog: This is obviously quite pro-BluePulse, it’s the response to Oliver’s post.
bluepulse; first look at a mobile 2.0 giant: This is Oliver again at MobileCrunch, focussing more on technical aspects and the software as it relates to “Mobile 2.0″.

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