China Mobile Developing OS — Problem For Content Vendors

China Mobile is believed to be working on its own operating system for mobile phones, according to ITNews. The issue there is that it will allow the telco to restrict partnerships between mobile content vendors and handset manufacturers — “Tom Online and KongZhong Corp, for example, receive 20 to 30 percent of their revenues from default software installed on mobiles by handset vendors. A carrier-specific OS would not necessarily include these links”. If that wasn’t bad enough, the suspicion is voiced that China Mobile is considering a tenfold increase in data charges for data going outside its network, which would have the the effects of reducing the amount of content sold but shifting a very large proportion of that onto the carriers portal, which would have lower data charges.

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