With a half-million smartphones on order by the Census Bureau, Microsoft’s John Starkweather thinks the mobile division has turned a major corner
Microsoft’s mobile division has landed a big coup. The software giant said on Apr. 4 that the U.S. Census Bureau will order 500,000 devices powered by Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 5.0 operating systems. The bureau will purchase these smartphones, which are able to run complex applications between 2007 and 2009 from Taiwanese manufacturer HTC Corporation, which has also built Treos and iPaqs.
Under a new deal the federal agency will distribute some 500,000 wireless handsets to government workers to help collect data for the 2010 survey.
It is a high-tech move for the agency. The bureau had previously used paper and pen to take U.S. citizens’ details, which were then digitized by data entry staff.
The Microsoft contract forms part of a wider $600 million, five-year deal with Harris, a Florida company running the data collection project that involves the automation of field data collection. The move is aimed at cutting the time, labor costs and errors involved in manual data collection and input.
The deal is not only the largest Microsoft has ever received for mobile devices but also one of the biggest public deals for smart phones in the industry.
John Starkweather, group product manager for Microsoft’s mobile and embedded devices division, says it is the biggest contract of its kind for Microsoft and possibly the industry, where purchases of even 50,000 phones are uncommon.
The order could mark the beginning of a growth spurt for smartphones. Shipments of the handsets are expected to double this year, making up 15% of all cell phones shipped, according to consultancy ABI Research. Starkweather says it is a "watershed moment," a sign government and corporate customers — which until now have purchased high-end handhelds in smaller numbers — may finally be ready to deploy smartphones en masse.
Between 2004 and 2005, the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant saw shipments double, from 3 million to 6 million, for devices loaded with its mobile OS. But it remains one of the smallest vendors in the sector by market share. The Symbian operating system is the sector’s current heavy-hitter, with more than 60 percent market share, according to figures from research firm Gartner.
Tony Cripps, an analyst at Ovum, said that Symbian likely was beaten to the deal by Microsoft because of a difference in availability. "In America, there are very few Symbian devices on the market capable of doing this job," he said.
It reinforces the appeal of Windows Mobile in the enterprise, Cripps added. What this might suggest is that people do want to use their mobile devices for more than e-mail, so enterprises may need to examine their options more closely in the future.
The phones will be made by HTC, a device manufacturer based in Taiwan who has been a longtime partner of Microsoft’s and uses only the software giant’s operating systems in all of its mobile handsets.
The HTC devices used in the project will be the sort of powerful, feature-heavy handsets currently labeled as smart phones, which offer more PC-like capabilities than more common machines.
They chose this deal because it allowed them to build a line-of-business application and enables the field workers to take their handhelds back to the office to sync up with the servers, said Karen Carter, a spokesperson for Microsoft’s Mobile Communications and Embedded Devices Division.
Smartphone watershed or no, this may be Microsoft Mobile’s moment. In September, Palm said its popular Treo handheld will use Windows, "Palm Taps Microsoft". Motorola is expected to unveil its much-anticipated Q phone, featuring Windows Mobile. In all, the moves suggest Microsoft is gaining ground on Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry wireless paging service. A RIM spokesman says the Canadian company did not bid on the Census Bureau contract "because it falls outside the market RIM serves."