Microsoft OneApp Gets Unleashed For Featurephones

We've mentioned Microsoft's OneApp before, as a cursory statement regarding trademarks, but now Microsoft has gone ahead and announced just exactly what we should expect. And it looks like they're trying to hit a home run. Instead of keeping their road map to their Windows Mobile platform, they're opening their doors (or maybe breaking them down) and offering the OneApp service for featurephones. That's right.

You read that right. It's not just about Windows Mobile anymore; it's about getting their applications, or the service itself, onto as many devices as they can. And yet, in this same vein of thinking, they're targeting a certain phones and basing it off their processing power and available memory. The possibility comes from the fact Microsoft is working primarily with the carriers, and not the phone manufacturers. Microsoft created OneApp to be side-loaded from the cloud, so that the processing footprint on the phones themselves is as minimal as possible. Microsoft is even saying that the initial download for the OneApp application is ridiculously small: 150K. OneApp is made to download only a portion of the app from the cloud, so that the user doesn't have unnecessary memory usage on their device.

At the moment, OneApp is up and running on South Africa's carrier Blue Label Telecoms. Applications available at the moment are Windows Live Messenger (a given), Facebook, Twitter, and an RSS reader application, among a few others. By the end of the year, developers are getting a shot to code to their heart's desire, with Microsoft planning further launches of OneApp "within the next year." So we've probably got some time to wait, even here in the States. Which is unfortunate, because we want to take this for a spin right now.

[via Microsoft]