Mobilious

“Microsoft today is launching OneApp, a new software application that allows “feature phones” to run popular mobile phone applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live Messenger and Mobile Wallet.

Feature phones are mobile phones that are capable of running some apps but that lack the capabilities of smartphones.

Amit Mital, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Group and Startup Business Accelerator, says OneApp will help bring more applications and services to emerging markets such as those served by Blue Label Telecoms of South Africa, the launch partner for the new technology. “OneApp is a technology that is going to help people do things they couldn’t do before — anything from paying their bills to helping diagnose their health issues or just staying connected with friends and family,” Mital says.

More than half of the people in the world own mobile phones, but many of those phones have difficulty accessing popular mobile applications, including social applications such as Facebook and other helpful applications to deal with finances, healthcare, tourism and education.

“When people see these apps running on a feature phone, their eyes light up. It’s pretty exciting,” says Tim McDonough, senior director of Mobile Product Management at Microsoft. “What we’re letting you do is get access to the applications and services you want from a device you already own. If you don’t own a PC, or you share a PC, your mobile phone may be your first or only computing device.”

McDonough says OneApp will complement Microsoft’s Windows Mobile strategy. OneApp was designed from the ground up, with emerging markets in mind, to help users gain more power from feature phones that have limited memory, processing and other capabilities. For users, it appears as a single application through which they can access all the mobile apps they want…”

This news was picked from and continues @ http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/Aug09/08-24OneApp.mspx