Swisscom started supporting Vodafone live! phones [1] (Vodafone owns a 25% stake of Swisscom Mobile AG). I played around with the three available phones the other day, as there is the Sharp GX20, the SonyEricsson Z600 and the Motorola V525. Vodafone live! can be seen as a common menu or navigation for mobile phones making it easy to call up photos, games, sounds, pictures and messages and share them with others.
Vodafone UK offers setups for a range of other phones than only the ones mentioned above [2]. One reason to provide phones with a common menu may ground in the delivering of phone-independent services at a later stage. The fun aspect is good argument to introduce such a common desktop but further more also a possibility to motivate customers to change their carrier, as they usually do not change them before their next upgrade of their handsets [3].
As most, if not all of the new phones come with java support I am wondering if the Java Desktop could not be rewritten to run on those phones [4]. This would enable access to a wide variety of applications. Just a thought.
[1] http://www.swisscom-mobile.ch/live
[2] http://mmsota.vizzavi.co.uk
[3] http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/09/26/1064083179063.html
[4] http://wwws.sun.com/software/javadesktopsystem
