It’s always a pleasure to spend a few days in Barcelona. Though when it’s for Mobile World Congress, the tapas and nightlife give way to the exhausting reality of navigating some 1500 exhibitors sprawled over an area about twice the size of Camp Nou, Barcelona FC’s vast stadium.
On the opening day of this year’s Mobile World Congress Telefónica, the Spanish operator, joined Mozilla to announce the Open Web Devices platform, with a reference mobile phone architecture allowing HTML5 applications API access to core device capabilities — paving the way for pure HTML5 smartphones. Mozilla demonstrated the technology at the show on a Samsung Galaxy S2 stripped of its Android OS by Mozilla engineers.
The Mozilla Foundation first started talking about Boot to Gecko last summer. The idea is to offer a native web environment for mobile devices, similar to Google’s Chromebooks, a model Google isn’t (yet?) bringing to mobiles because that’s where Android goes. So what will your next smartphone be running — iOS, Android, Windows, or Gecko? And will your tablet be running the same OS?
Our take? From the enterprise point of view, rather than representing a step to increased standardization, this is more likely to be one more level of fragmentation in the market. And one more reason for an enterprise browser solution, capable of standardizing enterprise usage and enforcing policy whatever device is in the hands or on the desk of the end user.

In a rare show of Anglo-French synchronization, the
On September 30th CommonIT’s
Just back from three intense and encouraging days at the 
Does what, exactly? Why,