Windows Live Mobile Search 2.0 Out
Microsoft released the second version of its Windows Live Mobile Search application on Friday, including some new features for both the standalone and Web-based versions of the client. — Versions of the software are available for Windows Mobile, J2ME, and in beta for BlackBerry devices.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is Microsoft's answer in a 2007 sprint to own the phone screen. Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0 arrived on Windows Mobile in March 2007 and was declared out of beta by late June, giving Yahoo a head start on rich mobile clients while most search still happened on desktop browsers.
Version 2.0 closes some of that gap: per the Virtual Earth team's rundown of the release, it adds GPS positioning, traffic reporting, movie searching and cached navigation, ships for Windows Mobile and J2ME, and — notably — enters beta on BlackBerry, putting Microsoft's client on a rival platform's hardware.
First-order effects
- Windows Mobile and J2ME handset owners get location-aware local search, traffic and movie lookups without touching the browser, and BlackBerry users gain a first supported way to run the client in beta.
Second-order effects
- Yahoo is pushed into a feature-parity race on its own four-month-old Go for Mobile franchise, and carriers gain two competing search clients to bundle or preinstall on the same devices.
Third-order effects
- If both portals keep shipping native clients across each other's platforms, mobile search hardens into a client-side distribution battle fought device-by-device — a precursor to the platform-gated app ecosystems that later replaced downloadable J2ME software.
The trend: Portal-era search rivals are racing to port full-featured native clients onto every phone platform, treating handsets as the next distribution front years before app stores standardize that channel.