Net-m shows off complete white lable mobile OS

Rating: And it is aimed at European operators

It just goes to show when wandering around an exhibition as vast as MWC 2013 it is actually worth taking the fliers. Incidentally, MWC now reminds GoMobile News of CeBIT Hanover rather than a cosy GSM show that used to be held in Cannes. Anyway, on a small leaflet from Germany’s net-m (Net Mobile)  was the sentence, “net-m OS is a new white label operating system based on open standards and based on core web technologies.” Oh No, we thought. Not another mobile OS to compete against Android and iOS. However, net-m’s Dr Hermann Simon Lichte revealed that his company actually builds on top of the Mozilla Firefox OS in order to create a white label OS aimed at operators. And European operators not just those in developing markets.

Lichte revealed that net-m has a demonstration of its own OS running on a Nexus 5. The company has to do a bit of fiddling because Firefox doesn’t quite run on all shipped Android smartphones yet.

Anyway, the OS is completely customisable so that all the apps running on the handset’s Home screen can display the operator’s logo.

The company has also built in support for the cloud to make it extremely easy for handset data to by stored and synchronised on the cloud’s servers.

The major play for this OS, however, is to provide a marketplace for all the apps that will be developed or ported to run on Firefox devices. And the marketplace will carry the operator’s brand, of course.

Quite sensibly, of course, net-m has designed its white labelled marketplace to support direct carrier billing.

If Firefox takes off to the extent to which GoMobile News thinks it will, net-m may well be onto something here.