SINGAPORE--MediaTek is aiming to bring Web access and services previously available only on smartphones to feature phone users via its Maui Runtime Environment (MRE) middleware platform, with Yahoo's instant messaging and e-mail services first to be made available.

MediaTek Chairman Tsai Ming-Kai said the Taiwanese mobile chipset maker is committed to helping its phone manufacturing customers create more product differentiations to address the feature phone market. To this end, he introduced the company's MRE software to circumvent " conventional limitations" to preinstall software on feature phones.

Speaking at a media briefing held here Wednesday, Tsai pointed out that feature phones can only contain limited number of preinstalled apps and cannot accept new content downloads. With MRE and " smart-feature phones" to be introduced by its handset partners, these users will now be able to enjoy mobile Internet services " at an affordable price" , he noted.

" MRE has opened the doors to service and content providers to develop all sorts of services, from mobile games and multimedia entertainment to delivery of up-to-date stock market information," he added.

Yahoo's other services such as Flickr and news reports will be rolled out in the fourth quarter of this year, the company noted.

Asked if the middleware will conflict with operating systems (OSes) commonly found in feature phones such as Symbian or Java, Jason Wu, product manager at MediaTek, said most phonemakers will use the chipmaker's feature phone OS when they purchase its chipset.

This way, there will be " no issues" when utilizing the MRE on their phones, noted Wu who was also at the briefing. " It doesn't make [financial] sense for the handset makers to just buy our chipsets but license the OS from someone else," he said.

Its OS is licensed from a third-party developer but MediaTek makes further tweaks before the platform is installed on handsets, Wu explained. The OS has several benefits over other competing platforms such as Java, for instance, where the amount of space needed to deploy the OS as well as middleware on the phone with the MRE is only 140 kilobytes, while Java needs 1.7 megabytes, he added.

He also stressed that MediaTek will not compete with existing service and content partners as it will focus primarily on its chipset business. However, the Taiwanese company will " support" these partners in deploying their apps quickly and creating billing systems when needed later on, he noted.

Its current focus is on fostering the " open" ecosystem and bringing in more content providers onboard the MRE platform, Wu elaborated. In the long term, MediaTek will be looking to open up the software development kit (SDK) for all to use, down to individual software developers, he added.

Mobile key to Yahoo's strategy
For Yahoo, the global partnership will extend its content services to a wider audience, said Rose Tsou, senior vice president of Yahoo Asia-Pacific.

Citing figures from internal studies, she pointed out that in countries such as Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia, mobile Internet access via mobile phones or PDAs (personal digital assistants) has been growing in all three emerging markets at the expense of fixed access points such as Internet cafes. Tsou added that Yahoo has a 82 percent reach in Southeast Asia markets, particularly for its news, Web mail and instant messaging products.

With these statistics in mind, she said the partnership with MediaTek is an example of how mobile will be a " cornerstone" of Yahoo's business strategy going forward.

" The mobile Internet presents a wealth of opportunity for Yahoo and our partnership with MediaTek will further connect us with our audiences in growing markets such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam and India, where new Internet users are coming online for the first time through their mobile devices," she noted.

Feature phone makers and telcos will also be looking to cash in on the partnership, with Indonesia's Nexian, Malaysia's Spice CSL and Philippines' Cherry Mobile revealed as MediaTek's hardware partners during the briefing.

Nexian, for one, has pledged its support to grow the MRE ecosystem to increase the attractiveness of phones preinstalled with apps running on the platform. Martono Jaya Kusuma, CEO of Nexian's selular group, told ZDNet Asia that " if done right" , MediaTek's partnership with Yahoo will boost its phone sales.

To help populate the ecosystem, Nexian's app development arm will create software relevant for Indonesian users, added Kusuma, at the sidelines of Wednesday's briefing.

He also expressed confidence that MediaTek's price-competitive chipsets and OS will do well against Google Android-powered low-end phones, particularly in the entry-level feature phones segment. This is because Google's mobile OS will not " run well" on low-end chipsets, unlike the Taiwanese company's OS, he said.

Chinese telecoms equipment vendor ZTE has set its sights on narrowing the gap with market leader Huawei Technologies, looking to its terminal and cloud computing businesses to drive over 20 percent growth in revenue this year.

Local news agency China Daily reported Thursday that Huawei recently forecasted an increase of less than 10 percent in sales, from 2010's 185.2 billion yuan (US$28.5 billion) to 199 billion yuan (US$30.7 billion) this year. Comparatively, ZTE's revenue for 2010 was about a third of Huawei's at 70.26 billion yuan (US$10.8 billion), it added.

Citing ZTE's executive vice president Xie Daxiong, the news agency said the No. 2 telecom equipment manufacturer is expecting a strong boost from its terminal business, which includes handsets and data services.

Last month, the company announced that it hopes to become one of the world's top five Android smartphone makers this year. According to China Daily, ZTE expects to ship 12 million smartphones in 2011, one-tenth of the 120 million devices it projects to ship in total. In 2010, the company shipped 90 million handsets.

" ZTE wants to become one of the world's top three mobile phone vendors by 2015," Xie said in the report.

According to a report this week by ZDNet Asia's sister site CNET, ZTE will be one of three new hardware partners that will adopt Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 OS for its smartphones following Redmond's unveiling of its update codenamed Mango.

Huawei is also riding heavily on Google's mobile operating system (OS) to grow its mobile business. Last September, company executives told ZDNet Asia that it will be using Android to power its smartphones and tablets, and that the ecosystem will soon overtake Apple's iOS platform.

Fan Jiongyi, who heads up ZTE's terminal business, added in China Daily's report that overseas markets accounted for more than 60 percent of the company's terminal sales last year, while the local market contributed the remaining 40 percent. The company's flagship mobile phone, ZTE Blade, sold over one million units in Europe since its launch last year, and in some of the European markets, sales of the handset were surpassed only by Apple's iPhone 4, he revealed.

Besides its terminal business, the China company is also turning to cloud computing to boost its sales, the report stated. ZTE plans to become a leader in this arena by 2015 and has already committed 3,000 employees to work on cloud R& D projects.

" We hope the products and services related to cloud computing will exceed US$2 billion this year," said Wang Wei, ZTE's vice president, in a media statement. These offerings include data communication products, enterprise networks and servers and storage products for government networks, according to the company.