Seen at MWC: Prototype Netphones and Netphone Tablets

So it appears that the Netphone isn’t just one phone. It’s a brand! I was made privy (well, me and all 60,000 people) to prototypes of future devices that carry the Netphone branding that will be launched by SMART.

Seen here are the Netphone tablet, an entry level Netphone running on Brew (the white one) and the Netphone we’ve previously seen running Android 2.2. All these are part of the WAC initiative, meaning the Jollibee app you see can be made available across several platforms (i.e. Android, Brew, etc) without having to create multiple apps for different platforms. In the same way, telcos from other countries that are part of the WAC initiative can also choose to apply these apps to their store.

SPECULATION: This is actually big. Remember the Sandbox project I helped move forward several months ago? In a way, this is it’s second iteration. Imagine a BlackBerry Messenger-like service but applies to everyone who has Netphone devices. SMART is re-building its own community of subscribers by interconnecting them to one another. So instead of committing to one device platform, WAC enables SMART to use several phone platforms to interconnect. This definitely makes sense since the Philippines is primarily a feature phone market (i.e. the white Brew-enabled Netphone) but recognizing the fact that smartphones and tablets are the big thing for the upper income brackets. END OF SPECULATION.