Go No Go for Consumer Mobile Market Says Synchronica CEO

Yahoo's Lack of Support for Open Standards and Homogenized User Interface Will Throttle Mass Market Device Support

Royal Tunbridge Wells, January 9, 2008. - In the wake of Google's Android announcement, internet search company Yahoo has announced its plans for a mobile application development platform. Yahoo claims that their platform Go will allow third party developers to write applications that will run on a wide variety of mobile devices, boosting the adoption of mobile data services.

But Carsten Brinkschulte, CEO of Synchronica, claims that lack of a truly open platform and resistance from mobile handset manufacturers will severely restrict mass market adoption of mobile applications based on Yahoo's Go platform.

Synchronica is a pioneer of mobile email middleware based on open standards which allow its applications to be used on all ordinary mobile phones. Therefore Brinkschulte has a deep understanding of the ecosystem of mobile handset manufacturers, operators, and application vendors:

"Once again, we see a big vendor heralding an open mobile platform which is in fact proprietary technology that does not support common industry standards, such as Push IMAP and SyncML", comments Brinkschulte. "In addition, the Go mobile technology takes over the user interface of the device rather than working with the manufacturers' firmware. Therefore, we believe that Yahoo Go applications will receive only limited support from mobile handset manufacturers, and this will severely restrict the number of consumers that can use the new applications."

About Synchronica

Synchronica plc develops and markets synchronization and device management solutions for mobile operators, device manufacturers, and enterprises. Its product portfolio ranges from data synchronization (DS) to device management (DM), and firmware updates over the air (FOTA). Products include the mobile device management product set Mobile Manager Suite and the push email and synchronization solution Mobile Gateway. Headquartered in the U.K., with a development center in Germany and presences in the USA, Hong Kong, and Dubai. Synchronica plc is a public company traded on the AIM list of the London Stock Exchange (SYNC). More information is available at www.synchronica.com

For more information, please contact:

David Clark
Tel.: +44 1892 5527 20
Fax: +44 1892 5527 21
david.clark@synchronica.com