Orange wants 80% of all sales to be Signature devices

Orange wants 80% of the devices it is shipping by the end of 2008 to be within its Signature range. Currently, around 50% of the models available with Orange fall within its Signature range, accounting for 60% of the sales volume.

Matthias Hilpert, Director of Device Strategy, Orange, said that an increased focus on the Signature range, in which Orange controls the look of the phone and the applications and software available on it, would not affect the ability of phone manufacturers to innovate and differentiate within the Orange range.

“We are talking about volume of sales, not numbers of model,” he said. “Only around 50% of the available models will be Signature phones, but our high volume devices will nearly all be on the Signature range.”

Hilpert was speaking at an event organized by Abaxia, which provides the idle screen software to Orange for its Signature range, allowing to to use the idle and home screen for themes, personalisation and to push relevant content to users.

Hilpert said that although phones ship out the box with the set configurations, users can change the settings, or opt to have third party applications and themes installed if they wish.

Speaking to Mobile Europe later, Hilpert said that he thought the Abaxia approach offered flexibility, and a light touch in terms of the software build and integration. Cell broadcast applications for idle screen usage (such as that pushed by Celltick) were less flexible and interactive, and also problematical because most operators do not have the broadcast capability enabled in their networks.

He also thought that combining location based services with the home screen element and pushed content was “on the roadmap”, although he appeared to query the use of such services within the home page/ idle screen environment.

Cedric Mangaud, CEO, Abaxia, said that the company was “in discussions” with other operators about its idle screen software, but could not name any as yet. He also said the company was talking to various companies about combining touch screen UIs with its idle screen software. This requires integration of hardware with software, he said, and would take a little work.