Mobile Phone Firmware Updating

As Mobile Phones Add Features, Firmware Becomes More Complex.

Over the last several years, mobile telephones have undergone a transformation from relatively simple voice-based handsets to more sophisticated multimedia communication devices, and they now commonly include text messaging, cameras, web browsers, conferencing capabilities and other sophisticated features.

In order to provide these more sophisticated features, these devices now require increasingly complex mobile phone firmware. It is this firmware that controls the operations of the mobile phones. The growing complexity of mobile phone firmware, however, presents a significant challenge to mobile handset manufacturers and mobile telephone carriers: the ability to ensure that the mobile phone firmware is of high quality and 100% reliable. Given the volume of mobile handsets shipped – more than 600 million units are expected to ship in 2004 – and the diverse conditions in which they are used, as mobile phone firmware complexity increases, the likelihood of defects causing an operating malfunction increases.

Over the Air (OTA) Technology Enables Cost Effective Mobile Phone Firmware Updates.

To address the growing challenge of providing higher quality and more reliable firmware, and eliminating expensive recalls, while at the same time meeting aggressive time-to-market demands, a more effective technology known as "over-the-air" (OTA) mobile phone firmware updating is gaining broad acceptance in the mobile telephone industry. (This technology is sometimes referred to as "firmware over the air updating": FOTA). OTA mobile phone firmware updating enables mobile device manufacturers and carriers to remotely update the firmware wirelessly. That is, it can update the mobile phone's firmware even when the phone is already in customers' hands. By using OTA methods to update mobile phone firmware and to patch flaws in the firmware originally installed on the handset, users no longer need to bring the handset to a service facility to update the firmware on their mobile phone.

Delivering Firmware Updates Over the Air Enables Mobile Phone Personalization.

In addition to delivering patches to fix faulty firmware, the OTA mobile phone firmware updating technology can be used to deliver new features and services to customers. Because this updated firmware can be delivered to users without requiring them to bring their mobile device to a service facility to reflash the memory with new firmware or to purchase a new handset, carriers can conveniently deliver firmware with new services to individual users' handsets, in effect "personalizing" the handset to meet the particular needs of an individual user. This has the advantage of enhancing customer loyalty and it provides opportunities for carriers to generate additional revenue per subscriber.