Red Bend Speeds Firmware Upgrades
By Rhonda Wickham | February 6, 2007

As operators launch new mobile services that depend on the existence of certain software capabilities inside mobile phones, they are restricted to launching the service with only those phones that are compatible for the new service. Or worse, customers have to visit a retail location to get the updated software to support the new service. Red Bend Software is offering its new product suite – vRapid Mobile – as a way for network operators and handset makers to improve software releases and add feature capabilities as well as fix bugs on devices.

The product suite, which builds on standards enablers from the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), uses Red Bend’s firmware over the air (FOTA) solution to update the entire firmware image as one monolith. According to the company, vRapid Mobile can update, add and remove individual embedded software components on any mobile phone, allowing operators to deliver the needed software components over-the-air to the phones on their networks and begin selling their new service to consumers immediately. Yoram Salinger, CEO of RedBend Software, says the suite “bends industry conventions by extending the reach of customization deeper inside the software architecture of mobile phones, across any mobile software platform and at any time in a device’s lifecycle.”

For example, vRapid Mobile would allow operators to add push-mail capabilities via a messaging client update, upgrade a phone’s media player, install a new audio codec to support richer music downloads or enhance a custom application suite with location/navigation services. Alternately, it could be used to update the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) middleware on mobile phones to support service providers deploying quadruple play IP-based networks. The difference between VRapid and other FOTA updates, according to a Red Bend spokesperson, is the size of the data being sent. “Since VRapid only sends the specific firmware update, rather that an entirely new firmware, as FOTA does, the update is much smaller and downloads and installs much faster,” she says.

The suite with support for Linux and select mobile phone platforms will be available in Q2 2007 with support for Symbian available in Q3. BenQ Mobile, LG Electronics, NEC, Sharp and Sony Ericsson currently use the company’s FOTA mobile client software.