Carsten Brinkschulte, CEO of Synchronica, on Orange's Social Life service

I had a note in from Carsten Brinkshulte, the CEO of Synchronica, who saw the piece we published yesterday on Orange’s launch of their ‘Social Life’ service.

Synchronica are all about sync — in particular, their Mobile Gateway (push email for everyone) and Mobile Backup services are being enjoyed by customers of many an operator. Social networking is naturally an area of interest for the company hence Carsten’s comments below:

I think this shows that carriers have understood the importance of social networking, but it also shows the limitations of the technical approach some solution providers are taking.

Orange said ‘Widget Player is currently available on the Nokia 6303, but it plans to roll out the application to more devices throughout the rest of 2009′.

How much sense does it make to introduce a solution that clearly is targeted at the mass-market of consumers and then make it available only on a single handset?

The client-based approach of many messaging vendors is drastically limiting the addressable market. Synchronica has always implemented a different approach using industry standards delivering push Email, synchronization and now social messaging to the native applications of a wide range of handsets – without requiring an additional client to be downloaded to the handset.

As a result, our solutions have a much larger addressable market and are better suited for the consumer sector which is categorized by a highly heterogeneous device landscape.

That’s a very interesting point. I took a look at the announcement and wondered that too, Carsten. I can only assume (and hope) that this the first of *many* Orange handsets that will go live with widget support.