Yet another CDMA-one client for mobile UI tips up

DESPITE THE INQ's high hopes for the Celltop interface from Aricent, the company has just revealed yet another US-based, CDMA-one operator as a customer - Sprint.

Four months after the actual launch of One Click by Sprint, Aricent has finally got permission to say that its technology powers the One Click UI.

Now the folks at Aricent are obviously convinced that they have a solution which is an Apple Ithingey beater.

But come on guys - One Click is only available on four handsets - the Samsung Rant and Highnote; the LG Lotus and the Sanyo Eclipse. All are Qualcomm and Brew powered, no doubt.

Aricent trumpeted that the whole concept-to-market process for Sprint was less than 10 months. But given the small number of handsets involved plus the fact that it looks much like Celltop anyway, that's hardly very fast.

We were impressed by certain aspects of One Click - the fact that Sprint can modify the UI using OTA (Over-The -Air) technology being one of them.

The other is One Click's ability to learn from user behaviour and move frequently used options up the stack automatically.

As the INQ has said before, if Aricent wants to go truly mass market it should push its J2ME version at GSM operators - especially in emerging markets. µ