February, 6 – 2008 – a group of key operators, infrastructure and device vendors comprised of Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, TeliaSonera, Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung, announced a joint effort to facilitate the evolution of mobile communication towards rich communication.

Together the participants have agreed upon a set of features originating from profiled IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) standards as well as implementation guidelines with the intention of having interoperable rich communication services available in 2008.

The core features that consumers will get include:

- Enhanced Phonebook, with service capabilities and presence enhanced contacts information

- Enhanced Messaging, which enables a large variety of messaging options including chat and messaging history

- Enriched Call, which enables multimedia content sharing during a voice call

According to the agreement, the capabilities mentioned above will be available on any type of device and there is open communication between devices and networks. This agreement strongly favors Google’s Android project.