China Mobile offers sops to 3G applications developers

China Mobile is planning to offer freebies and incentives to service providers to develop applications for its third generation (3G) mobile services, an unprecedented move that is set to intensify competition in the country's fledging 3G business.

Under an initiative the company plans to kick off next week, China Mobile will enlist services and applications tailor-made for its TD-SCDMA 3G services from developers and partners and will not take commissions from them during the first year.

The world's biggest mobile carrier in terms of user number will also provide a series of technological and management platforms for the application developers.