Motorola has launched a very Clued-in strategy to push Always-On applications.

It is to use the mobile phone as a remote control.

The idea is that you sync the phone to your home using a verison of the old Palm cradle, then control home automation applications remotely using the phone.

This is clever in many different ways:

• In a crowded mobile marketplace you now have a reason to stick with the Motorola brand.
• You're linking two disparate technologies -- home networking and mobile telephony -- and branding both to Motorola, even though both are based on separate standards.
• You're adding personalization to the phone, making it more valuable.
• The phone is the perfect platform on which to base voice controls.
• The phone is becoming the next client computer, as we've said before.
• The Always-On world is just being born, but here we have a complete system, based on open standards, available from a single vendor.
• Always-On applications make a lot more sense as a direction for mobile technology than copyright ever will.

The threat, and the challenge, for Motorola is to keep the system as open as it possibly can.

If Motorola tries to use integration to transform these open standards into something proprietary, it risks losing the whole market.

If instead it grows the whole and plays a central role in bringing other companies to the table, Motorola can become the next tech generation's Microsoft.

But it has made a smashing start.