Standards for the Mobile User Experience

At last, it appears that the mobile phone manufacturers have decided that open-standards and consistency in user-interfaces might be beneficial. There's an independent group called Open Mobile Terminal Platform (“OMTP”) that represents Orange, NTT DoCoMo, mmO2, Smart Communications, Telecom Italia Mobile (“TIM”), Telefónica Móviles, T-Mobile and Vodafone.

"Mobile Operators clearly need to promote their own unique interfaces and services to differentiate their respective offerings. However, subscribers can also benefit from mobile service providers being able to deliver a consistent and more customized user interface within their respective networks."

On a related note, check out the guidelines here:
Specialist Task Force 231: Generic user interface elements for mobile terminals and services

Thanks to the folks at usablemobile for pointing these out.