Vodafone has decided to team up with China Mobile and Japanese operator Softbank - formerly Vodafone’s Japanese arm - to create a new lab charged with developing new tech, services and applications.

Unsuprisingly, it’s web based services that will receive the bulk of the attention, including widgets that should be compatible with any handset or operating system.

The choice of partners looks to be interesting one - one operator from Japan, a country pretty much one of the most established and cutting edge in terms of mobile development and China, still a relatively new market but with lots of room from growth, and one all the established players have got their eye on. Hopefully there’ll be some intriguing applications coming out of this old mobile world-new mobile world collaboration - that is, if they can find something that appeal to users on low end handsets with slow connections equally well as speedy networks and high-end devices. After all, web browsing has proved far more popular for high end device - perhaps widgets will give operators a way to get in at the lower end.

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