On Friday last week I was invited to a preview of Orange’s Spring/Summer 2009 Collection. As I’ve mentioned in the past, Orange structures its product innovation work in bi-annual runs it calls La Collection, just like fashion collections. in the course of a short hour, I and a number of internal and external people were rushed through all the latest and greatest to come out of Orange’s labs. Here’s a quick run-down of what I saw and what struck me:

• 24/24 Actu: the first service that I saw was probably the one I found the most interesting, although that might be because it’s personally of interest to me. 24/24 Actu is a web portal that aggregates national news from various sources, both print, audio and video. It breaks it down in themed and searchable chunks. Essentially, the user types in a topic in the search bar and gets all articles, radio snippets and video clips related to said topic. The service is functional and a user pilot is to begin soon. The only snag: the business model is “currently unknown”.

• New Livebox: After 5 years, Orange’s lifebox gets a facelift, both external and internal. On the looks side, I’m not all that impressed. It’s still big and has a less sexy design in my opinion. Not that I care much though, to be fair. More interesting to me is the ergonomy redesign. The menus and navigation finally look like something, and though we’re not at Fios Media Guide levels yet, we’re getting there. Widgets are promised, both from Orange and third-parties.

• Hi-Fi Adapter: This is a device that you plug on your (traditional) stereo and allows you to stream all the music content on your PC (or from Orange’s LiveRadio service) on your stereo. Gimmicky, but nice.

• Tabbee: A concept I’m really struggling with. Tabbee is a 299 EUR touch screen device that allows you to access internet through the home wi-fi. I have a lot of trouble thinking anyone would dish out that much money for a device that sits at home and allows you to do the same thing as you PC, only on a smaller screen. If I want to check out my email without walking to my PC, I use my iPhone…

• Media Remote Control: the idea of the media remote control is that your smartphone works as a universal remote control to select content on your PC or other available devices and stream it to any other connected devices. I thought the technology was sleek, but I don’t really think this is hugely likely to catch up.

• Medical office: this is a service dedicated to doctors. It allows for automatic backup and encryption of any files and correspondance on patients. It’s certainly user friendly; beyond that, not being a doctor myself I have no idea how attractive it may be to one.

• Telepresence: you don’t present telepresence anymore, but since Orange is embracing Cisco on this line of products, they do. Sleek as ever, and Orange, unsurprisingly, offers a fully managed service on top of reselling the equipment and selling the connectivity.

• Visual Voicemail: taking a leaf from the iPhone book, Orange launches VVM for all mobiles.

• IM for emerging countries: this service is effectively an SMS-based IM mobile client which can interoperate with existing IM clients. The idea is to have a non-IP based service that doesn’t rely on a mobile data network. The pricing will be key, of course, and it sounds like it will be pay as you go, which I think is an issue…

• Application Shop: Again, inspired by the success of the iPhone app store, Orange intends to launch a device agnostic app store. The store will install each app as rendered specifically for the customer’s mobile. This competes or completes Orange’s existing app delivery channels (own web portal and Gallery) depending on your point of view.

• Orange TV Player on iPhone: this is an iPhone app that allows you to stream and view Orange distributed TV channels on your iPhone. Looks sleek and makes good use of iPhone ergonomy and capabilities. It’s a paying service (of course) and must squeeze the juice our of your battery like all hell, but it’s sexy.

Overall an interesting collection. I kept thinking throughout that none of this was really very innovative. The communication spin was that simplicity was also innovation and while you might agree with that, I felt that none of what I saw was exactly conceptually new or unexpected coming from a telco such as Orange.

That’s not to say that the services presented are uninteresting or without potential (though I would argue that some in there are unlikely to experience more than confidential distribution), but I think it’s a misnomer to call what was shown there “innovation”. Coming at a time where the French press questions Orange’s capacity to innovate, I’m not sure that, sleek as some of these services were, the Spring Summer 09 collection will have convinced them otherwise…

If you need visuals to form an opinion, Telecom TV has covered the event: