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DailyMotion is highly influenced by the French ISP called Orange which is suspected of prioritizing some contents and slowing down Megaupload and other websites. Besides, there are people from the french government working for them which are the ones who came up with the HADOPI law. Knowing all that, I wouldn't trust news coming from DM.

Orange (french provider)
http://www.orange.com/sirius/dossiers_anim/cables_sous_marins/index_fr.html

Orange is a brand of France Telecom, not two separate entities:

http://www.orange.com/english/access/aboutUs.php

Symbian is off topic for *that very reason*. Of course they're the market leader. Everybody KNOWS that. It's utterly irrelevant here.

This is about Linux/Windows and which direction the multinational company Motorola are taking. *AFTER* they sold their Symbian shares some two months ago.

EXIT Symbian.

Why did they release a Linux-cellphone in the first place, then?

And that is an interesting question.

The Slashdot punchline was a reference to an outdated press release, interpreted by Slashdot as "Eventually Motorola plans to use Linux in most of its phones."

Here some more indications Motorola may already have dropped Linux.

The A760 was announced already in February 2003. From then and untill the phone was reality took 9 months.

The MPx200 was announced on September 15th 2003 and was in the shops only 5 weeks later.

The MPx200 was actually in stock BEFORE the A760, and primarily targeting the home markets in US and Europe, not Asia. (Btw, Orance covers most of Europe and also Tailand, Hongkong, India, Israel and more)

That doesn't mean a 5 week turnaround on phone development. It means a lot of work was done "backstage", before officially announcing the new strategy - and phone.

So why the need for secrecy? Well.. obviously due to the upcoming sellout of Symbian.

Motorolas life "after Symbian" could take three directions. They could continue using Symbian, without ownership. They could use Linux. Or mobile Windows. Or all three, for that matter, but that would mean messy development..

Here is another indication that Linux to Motorola was an intended sidetrack:

Searching the Motorla press release site, you will find there are 26 Motorola press releases mentioning the A760. Over a timespan of the 10 months: From the announcement and to the phone was in the shops.

Search for MPx200 and the story is anotherl. In the mere 5 weeks from they announced their mobile Windows plans, no less than 1269 Motorola press releases mention the MPx200.

So back to your question..

Motorola have cancelled phones before. They could have cancelled A760 as well. I think they released in Asia because...

1: The phone was cheap to produce

2: the Asian market is huge - chances of breaking even with a Linux phone is better there than in the more saturated markets of US and Europe.

But last and not least..3: Dealing with Microsoft is dealing with the devil. In particular for a company in the red. A Linux joker up Motorolas sleeve was likely an argument providing financial benefits versus MS.

Around half a year ago it became known that Microsoft salesmen carte blanche offer huge rebates to companies who otherwise would have chosen Linux solutions.

Soooo.. You tell me. Why was the A760 released?

dunno if they're available in america or not but the Orange Spv can be used as a pda, have gprs net connectivity, play games, play music (you can buy bigger sd cards to get more storage), play videos, have an extension that takes pictures and plus some more stuff. They're not massively sized, nice and compact with loads of functionality. Of course they're made by Microsoft so they'll not be popular around here, but they're pretty neat.

So, and what exactly stops me from using sms on a phone without built in mp3 player, the capability to watch movies and the possibility to edit word/excel documents? The beauty of sms is its simplicity.

What failure? Please elaborate on what you think is a failure.

For starters: They weren't able to lure any major cellphone manufacturer in. Big suprise: They didn't want to be OEM manufacturers for a Microsoft branded phone. So they turned to the network providers and where able to cut a deal with Orange. A couple month later deals with Swisscom as well as T-Mobile to release a Microsoft powered phone fell appart, due to bad bugs, which they weren't able to resolve. You can read some of Orange SPV reviews for yourself. In general there seem to be a few zealots, which consider this to be a good phone, despite all it's limitations. In essence:

Battery life is barely sufficient to last a day

Bugs crash the phone on occasion

After which it requires 40 seconds+ to boot and connect

You can't dial your synchronised Outlook contacts directly (this might, or might not be fixed, alas it doesn't thing high praise on the much touted integration)

There are very, very reasonable security concerns

...

I wouldn't exactly call this a roaring success for the Microsoft Smartphone platform.

Add to that the absolute miniscule marketshare in comparision to Symbian.

This might change of course, if Microsoft pours billions and billions of $ into this market, but there's certainly no guarantee (especially since the telecom industry fears nothing more then deviating from standards and Microsoft has a rotten track record in this respect).

So, yeah: Given all those reasons I'd call Microsofts Smartphone Platform a spectacular failure to date.

These...people... are pushing forth guidelines for writing "Orange"-friendly HTML...

Check out this "Orange Web Development Guidelines"

link

It's password protected, I could access this yesterday, amazingly when I laughed at some Orange developers and posted about this on another forum yesterday, it was indeed not password protected.

But the pdf guidelines basically states these gotchas

1) Can't send any frames.. frames are filtered out before they get to the phone

2) Jscript parser case sensitvity is opposite that of IE 4/5

3) There's one font called "nina"

So this is arguably HTML, in fact it's not HTML since frames are definitely a part of HTML. well 4.0 but they're using other 4.0 HTML features. So they're non-standard. WAP's next generation, wireless xHTML, is indeed a standard per the WAP forum, and should be adopted soon. It's just as feature-rich as wireless HTML markup can be, just like "Orange HTML" only difference is it's a standard unlike "Orange HTML." xHTML has been agreed upon by Japanese telco's, European carries, American carriers. SPV's hack of HTML browsing isn't a solution.. It's neat, but WAP will replace it. Guess WAP isn't crap.

In these Internet times, should it not be - it's like comparing Apple to Orange

Check out the SPV, which runs the same OS platform as the P800. I've got one, very cool toy. MSN Messenger on a mobile phone, great idea.

There's various software being put together for it, some emulators and divx players (had "Attack of the Clones" on my phone for a while) are already up and running, plus several decent games.

Discussion of these Smartphones mostly takes place at Modaco

How big a company is Sendo? How prominent are they in the field?

Sendo isn't really a big player in the mobile industry, but it's nice anyway to see them leaving Microsoft!

Sendo was listed as one of the first SmartPhone (what a misnomer) partners: who else joined? Have they put anything out yet?

By now, only Orange offer a "smartphone"...