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Cellular and Computing Industries Finally Collide
magarity writes "For years now cell phones have become increasing complex as computers become ever smaller. The two industries now directly collide. Of special interest is the change in mission statement by Microsoft from 'a computer on every desk and in every home' to 'empowering people through great software, any time, any place and on any device.' With mobile phone saturation in the industrialized world from +80% (Italy) to 45% (USA), this is the next battleground for information technology dominance. Both industries have giant sized players; the shakeouts, as well as implications for consumers, will be huge."
Now if they only produced better screens we could get some work done. The only working thing you can consider "computing" and "cellular" is the Treo.
That WAP is shit. I can tell you as I have some experience (Nokia, Siemens, Sony, Ericsson, Alcatel, everyone plays his own game, with large differences in the ways things are shown). We have to go directly for web or for Java. I've tested some Nokias and Alcatels. For instance, Alcatel 525 WAP browser, in forms, it doesn't show you the next input till you've filled it!!
Not sure if you are trying to be funny, but Italy is roughly 301,000 sq km, and New Jersey is rougly 19,215 sq km.
100% - 45% = 55%, not 65%.
on the same subject is http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory .cfm?Story_ID=1454436
What's the quality of the landlines in Italy? How often do people move around? If the quality of the landlines is shit, and people move around a lot, there is a huge incentive for everyone to get a cell phone because (a) they are more reliable, and (b) they are more convenient if your "permanent address" changes every two months.
In the US, the quality of the land lines is pretty good, so you don't need to get a cell phone unless you need (or want) the mobile aspect of it.
It's not that. Penetration measures against population. That is, 80% of the Italians (some 80 million, not so small) own a cell phone. Italy, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Spain, Netherlands, ... have more users than the USA per inhabitant.
With such differences, it's not a matter of infrastructure. You can take only those regions with coverage and the difference would still be there. The problem is in the offer.
err...so northern Finland is a highly populated area? I go there quite a lot, and believe me, it's pretty quiet.
Market saturation is done on 'per capita' not 'per square km'...
That 80% is saturation, not coverage. They are not the same thing since most people in industrialized countries live in concentrated areas.
I see this actually the other way around. SymbianOS 6 is way more powerful than PalmOS 4 (and very likely also 5) and this gap will widen even more with SymbianOS 7 [symbian.com]
Phone manufacturers have not been shy about voicing their hatred and disdane for MS. Symbian by the way is a recycled piece of junk. I won't bother rehashing the ugly history of symbian, but the thing has been in development for 6+ years. Do a search in google for symbian to find out how many horrible failures it's had. The only reason it is still alive is MS keeps dumping money into the product.
I've spoken to embedded phone engineers that work at qualcomm and others in the cell industry. Nokia, Ericcson, Sony, LG and motorola hate MS. It's just that simple. Plus symbian takes an order of magnitude more memory to run than other embedded systems. There's a good reason a lot of phones have a simple OS and don't have a full blow RTOS, memory and cost. When you sell phones for 30.00, you can't afford to spend 2.00 on the OS and 10.00 on 16megs of ram. Here is an excerpt from symbian's page
limited memory: mobile phones and handheld computers have a very limited amount of memory, with memory for running programs often in the region of a few megabytes and memory for storing files usually a few tens of megabytes. The challenge for the developer is to make their software usable despite these restrictions, and this requires a combination of skillful programming and careful design. Restricted memory also poses challenges in the design of the operating system itself
Notice they mention megs and not kilobytes. With the competative phone market every kb of memory counts towards the profit margin.
which will not be until December 2 according to the register. Apparently, MS are hiring a Detlef Eckert who heads a department in the European Union overseeing security, e-Commerce and telecommunications. But don't worry, he will not be resigning his post, just taking a leave of absence to work at Microsoft until he rotates back into his position to oversee EU IT in an unbiased way.
This article (originally referred to in this submittal) comprehensively outlines how it's an uphill battle for Microsoft.
Mozilla's tabbed browsing is ideal for posting links on
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
While we were living in Italy, we were one of the fortunate people, through military contacts, who could procure a land line quickly and with very little effort. It wasn't an "old world" area, but the group in charge of telephones didn't generally feel pressured to move quickly. I'm not sure how much has changed in the last 10 years, but I would imagine that it's probably much easier to get a mobile phone than a land line, so "acceptance" is probably a sign of convenience, rather than progressive thinking.
http://www.eurunion.org/profile/facts.html 15 members, which doesn't include, for instance, Switzerland or Denmark)
(actua
2001 data unless otherwise stated:
US area: 3717.9 sq miles ??
US population: 284.8 million ??
US density/sq mile: 76.6
US share of world trade: 11.9%
US mobile users: 137.5 million (July 2002)
EU area: 1249.0 sq miles
EU population: 378.0 million
EU density/sq mile: 302.6
EU share of world trade: 19.4%
European mobile users 279 million
European penetration 70.2% (July 2002)
world total number of users: 860 million