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Mobile Carriers Cry "Less Operating Systems"
A NYTimes story says "Multiple systems have hampered the growth of new services, mobile phone executives say. " The story does a good job of capturing some of the changing dynamics in the mobile OS market — but rightly raises the point that given the sheer size of the mobile market, it's unlikely we're going to see the homogenization we have in the desktop market.
Will all of the lock down, lock in, and prison sentences (aka 1-2 year cell phone contacts)
I once tried to get a windows mobile phone and they said that you must pay for 2 years for data + voice to get it at the deal price.
T-mobile is cutting off data / internet to non T-mobile apps on some of there phones.
others lock down Bluetooth to force you to use there network, and some have internet data limits.
The I-phone is cool but they only want you to use payed for apps on it.
Oh poor carriers! Boo hoo hoo!
They're just upset because they put a lot of research and development into stripping the features out of phones that they find inconvenient, and having multiple systems means they need to spend that much more in tech so that they can hamper the new devices similarly.
I mean, they CAN'T just let the phones be, can they? If they did, then the phones would have the out-of-the-box capability to transfer ringtones and wallpapers 'n whatnot directly from people's PCs, or from web sites OTHER than the carriers!
New OSes have *nothing* to do with the fact that adoption is being hampered. It's the greed of the telcos that are hampering things, because they demand that phones be completely locked down so users are ONLY allowed to do what the telcos want, like paying 4 bucks for crappy renditions of Madonna songs.
But this is why Microsoft is actually a good thing on the desktop market. I'm all for using different OSes, but the sheer number of applications available for a single OS (And in this case it happens to be Windows) is staggering compared to how bad it COULD have been had we had multiple OSes that were popular. It's expensive to develop cross platform support, which is why most companies will aim for the market that makes them the most money.
I'm still looking forward to Linux and Click and Run technology -- that is the first step of many needed to start surpassing Windows on the desktop.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I do not know about you guys but I prefer more competition and less vendor os lock in.
Java is huge in the mobile market as a result.
The problem I have is all the oses are dictated by the monopolies of the carriers. Even the menu's must work all the same and all applications except java applets need to be signed so they can be the gatekeepers aka the carriers.
http://saveie6.com/