When asked whether open source models created problems for vendors with licensed software, the software giant went on the offensive. "It does infringe on a bunch of patents, and there's a cost associated with that," Tivanka Ellawala, Microsoft financial officer told MarketWatch. "So there's a... cost associated with Android that doesn't make it free."
I suppose they have to, seeing as they're licensing WinPhone the same way as Windows mobile (ie for $$ for unit)
of course they can do all those things, but I think the differentiators is too little to make a difference. A larger screen will either incur more cost for the manufacturer, or will have to cost the consumer more. I don't know if a more expensive but larger-screen WinPhone will sell more than a smaller screen, cheaper version... but the cost difference isn't going to be massive so one will sell lots, the other will be nothing. Maybe.
Or maybe consumers will see them both as the same thing, and the manufacturers will have to compete on either cost, or things like screen size. They cannot add their own value-add functionality, unless its in the form of apps, whilst the majority of the functions is basic windows phone functionality - same facebook, windows live and bing connectivity without (say) twitter support or the kind of extra that the manufacturers are putting into the android devices as a way of differentiating themselves from their competitors - eg, the Sony multimedia stuff, or the Samsung aldiko ebook reader. Maybe the WinPhone apps will be of such power that they can replace this, but I doubt it - Microsoft wants to keep a "consistent user interface" meaning they get the home page apps that you won't/can't replace.
We'll see. maybe it'll be huge success and everyone will run Windows on every computing device ever made:)
probably more important is the bit that said the phone manufacturers can't customise it.
So, can you imagine Samsung and HTC putting in vast amounts of effort to design, manufacture and market a phone that.. to all intents and purposes, is the same as the other one. Including the LG phone they cranked out cheaply and gets all the sales because of that.
At the moment, all my colleagues are excited by Android phones, everyone who had a HTC hero wants a HTC Desire, and now they're salivating at the Galaxy S. These are different phones, slightly differnet features, and that makes for happy manufacturers who suddenly release something and make vast amounts of cash - enough to pay for the next bigger, better model.
With Window Phone... why bother, unless you're the cheapest no-one will care for your phone. If it has an extra megapixel on the camera, you're just losing money compared to your competitor who sells thousdands more than you because they priced it $20 cheaper.. for exactly the same functionality.
We'll see about Exchange support but so far it appears Android's is better!
For development.. note that you can develop in QT for Symbian and no doubt MeeGo, and Android (see the lighthouse project), and an iPhone project is being worked on. Given Blackberry apps tend to be a separate breed, it almost makes sense to do all your dev in QT (as it works on Windows, Linux and mac too) and you're back to an almost-single codebase. That is very important if you don't want to lose tons of cash rewriting everything all the time.
As the OP noted, Silverlight on Windows Phone 7 is poor, and its pretty limited marketshare on the desktop roughly equates to no-one bothering with it (except die-hard MS developers who expect the world to fall over itself for the latest MS tech). If you could run C++ on Windown Phone 7 then QT would be a very compelling solution - and might even save the Win Phone market.
yes, but that's only been for a little while. And at 20,000 units a time, it's got a loooooooong way to go to make up the 30 million unit shortfall compared to the Wii. (I make it 28 years at 20,000 units per week to catch up)
After the xbox slim becomes less 'modern' and nintendo brings out Wii 2 (or whatever), the numbers will change again. Probably they'll change next month when the PS Move is out (its quite cheap) so I think it will jump up in the weekly rankings for a while.
No, the only valid indicator is the total sales. If it wasn't for Windows and Office, XBox would have gone bankrupt years ago.
mind you, according to commentators on the financial crisis, the problem is that most or nearly all economists struggled with the maths used in financial economics nowadays. there is also a strong case that the mathmaticians who created the financial algorithms didn't really understand it either.
js performance is not important if it just fires up, slides an advert across the page and then stop. It *is* really important if your webpage is full of javascript driving a rich "desktop-style" GUI.
I always thought it made a ton of sense to have server-side javascript. If you're going to write script-based,err, scripts on the server currently people do them in PHP or similar. Doing it in JS would mean you only had to learn 1 language, and hopefully become an expert in it (instead of having to learn far too much and being more a jack'o'trades).
Personally, I avoid Java and.NET on the server. If you're writing server-side coe, extra developer productivity and fancy APIs/frameworks are of much less importance than reliability, stability and performance. So I go with boring old C++. I don't want this new bleeding edge dtuff, I want old-man's maturity instead.
I also want the option of running on Linux which is where our customers seem to be increasingly asking for nowadays (and I'm not sure why as our client-side stuff is all Windows only)
yeah right.. cos you're restricted to 128 characters for twitter, but your URL is likely to be slightly longer. A bit like the huge disclaimers on emails that say 1 line of content.
Now I'm in the UK, and I see it differently (culture maybe). We don't get PHBs courted by MS reps, what we do have is a pervasive 'marketplace' of developers who want or like certain development tools, these drive the adoption - usually by telling the PHB of XYZ being the next thing. Obviously this only works for mainstream stuff, and PHBs looking at the job market and seeing cheaper/more devs with certain tools. There's also the trainign aspect - we tedn to offer training as a perk to devs, who then say "I need XYZ to stay current", boss sees all this happening and decides that its ok to trial a tool or so to see whether its ok or not.
Then, the dev tools arrive and they're filled chok-full of the 'new microsoft stuff' (as everyone uses Visual Studio) and its almost difficult not to use it. And, of course, the computing media is full of Microsoft's marketing telling us all how wonderful the new crap is. (I recall a softie markleteer telling us all how.NET exceptions were completely free, no overhead whatsoever and could be used for program flow! And how reference counting was so bad no-one could ever write an app without circular references, and that GC would solve world hunger. sigh)
So I've had to put up with the newer devs always nagging me when we'll start using.NET 'cos its so much better and so on. and now we have a ton of re-training and inexperienced devs. And I think we'll end up with more javascript-based web dev instead of monolithic thick clients. (but not quite yet).
yep, I agree there - Linux will be popular because of Google.
But.. developers. Its not about providing tools and saying 'off you go then', MS actively courts devs, look at how.NET dev has finally taken off, MS has pushed massive amounts of marketing, hype, tooling and stuff at devs everytime it can, and the number of C# jobs is the result. And now, I have to learn it for my next role, even though there are so many crappy bits in the framework (version hell anyone?) that it feels like coding VB6 all over again. Still, everyone wants to do it now - future careers are a subconcious incentive. So, though I've put it off for a while, it looks like i'll have to learn it, and then probably learn something else too to keep up (I like to learn stuff properly you see, not just be 'good enough')
So web devs are also coming round - whereas I used to see almost exclusive Linux webhosting, and the odd 'pay loads extra' for MS hosting, now its mostly Windows webhosts. I assume MS pays for every user, or at least gives the stuff away (they did that to us - we used Oracle DBs, but MS said to us - sell SQLServer and we'll give you it for nothing so every licence you see, you get to keep the cash. Management wet themselves at that, and now most of our customers choose the sql server option).
These are the reasons I think its important to court devs, MS slips and slides in here and there to get people to choose the easy option, persuades marketing to offer the MS option first, pretends their tech is the ultimate best thing ever (since the last one which is now 'that old crud' of course)
I don't think Google chose Java to attract Java devs, but because they used and liked it themselves. Nothing more than that. Google has always been a Java/python/C company because of their employee's skillsets.
I'm sure we'll see what happens. Probably more share price decline for MS and possibly the end of Ballmer if (when?) Windows Mobile 7 doesn't do as well as expected.
I look at Google's rather massive investment in R&D and outpouring of free cloud-based services as being very future-oriented: they know that they may not be able to subsist on ad revenue forever, and would like to have other options. Microsoft has been doing the same thing for the same reason for many years
1 thing about that, Google is milking the ads like they'll be nothing eventually, and looking to the future for potential alternatives (or additives). Microsoft is only just jumping on the ad bandwagon and trying to slap them everywhere they can. I can imagine Microsoft putting ads into Office soon and alienating its users, while Google moves on to something even more profitable (probably a % of subscription services, micro-paid for from your mobile contract or somesuch).
but Microsoft generally fails at anything outside its core competency of operating systems and office suites.
oh, you beat me to it:)
but you missed one important thing: developers. There is a very good reason MS courts them so much, and its something Google would do well to look at.
I'm still looking forward to the collapse of all this noise towards the end of Q4 2012.
Me too. By then Nokia will have perfected their 'mobile computing devices' and we'll all be thinking how crap those old smartphones were, with our new mini-PC we dock at our desks or to our TVs. Times, they are a-changing, the old desktop PC dinosaur is dead, it just doesn't realise it yet.
Published alongside this story, under the same byline, is a related piece on the collusion of Microsoft lawyers with corrupt Russian police in extorting money from the targets of software piracy investigations
you missed that bit from the summary, let alone TFA.
All I know is that when MS decided to check on us if we had enough licences (we didn't, of course, their convoluted licence agreements saw to that) they made us hire an audit company to come in and check us out - so they made us pay to audit ourselves for Microsoft's benefit.
Much as I think we should be buying the correct number of licences (that way management can see how expensive MS stuff is, rather than thinking all's fine when the company is awash with unlicenced installs), I do disagreee that a company should pay to audit itself.
I doubt that.. recall James Gosling talking about how he and colleagues at Sun had a competition to file the most ridiculous patent applications? He "invented" the light switch, and he says it was pretty dull in comparison to the others.
not just that, but Google TV is based on... Android. I guess all TVs will have to come with cameras and GPS too:)
Ars Technica has a article about it, they say that Google gives out varying answers depending who you talk to.
One one hand, we have a radically new set-top form factor that will supposedly run Android applications, and on the other hand, we have a Google product director saying that Android isn't a good fit for non-smartphone devices and that those devices may pose insurmountable application compatibility challenges in some cases.
I reckon this will quickly be a non-story in the end. Someone from Google will provide the necessary foot to the bum of the marketing department and all will be well.
* all those sales guys will be taking their 'work PCs' home with them, on the road, from hotel rooms etc. That's exactly what they want. That's the 'killer feature' mobile devices provide. For security... well, apps'll have to be "cloud enabled" or something, with remote lock-out. that should fix the security problems - by not allowing the device access to anything. Stop thinking like these things are PCs running Windows with everything on the local HDD and a bit of a network connection.
* I meant "that's covered" as anything the netbook does, a smartphone/pad can do too. Users will only notice an improved user experience, so they're not likely to have a problem shifting to the new devices. Except they won't get Windows, which I don't think they'll mind this time round.
I'm thinking of the marketplace these would be targetted at.
Sure, hard-core gamerz will not want one if it doesn't run the absolute latest super-graphics games that require 2 PSUs and 4 Gfx cards for their neon-light equipped gaming rigz. but, ignoring them....
My account manager always has his (old) smartphone glued to his ear when i see him. And he uses his PC for email and the odd word document. That's easily replaced with a smartphone, one that could connect to a big monitor and keyboard while still being portable would be perfect for him - and the rest of the sales and managerial types out there. That's a good 50% of all PC sales I think.
The rest of home users want something that lets them do 'netbook' style stuff - web, email, text, social networks, youtube. Well, that's covered and I think PC sales are dropping for home users already.
Business users - again, most of them do email, web and some odd LoB apps. The latter are a problem, unless they become web-apps, which is where the smart money is going nowadays (although that tends to be for easy deployment and management of the apps), once entirely webapps, there's not reason most people need a PC at all.
I think the future is for mobile devices, not PCs. The dinosaur that is Microsoft is dead, its just that the signals havn't reached its brain yet. Just like IBM many years ago, and others since.
this is an app that sits on your PC acting as a gateway between OWA and Thunderbird (and Lightning if you want to use your Outlook calendar too). It can also run on a server and act as that gateway for all users on your network.
The only thing you miss is the 'push' email as its sent, but I find my corporate Outlook/Exchange environment takes a good while to transmit emails across the firewalls anyway so its no loss that you have to (automatically, in the background) poll for new mail regularly.
if you want to see something really cool, check out the Image Swirl search. Its no so much a bit of eye candy as is an associative grouping of search results - for images. Unfortunately, it uses Flash, but give it a go - click a group result and you'll see. Hopefully they'll implement this as js if it comes out of the labs.
no idea, sorry. It will change according to the country anyway. Usually its government datasets, plus 'yellow pages' type data from commercial companies.
most PoI are created from external data sources, not entered by hand. So your beef is with the companies that supply that data. The problem with manually modifying them is that there are a lot of them, and you'd so quickly build up a backlog longer than anyone could manage. Maybe they could get an automated system in place, where enough people who update the same POI 'validate' their own work and have the update accepted would work.
From what I know, the Microsoft offering is not feature complete, a bit like their free-text search indexing in SQL server, its always a step behind Oracle's. I know we use Oracle for its spatial capabilities because the SQL server doesn't quite cut it for the really cool stuff.
For free versions - MySQL has spatial in it for some time. That's still free, and hopefully Oracle will improve the capabilities if only to annoy MS and capture the market that you represent - the 'we want it free until we have to buy something, and then that'll probably be Oracle' segment.
Slashdot Mirror
and it appears Microsoft is dead serious about making this work.
yup. they've already started trying just that in their own, inimitable style
When asked whether open source models created problems for vendors with licensed software, the software giant went on the offensive. "It does infringe on a bunch of patents, and there's a cost associated with that," Tivanka Ellawala, Microsoft financial officer told MarketWatch. "So there's a... cost associated with Android that doesn't make it free."
I suppose they have to, seeing as they're licensing WinPhone the same way as Windows mobile (ie for $$ for unit)
of course they can do all those things, but I think the differentiators is too little to make a difference. A larger screen will either incur more cost for the manufacturer, or will have to cost the consumer more. I don't know if a more expensive but larger-screen WinPhone will sell more than a smaller screen, cheaper version... but the cost difference isn't going to be massive so one will sell lots, the other will be nothing. Maybe.
Or maybe consumers will see them both as the same thing, and the manufacturers will have to compete on either cost, or things like screen size. They cannot add their own value-add functionality, unless its in the form of apps, whilst the majority of the functions is basic windows phone functionality - same facebook, windows live and bing connectivity without (say) twitter support or the kind of extra that the manufacturers are putting into the android devices as a way of differentiating themselves from their competitors - eg, the Sony multimedia stuff, or the Samsung aldiko ebook reader. Maybe the WinPhone apps will be of such power that they can replace this, but I doubt it - Microsoft wants to keep a "consistent user interface" meaning they get the home page apps that you won't/can't replace.
We'll see. maybe it'll be huge success and everyone will run Windows on every computing device ever made :)
probably more important is the bit that said the phone manufacturers can't customise it.
So, can you imagine Samsung and HTC putting in vast amounts of effort to design, manufacture and market a phone that.. to all intents and purposes, is the same as the other one. Including the LG phone they cranked out cheaply and gets all the sales because of that.
At the moment, all my colleagues are excited by Android phones, everyone who had a HTC hero wants a HTC Desire, and now they're salivating at the Galaxy S. These are different phones, slightly differnet features, and that makes for happy manufacturers who suddenly release something and make vast amounts of cash - enough to pay for the next bigger, better model.
With Window Phone... why bother, unless you're the cheapest no-one will care for your phone. If it has an extra megapixel on the camera, you're just losing money compared to your competitor who sells thousdands more than you because they priced it $20 cheaper .. for exactly the same functionality.
We'll see about Exchange support but so far it appears Android's is better!
For development.. note that you can develop in QT for Symbian and no doubt MeeGo, and Android (see the lighthouse project), and an iPhone project is being worked on. Given Blackberry apps tend to be a separate breed, it almost makes sense to do all your dev in QT (as it works on Windows, Linux and mac too) and you're back to an almost-single codebase. That is very important if you don't want to lose tons of cash rewriting everything all the time.
As the OP noted, Silverlight on Windows Phone 7 is poor, and its pretty limited marketshare on the desktop roughly equates to no-one bothering with it (except die-hard MS developers who expect the world to fall over itself for the latest MS tech). If you could run C++ on Windown Phone 7 then QT would be a very compelling solution - and might even save the Win Phone market.
yes, but that's only been for a little while. And at 20,000 units a time, it's got a loooooooong way to go to make up the 30 million unit shortfall compared to the Wii. (I make it 28 years at 20,000 units per week to catch up)
After the xbox slim becomes less 'modern' and nintendo brings out Wii 2 (or whatever), the numbers will change again. Probably they'll change next month when the PS Move is out (its quite cheap) so I think it will jump up in the weekly rankings for a while.
No, the only valid indicator is the total sales. If it wasn't for Windows and Office, XBox would have gone bankrupt years ago.
you do realise the joke went right past you?
mind you, according to commentators on the financial crisis, the problem is that most or nearly all economists struggled with the maths used in financial economics nowadays. there is also a strong case that the mathmaticians who created the financial algorithms didn't really understand it either.
and the only damage you'll cause with a MBA or Economics degree is... oh wait a minute....
absolutely!
js performance is not important if it just fires up, slides an advert across the page and then stop. It *is* really important if your webpage is full of javascript driving a rich "desktop-style" GUI.
I always thought it made a ton of sense to have server-side javascript. If you're going to write script-based,err, scripts on the server currently people do them in PHP or similar. Doing it in JS would mean you only had to learn 1 language, and hopefully become an expert in it (instead of having to learn far too much and being more a jack'o'trades).
Personally, I avoid Java and .NET on the server. If you're writing server-side coe, extra developer productivity and fancy APIs/frameworks are of much less importance than reliability, stability and performance. So I go with boring old C++. I don't want this new bleeding edge dtuff, I want old-man's maturity instead.
I also want the option of running on Linux which is where our customers seem to be increasingly asking for nowadays (and I'm not sure why as our client-side stuff is all Windows only)
yeah right.. cos you're restricted to 128 characters for twitter, but your URL is likely to be slightly longer. A bit like the huge disclaimers on emails that say 1 line of content.
eg.
http://www.frankfurt-airport.com/content/frankfurt_airport/en/news/world_s_first_hootersrestaurantatanairportopensatfrankfurtairpor.html
Now I'm in the UK, and I see it differently (culture maybe). We don't get PHBs courted by MS reps, what we do have is a pervasive 'marketplace' of developers who want or like certain development tools, these drive the adoption - usually by telling the PHB of XYZ being the next thing. Obviously this only works for mainstream stuff, and PHBs looking at the job market and seeing cheaper/more devs with certain tools. There's also the trainign aspect - we tedn to offer training as a perk to devs, who then say "I need XYZ to stay current", boss sees all this happening and decides that its ok to trial a tool or so to see whether its ok or not.
Then, the dev tools arrive and they're filled chok-full of the 'new microsoft stuff' (as everyone uses Visual Studio) and its almost difficult not to use it. And, of course, the computing media is full of Microsoft's marketing telling us all how wonderful the new crap is. (I recall a softie markleteer telling us all how .NET exceptions were completely free, no overhead whatsoever and could be used for program flow! And how reference counting was so bad no-one could ever write an app without circular references, and that GC would solve world hunger. sigh)
So I've had to put up with the newer devs always nagging me when we'll start using .NET 'cos its so much better and so on. and now we have a ton of re-training and inexperienced devs. And I think we'll end up with more javascript-based web dev instead of monolithic thick clients. (but not quite yet).
yep, I agree there - Linux will be popular because of Google.
But.. developers. Its not about providing tools and saying 'off you go then', MS actively courts devs, look at how .NET dev has finally taken off, MS has pushed massive amounts of marketing, hype, tooling and stuff at devs everytime it can, and the number of C# jobs is the result. And now, I have to learn it for my next role, even though there are so many crappy bits in the framework (version hell anyone?) that it feels like coding VB6 all over again. Still, everyone wants to do it now - future careers are a subconcious incentive. So, though I've put it off for a while, it looks like i'll have to learn it, and then probably learn something else too to keep up (I like to learn stuff properly you see, not just be 'good enough')
So web devs are also coming round - whereas I used to see almost exclusive Linux webhosting, and the odd 'pay loads extra' for MS hosting, now its mostly Windows webhosts. I assume MS pays for every user, or at least gives the stuff away (they did that to us - we used Oracle DBs, but MS said to us - sell SQLServer and we'll give you it for nothing so every licence you see, you get to keep the cash. Management wet themselves at that, and now most of our customers choose the sql server option).
These are the reasons I think its important to court devs, MS slips and slides in here and there to get people to choose the easy option, persuades marketing to offer the MS option first, pretends their tech is the ultimate best thing ever (since the last one which is now 'that old crud' of course)
I don't think Google chose Java to attract Java devs, but because they used and liked it themselves. Nothing more than that. Google has always been a Java/python/C company because of their employee's skillsets.
I'm sure we'll see what happens. Probably more share price decline for MS and possibly the end of Ballmer if (when?) Windows Mobile 7 doesn't do as well as expected.
I look at Google's rather massive investment in R&D and outpouring of free cloud-based services as being very future-oriented: they know that they may not be able to subsist on ad revenue forever, and would like to have other options. Microsoft has been doing the same thing for the same reason for many years
1 thing about that, Google is milking the ads like they'll be nothing eventually, and looking to the future for potential alternatives (or additives). Microsoft is only just jumping on the ad bandwagon and trying to slap them everywhere they can. I can imagine Microsoft putting ads into Office soon and alienating its users, while Google moves on to something even more profitable (probably a % of subscription services, micro-paid for from your mobile contract or somesuch).
but Microsoft generally fails at anything outside its core competency of operating systems and office suites.
oh, you beat me to it :)
but you missed one important thing: developers. There is a very good reason MS courts them so much, and its something Google would do well to look at.
I'm still looking forward to the collapse of all this noise towards the end of Q4 2012.
Me too. By then Nokia will have perfected their 'mobile computing devices' and we'll all be thinking how crap those old smartphones were, with our new mini-PC we dock at our desks or to our TVs. Times, they are a-changing, the old desktop PC dinosaur is dead, it just doesn't realise it yet.
Published alongside this story, under the same byline, is a related piece on the collusion of Microsoft lawyers with corrupt Russian police in extorting money from the targets of software piracy investigations
you missed that bit from the summary, let alone TFA.
All I know is that when MS decided to check on us if we had enough licences (we didn't, of course, their convoluted licence agreements saw to that) they made us hire an audit company to come in and check us out - so they made us pay to audit ourselves for Microsoft's benefit.
Much as I think we should be buying the correct number of licences (that way management can see how expensive MS stuff is, rather than thinking all's fine when the company is awash with unlicenced installs), I do disagreee that a company should pay to audit itself.
I doubt that.. recall James Gosling talking about how he and colleagues at Sun had a competition to file the most ridiculous patent applications? He "invented" the light switch, and he says it was pretty dull in comparison to the others.
not just that, but Google TV is based on... Android. I guess all TVs will have to come with cameras and GPS too :)
Ars Technica has a article about it, they say that Google gives out varying answers depending who you talk to.
One one hand, we have a radically new set-top form factor that will supposedly run Android applications, and on the other hand, we have a Google product director saying that Android isn't a good fit for non-smartphone devices and that those devices may pose insurmountable application compatibility challenges in some cases.
I reckon this will quickly be a non-story in the end. Someone from Google will provide the necessary foot to the bum of the marketing department and all will be well.
just 2 points:
* all those sales guys will be taking their 'work PCs' home with them, on the road, from hotel rooms etc. That's exactly what they want. That's the 'killer feature' mobile devices provide. For security... well, apps'll have to be "cloud enabled" or something, with remote lock-out. that should fix the security problems - by not allowing the device access to anything. Stop thinking like these things are PCs running Windows with everything on the local HDD and a bit of a network connection.
* I meant "that's covered" as anything the netbook does, a smartphone/pad can do too. Users will only notice an improved user experience, so they're not likely to have a problem shifting to the new devices. Except they won't get Windows, which I don't think they'll mind this time round.
I'm thinking of the marketplace these would be targetted at.
Sure, hard-core gamerz will not want one if it doesn't run the absolute latest super-graphics games that require 2 PSUs and 4 Gfx cards for their neon-light equipped gaming rigz. but, ignoring them....
My account manager always has his (old) smartphone glued to his ear when i see him. And he uses his PC for email and the odd word document. That's easily replaced with a smartphone, one that could connect to a big monitor and keyboard while still being portable would be perfect for him - and the rest of the sales and managerial types out there. That's a good 50% of all PC sales I think.
The rest of home users want something that lets them do 'netbook' style stuff - web, email, text, social networks, youtube. Well, that's covered and I think PC sales are dropping for home users already.
Business users - again, most of them do email, web and some odd LoB apps. The latter are a problem, unless they become web-apps, which is where the smart money is going nowadays (although that tends to be for easy deployment and management of the apps), once entirely webapps, there's not reason most people need a PC at all.
I think the future is for mobile devices, not PCs. The dinosaur that is Microsoft is dead, its just that the signals havn't reached its brain yet. Just like IBM many years ago, and others since.
Sod OWA, there's only 1 good use for it: DavMail
this is an app that sits on your PC acting as a gateway between OWA and Thunderbird (and Lightning if you want to use your Outlook calendar too). It can also run on a server and act as that gateway for all users on your network.
The only thing you miss is the 'push' email as its sent, but I find my corporate Outlook/Exchange environment takes a good while to transmit emails across the firewalls anyway so its no loss that you have to (automatically, in the background) poll for new mail regularly.
since Nokia started the Lighthouse project, nicely hosted on code.google.com :)
See: http://tamss60.tamoggemon.com/2010/03/18/qt-on-android-the-bogdan-vatra-interview/
and instructions for how to do it.
if you want to see something really cool, check out the Image Swirl search. Its no so much a bit of eye candy as is an associative grouping of search results - for images. Unfortunately, it uses Flash, but give it a go - click a group result and you'll see. Hopefully they'll implement this as js if it comes out of the labs.
no idea, sorry. It will change according to the country anyway. Usually its government datasets, plus 'yellow pages' type data from commercial companies.
most PoI are created from external data sources, not entered by hand. So your beef is with the companies that supply that data. The problem with manually modifying them is that there are a lot of them, and you'd so quickly build up a backlog longer than anyone could manage. Maybe they could get an automated system in place, where enough people who update the same POI 'validate' their own work and have the update accepted would work.
From what I know, the Microsoft offering is not feature complete, a bit like their free-text search indexing in SQL server, its always a step behind Oracle's. I know we use Oracle for its spatial capabilities because the SQL server doesn't quite cut it for the really cool stuff.
For free versions - MySQL has spatial in it for some time. That's still free, and hopefully Oracle will improve the capabilities if only to annoy MS and capture the market that you represent - the 'we want it free until we have to buy something, and then that'll probably be Oracle' segment.