Why are you starting your comment with "Except"? Normally that means you're contradicting the comment you're responding to, but in this case it seems that you're adding useless information that doesn't add to the topic or in any way invalidate the point you're responding to.
He's saying that if you install an unauthorized, unsupported, version of iOS on your phone, using a set of convoluted hacks, you can run applications that were developed specifically for people who have installed an unauthorized, unsupported, version of iOS on their phones, using a set of convoluted hacks. Unlike the Droid X, where you can't install an unauthorized, unsupported, operating system on your phone, and so can only install any application you want.
Both the Droid X and iPhone are seriously screwed up, but if I were forced to choose, I'd... well, if I can get a UMTS version, I'd go with the "Droid X". Urgh. Verizon. "It's the Network! (...that makes you sound like you're wearing a ball gag when you're talking.)"
This isn't the first Android phone Motorola has done something entirely against the spirit of open platforms to either. For AT&T, they crippled the Backflip, such that it can only load software from the Android Market. (The AT&T Backflip is, in general, a bad phone reportedly anyway, it has virtually all of the Google software replaced with relatively ugly AT&T equivalents for example.)
I've said it before and I'll say it again: mobile phone makers are whores.
Been a long time since I had a phone from any manufacturer I didn't have a problem with...
I'm surprised so many Android phone makers are leaping onto the lock-down bandwagon this early on. These are the early days of Android, where a huge amount of influence comes from the tech community. The inevitable result of this kind of thing is that word of mouth, as well as reviews on virtually all of the phone blogs, is going to be resoundingly negative no matter how good the Droid X actually is.
Well, it's more of a Motorola issue than an Android issue. Just because an operating system is open doesn't mean the corporation that installed it isn't going to be a jackass.
It's not as if there's no precedent for this. There's a certain operating system based upon open source components from Mach, FreeBSD, GNU, and KDE, which is somewhat infamous for being closed. At least you can load and run your own programs onto the Droid X, even if you can't update the operating system to your own version.
Google is the new Microsoft - not the 1990s evil Microsoft, but the 1980s "good" Microsoft. While Apple was locking down Mac OS (albeit never to the same extent they are the iPhone, but nonetheless preventing it from running on open hardware, adopting proprietary protocols and hardware for the Macintosh platform, suing companies like DR who produced anything remotely similar, etc), Microsoft was putting out a more powerful system, albeit with some rough edges on the user interface, that was comparatively open and available to anyone who wanted it.
And likewise we're seeing Android, a technically superior operating system that's also open, but at the cost of a rougher user interface, eating Apple's lunch. The only major difference between then and now is the dramatic extent to which the Apple platform is locked down, and the non-Apple platform is open.
I'd hope that they'd not repeat the same mistakes, and learn from the fact that Apple's greatest growth came at a time during the first decade of Jobs where Apple took unprecedented steps to adopt open hardware and standards, but I'm just not seeing it.
Hyperbole is fun, but hardly part of an objective discussion.
I don't think you understood the reference. Steven Jobs, in one of his recent infamous emails, made the comment "Folks who want porn can buy and [sic] Android phone." (http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/04/steve-jobs-porn/) The GP was almost certainly referring to that.
Nobody (except, apparently, Steve Jobs) is unaware of the porn-capable web browser installed on every iPhone.
There was a brief period in the early part of this decade where Apple was:
Contributing new things to open source (Darwin's kernel, a radically refactored KHTML, etc)
Moving away from proprietary standards and towards open standards (from Sorensen to H.264, for example)
Designing genuinely better UIs for a variety of objects from MP3 players to desktops
Contributing to functionality and the "just works" mindset
They've slowly moved away from all of that, while speaking in doublespeak, "We don't want people using proprietary Flash! We want people using open standards like HTML5 (but as HTML5 will never actually do the things you use Flash for, what we actually are saying is we want you to use Quicktime, but we'll never say the "Q" word in public)"; "We believe in a phone that just works! Which is why we've invented a phone that's lousy at being a phone, and whose first iteration requires plugging into a computer and installing software to activate, rather than just inserting your SIM card like all other GSM phones", "We're coming out with a Smartphone! Note that it doesn't let you program it. No. You can run apps on it, but only if they're published by us.", etc, etc.
Moved back to GNU/Linux four years ago. I don't regret it for a second. Thank you Mark Shuttleworth. And thank you Google for doing what you can to fix the touchscreen phone concept, so we might actually get a chance to see if it's a viable concept or not.
That's because they're not, whereas significant parts of the media and various powerful political and industrial concerns are running smear campaigns against scientists who publish data that supports the AGW theory.
Surely, after "Climategate", you're not denying that there is a significant campaign against climate scientists?
The UK had Sky and British Satellite Broadcasting, satellite TV systems that, like the digital radio systems, have proven to be wildly unpopular.... the developers/operators of the two systems had to merge just to keep afloat.
Not a similar example.
Sky started with an already established satellite system, but suffered early issues establishing itself against the established, high quality, television networks in the UK. BSB, on the other hand, was in a more similar position to Sirius/XM, adopting an entirely new technology, launching its own satellites, and attempting to compete on the basis of quality. In practical terms, BSB no longer exists - it was "merged" with Sky, but the result was a renamed Sky with a lot more capital. BSB's satellites were decommissioned. And Sky itself continued to hemorrhage cash for several years until cable, not satellite, saved its ass.
The reason the two satellite radio operators nearly went under was because they went into a few years of trying to outspend each other on premium content and marketing
So does the combined operator no longer spend as much on premium content and marketing as one or other of the originals? I somehow doubt that.
The reason they were both failing was that there wasn't room in the market for two operators. There wasn't room in the market for two operators because the technology and concept simply wasn't popular enough. By merging, they can change two operators into one, halving their costs, and therefore being more capable of supporting the limited market that they're supporting.
Meanwhile, the original point stands. The actual technologies that Sirius and XM were launched on is wildly unpopular. The operator's Internet streaming services are, in practice, much more popular than the satellite services they were originally formed to create. The reason the two operators have survived is because they merged, and because they made the sensible decision to move away from satellite exclusivity.
J2ME doesn't cut it, you're still facing five different platforms with five different UIs that you'll have to customize the UI for. While it's easy to write a MIDP app that provides a native interface across multiple keypad phones, the others you mention are substantially different enough from one another for writing one UI to be a good solution.
J2ME, Blackberry, and Android are Java in the same way as GNU/Linux, Windows, and Mac OS are all "C". Java is a overloaded term that is used in some instances to mean the Sun Java framework, and in other cases the Java language. In Android's case, the Sun Java framework isn't a part of the system. You can't write an app in Java, and expect it to work under all the above platforms without writing the same kind of glue that you have to do if you want to write, say, an application in C for Mac OS X, Windows, GNU/Linux, and AmigaOS. And again, in practice, you have to write different UIs for each of the different platforms.
I think it'd be worth Sun/Oracle's while (or rather worth our while) putting together a "J2ME/TS" for touchscreen phones, that abstracts the touchscreen UIs so programmers can easily put together applications that work on all these platforms. That said, they're up against some big hurdles. There's no question they can release the stub code for Android and Symbian, and Blackberry would probably adopt it, but the list of platforms above is notable for the absence of two major players, iOS and webOS, neither of which are - for different reasons - going to be particularly third party development system friendly.
No, sorry, but getting as close as possible to the native UI with MIDP doesn't cut it. Smartphones make the real OS UI controls available to their programmers, in addition to lots of access to things that MIDP does not allow.
I don't think you have the slightest clue what you're talking about. Do you have any idea how the UI works on a keypad phone? What aspects of the UI are not accessible from MIDP? What parts of the phone are not accessible from a J2ME app running in a MIDP system? And don't give me an example of one phone that has a particular feature that there's no API for, because you'll find that on every phone - Apple is infamous for rejecting apps because an app is using a feature it shouldn't. And the diversity of Android handsets means that virtually all of them have features that Android's native APIs don't support, and frequently aren't supported in a way accessible to apps willing to use custom APIs too.
Even if it were within Apple's power to redefine the term, they did no such thing. For the first year of it's life, when the iPhone had no SDK available, Apple just called the iPhone a phone. I did a search of the Apple website at the time and there was no mention of "smartphone" anywhere.
Steve Jobs called it a "Smartphone" at the original announcement. The media willingly went along with the term after all. I have no idea why you weren't able to find the term on Apple.com, but Apple called it a Smartphone from day #1.
As soon as they become a way for small companies to take money away from them, slow down their time to market, or exclude them from certain areas, they become a liability.
They've ALWAYS been a way for "small companies" to take money away from them, slow down their time to market, or exclude them from certain areas, they become a liability. This hasn't changed any of these company's attitudes to patents one jot. In fact, Microsoft, for example, has gone from being fundamentally against software patents, as it was during the eighties, to wholeheartedly gung ho about them, despite the fact Microsoft has suffered a string of high profile, and incredibly expensive, patent infringement losses.
None of these companies are going to turn around and change their mind on the subject because of NTP. They've always known NTP was out there, ready to sue, and they're going to see whatever happens as a win, regardless of whether they end up paying money to NTP or not. If NTP loses, but does so over issues that do not undermine the system as a whole, then they walk away without paying anything. If NTP wins, then the patent system is strengthened and the companies involved see the payments to NTP not as money going to a troll, but money well spent on strengthening a system that ultimately makes things difficult for competitors.
GSM's a bad example. The system was developed "by the government", but only in the sense that the government owned the industry that developed it at the time (this was during/slightly before the big wave of privatizations.) Specifically, GSM started off as a France Telecom project, and was subsequently adopted by the EC/EU after it had already gotten to a point of being clearly a good idea. At that point, it was developed by a consortium of industries, including significant involvement by private groups like Nokia and Ericsson.
This isn't to say that I don't disagree with the ridiculous Tea Partyish crap in the article summary. The US system, HD Radio, is entirely privately developed, and is a big piece of crap that virtually everyone who's tried it has no desire to stick with. As others mention, FM is a highly robust system whose sole disadvantage over the digital systems is frequency use. But that "disadvantage" brings us signals that don't drop out in areas with slightly poorer reception.
The US also has Sirius/XM, Satellite radio systems that, like the digital radio systems, have proven to be wildly unpopular. Again, these systems were not developed by any governments. The developers/operators of the two systems have had to merge just to keep afloat, and last I heard more people were using them over the Internet than via the airwaves.
Personally I think a system that permits more radio choices is a good thing, but the digital systems thus far are not particularly good. It's not that they were developed by governments.
What is this "exact same Android phone" you speak of? I spent the last few weeks investigating upgrades to our phones in this household, and the one thing I can safely say is that the Android phones were a pretty diverse lot, size, camera, keyboard or lack of it, processing power, screen quality, camera quality, camera capabilities, styles, and, oh, prices too. The MyTouch Slide we eventually went for even has significant changes to the look and feel of the operating system, not just in terms of (somewhat unnecessary) T-Mobile crap, but also in terms of a revamped voice control interface (which is crap, but that's another story.)
If Nokia wants to make an Android phone and wants to distinguish it from other Android phones, they'd certainly not have a problem in doing so. There's also no reason whatsoever for them to build an iOS phone: all they'd be doing is creating a closed, proprietary, system when they could produce something just as capable and user friendly with an open architecture. Why waste money licensing iOS because of minor UI differences, when it's perfectly within your abilities to make changes to, say, Android or Maemo, that'll change the UI to whatever you want it to be?
I don't necessarily propose Nokia do Android, not because it's a bad choice, but because choice is good, and it'd be nice to see a mobile operator that once-upon-a-time was renowned for its style, come up with an alternative to webOS and Android, but suggesting iOS? Really? We don't need more iPhones. Nokia's problem is that both of its operating systems, Symbian and Maemo, have the same issues as iOS, not that they're not like iOS enough.
With the possible, probably temporary if so, exception of Google, virtually all of these companies love patents. They're not going to do anything that'd undermine the patent system, even if it means dealing with the occasional patent troll. And if one of them "steps out of line", the others will actually do what they can behind the scenes to undermine any efforts that would damage the patent process as part of it.
Sure, they'll all defend themselves against this patent. But not as wholeheartedly as many would assume or like. Suing the patent office? Don't make me laugh.
Kinda like America's "Post Office" and "Amtrak". Although even in America, if you claimed that having to buy stamps or train tickets in exchange for mail delivery or rail passage constituted "taxation", you'd be laughed at.
Not sure about that. MIDP apps do tend to look and feel like other phone components on most of the phones I've used them on. On some phones the means to start them is centralized (though can be circumvented by setting up a shortcut), but others just shove them in as more menu options under, say, the Office, section. The apps themselves almost always have interfaces virtually identical to the native system unless the programmer has chosen to do otherwise. The major disadvantage of MIDP is that you're at the mercy of the carriers being fascists and the manufacturers being whores - I've had at least one phone where MIDP applets weren't allowed to access the Internet, for example. But "native look and feel"? MIDP does that pretty well, actually. How can it not? The keypad-phone UI is almost wholly standardized now, with the differences between manufacturers being limited to the layout the menus, and what the cursor keys do when no menu is displayed.
The difference between a Smartphone and a Featurephone used to be that a Smartphone was programmable by the user. Since phones with keypads started to become more capable, and Apple redefined the term when it announced the iPhone, the term "Smartphone" became a phone that's essentially controlled by a touchpad, with the previous distinction completely blown away. Apple's original iPhone was referred to as a Smartphone even in the early days when Apple was telling developers that the only API on it was the web and had no intention of providing native app support. The irony was that the iPhone, in those days, was less programmable than the average Motorola flip phone.
If I were in the UK government's shoes, I'd concentrate on putting together a three level website, a basic WAP version for simple keypad operated phones, a more advanced version optimized for touchscreen phones, and a desktop version. These make more sense than writing "apps" for MIDP, Symbian (keypad), Symbian (communicator type phones), Android, webOS, Blackberry, iOS (if you get permission), and BREW (Ha ha! Just kidding!)
The sad part is that this is mostly true - relative to the other phone makers.
Virtually every Nokia handset has a number of permissions that enable and disable features of the phone, that are set or unset by the carriers when they're sold. As an example, my old (T-Mobile branded) Nokia 6085 has a crippled J2ME, that (believe it or not) doesn't allow apps to have access to the Internet. Various settings parts of the phone relating to APNs cannot be changed by the user. Essentially, unlocked, it's a voice/text messaging phone when given a non-T-Mobile SIM unless it's reflashed with hacked firmware.
Yes, Nokia tends to ship unlocked cellphones outside of the US (but so do most manufacturers), but within the US, short of ordering from a relatively limited selection from Nokia themselves, their phones are carrier locked, branded, and usually crippled in some way.
Nokia is a traditional mobile phone maker. They make phones they expect to sell to carriers, and they offer those carriers options they really shouldn't be. And so they've had trouble putting together a system that's designed, from the start, to be an open ecosystem. Maemo is waiting for mobile CPUs to increase in power and reduce in price, and has arguably missed the boat. And Symbian has an awkward architecture requiring the locked down aspects of the phone be hardware separated from the OS, or else phones be limited to running screened apps.
I don't think Nokia would have gotten into that state of mind if it wasn't for the relationship its allowed itself to have with carriers for the last few years. And, to be fair, at least they're trying. Motorola has slapped together MOTOMAGX for its voice phones, largely as a replacement for the somewhat long in the tooth custom OS thing they've had around for years, but I suspect they jumped on the Android platform with a sense of relief that someone had bolted something together that will work. The other operators, for the most part, don't even appear to have gotten that far, but ironically that means they're benefiting from the post iPhone fall out in a way Nokia isn't, simply because they haven't invested enormously in entrenched platforms that were going in entirely the wrong direction.
Well, J2ME isn't really a native interface, it's something that integrates awkwardly into Symbian and isn't what you'd want to use if you want to develop a first class Symbian app.
Nokia's kind of missed the boat with a lot of this. It's so used to the notion of developing technologies that can be locked down and crippled by its "customers" (the carriers) that it's completely failed to recognize the damage such acts have done to its own products. And as such it never saw the problem with the app model it uses, as with the exception of phones that have a clear separation of the phone hardware from the "computer" (such as in the 9xxxx series), only "approved" apps will ever run anyway. Unlike Apple, Nokia doesn't have some overarching philosophy that requires the locking down, it's just let decades of whoring itself to the mobile networks ensure it ends up with some very bad technology decisions.
I've finally had a real chance to play with "real" Android in the last few days (a T-Mobile myTouch Slide. Yum) and I have to say, after experience of both Maemo and (at various stages) Symbian, Nokia needs to take a major step back and ask whether it really has the right technologies under development. I think Google and Palm really have the right idea here, and Nokia will hopefully learn from them.
Nokia's "smartphones" (I hate that term, ever since Jobs redefined it to mean "Locked down phone that only runs software approved by the manufacturer" - Nokia has produced smartphones using the original definition, a phone that includes an open architecture pocketable computer, since the Nokia 9000) have run Symbian or its direct predecessors since the Nokia 9290. The OS has its roots in an OS developed originally for the Psion PDAs. The surprise, in many ways, is that it's used for bare bones phones, as its somewhat overengineered for such tasks.
I can't say I particularly like the environment, but to argue that it's unsuited, or unused, for smartphones is to demonstrate a certain amount of ignorance of the history of the OS. Arguably it's on a par with iOS in terms of capabilities, if not slightly more powerful, but lacking the standardized and high quality user interface of the latter. The lack of a requirement for apps to be managed code puts it slightly behind Android.
W-CDMA is not the same thing as "CDMA" the mobile phone standard. W-CDMA is the 3G GSM (UMTS) air interface. It's what AT&T uses for 3G. HSDPA/HSUPA/HSPA+ are enhanced versions of W-CDMA.
Verizon uses the entirely incompatible CDMA2000 system. CDMA2000 is used in other countries, but not nearly to the same extent as GSM/UMTS. Qualcomm, CDMA2000's major sponsor, is no longer working on upgrading it to 4G standards, throwing its lot in with the GSM "LTE" system instead.
So no, there isn't a "CDMA" (in the sense of the mobile phone standard) version of the iPhone, any more than there was a D-AMPS version of the iPhone back when it was 2G.
Not exactly. LTE has always been a migration path from the current voice+data systems, but because it implements everything over IP many people (including the carriers themselves) have assumed it's a "data" thing. This got ridiculous a few months ago when the game of telephone resulted in reporters seriously claiming that the carriers had suddenly got into a panic because "LTE had no voice support". Of course LTE has voice support! It's called IMS.
The funny thing is that the standards for this were actually created back when 3G UMTS was being standardized, and they weren't implemented because UMTS's separate voice channels, and poor bandwidth and latency on the data side, made the standard less than useful in practice - over 3G.
The other funny bit is that part the intention behind going for LTE was to separate the entire stack from the air interface technology, something UMTS was supposed to do but ended up screwing up. A phone implementing a full LTE stack (including IMS), that additionally supports, say, WiMAX, should be able to switch a voice call seamlessly between the two if the phone starts roaming. And, of course, this system works really well when you start sticking W-CDMA and CDMA2000 radios in the same phone...
Anyone who's known Tom for a while knows why she posts under those names. If you'd done even a few seconds of research you'd have found that out by yourself.
If I were you, I'd stop, right now, before you dig yourself into a deeper hole. Sending Tom and myself private emails inviting us to join in on an attack on a mutual friend on the basis of an extremely mis-characterized argument is completely out of order, especially when combined with an attack on Clone's privacy.
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Why are you starting your comment with "Except"? Normally that means you're contradicting the comment you're responding to, but in this case it seems that you're adding useless information that doesn't add to the topic or in any way invalidate the point you're responding to.
He's saying that if you install an unauthorized, unsupported, version of iOS on your phone, using a set of convoluted hacks, you can run applications that were developed specifically for people who have installed an unauthorized, unsupported, version of iOS on their phones, using a set of convoluted hacks. Unlike the Droid X, where you can't install an unauthorized, unsupported, operating system on your phone, and so can only install any application you want.
Both the Droid X and iPhone are seriously screwed up, but if I were forced to choose, I'd... well, if I can get a UMTS version, I'd go with the "Droid X". Urgh. Verizon. "It's the Network! (...that makes you sound like you're wearing a ball gag when you're talking.)"
This isn't the first Android phone Motorola has done something entirely against the spirit of open platforms to either. For AT&T, they crippled the Backflip, such that it can only load software from the Android Market. (The AT&T Backflip is, in general, a bad phone reportedly anyway, it has virtually all of the Google software replaced with relatively ugly AT&T equivalents for example.)
I've said it before and I'll say it again: mobile phone makers are whores.
Been a long time since I had a phone from any manufacturer I didn't have a problem with...
I'm surprised so many Android phone makers are leaping onto the lock-down bandwagon this early on. These are the early days of Android, where a huge amount of influence comes from the tech community. The inevitable result of this kind of thing is that word of mouth, as well as reviews on virtually all of the phone blogs, is going to be resoundingly negative no matter how good the Droid X actually is.
Well, it's more of a Motorola issue than an Android issue. Just because an operating system is open doesn't mean the corporation that installed it isn't going to be a jackass.
It's not as if there's no precedent for this. There's a certain operating system based upon open source components from Mach, FreeBSD, GNU, and KDE, which is somewhat infamous for being closed. At least you can load and run your own programs onto the Droid X, even if you can't update the operating system to your own version.
Google is the new Microsoft - not the 1990s evil Microsoft, but the 1980s "good" Microsoft. While Apple was locking down Mac OS (albeit never to the same extent they are the iPhone, but nonetheless preventing it from running on open hardware, adopting proprietary protocols and hardware for the Macintosh platform, suing companies like DR who produced anything remotely similar, etc), Microsoft was putting out a more powerful system, albeit with some rough edges on the user interface, that was comparatively open and available to anyone who wanted it.
And likewise we're seeing Android, a technically superior operating system that's also open, but at the cost of a rougher user interface, eating Apple's lunch. The only major difference between then and now is the dramatic extent to which the Apple platform is locked down, and the non-Apple platform is open.
I'd hope that they'd not repeat the same mistakes, and learn from the fact that Apple's greatest growth came at a time during the first decade of Jobs where Apple took unprecedented steps to adopt open hardware and standards, but I'm just not seeing it.
I don't think you understood the reference. Steven Jobs, in one of his recent infamous emails, made the comment "Folks who want porn can buy and [sic] Android phone." (http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/04/steve-jobs-porn/) The GP was almost certainly referring to that.
Nobody (except, apparently, Steve Jobs) is unaware of the porn-capable web browser installed on every iPhone.
There was a brief period in the early part of this decade where Apple was:
They've slowly moved away from all of that, while speaking in doublespeak, "We don't want people using proprietary Flash! We want people using open standards like HTML5 (but as HTML5 will never actually do the things you use Flash for, what we actually are saying is we want you to use Quicktime, but we'll never say the "Q" word in public)"; "We believe in a phone that just works! Which is why we've invented a phone that's lousy at being a phone, and whose first iteration requires plugging into a computer and installing software to activate, rather than just inserting your SIM card like all other GSM phones", "We're coming out with a Smartphone! Note that it doesn't let you program it. No. You can run apps on it, but only if they're published by us.", etc, etc.
Moved back to GNU/Linux four years ago. I don't regret it for a second. Thank you Mark Shuttleworth. And thank you Google for doing what you can to fix the touchscreen phone concept, so we might actually get a chance to see if it's a viable concept or not.
That's because they're not, whereas significant parts of the media and various powerful political and industrial concerns are running smear campaigns against scientists who publish data that supports the AGW theory.
Surely, after "Climategate", you're not denying that there is a significant campaign against climate scientists?
Not a similar example.
Sky started with an already established satellite system, but suffered early issues establishing itself against the established, high quality, television networks in the UK. BSB, on the other hand, was in a more similar position to Sirius/XM, adopting an entirely new technology, launching its own satellites, and attempting to compete on the basis of quality. In practical terms, BSB no longer exists - it was "merged" with Sky, but the result was a renamed Sky with a lot more capital. BSB's satellites were decommissioned. And Sky itself continued to hemorrhage cash for several years until cable, not satellite, saved its ass.
So does the combined operator no longer spend as much on premium content and marketing as one or other of the originals? I somehow doubt that.
The reason they were both failing was that there wasn't room in the market for two operators. There wasn't room in the market for two operators because the technology and concept simply wasn't popular enough. By merging, they can change two operators into one, halving their costs, and therefore being more capable of supporting the limited market that they're supporting.
Meanwhile, the original point stands. The actual technologies that Sirius and XM were launched on is wildly unpopular. The operator's Internet streaming services are, in practice, much more popular than the satellite services they were originally formed to create. The reason the two operators have survived is because they merged, and because they made the sensible decision to move away from satellite exclusivity.
J2ME doesn't cut it, you're still facing five different platforms with five different UIs that you'll have to customize the UI for. While it's easy to write a MIDP app that provides a native interface across multiple keypad phones, the others you mention are substantially different enough from one another for writing one UI to be a good solution.
J2ME, Blackberry, and Android are Java in the same way as GNU/Linux, Windows, and Mac OS are all "C". Java is a overloaded term that is used in some instances to mean the Sun Java framework, and in other cases the Java language. In Android's case, the Sun Java framework isn't a part of the system. You can't write an app in Java, and expect it to work under all the above platforms without writing the same kind of glue that you have to do if you want to write, say, an application in C for Mac OS X, Windows, GNU/Linux, and AmigaOS. And again, in practice, you have to write different UIs for each of the different platforms.
I think it'd be worth Sun/Oracle's while (or rather worth our while) putting together a "J2ME/TS" for touchscreen phones, that abstracts the touchscreen UIs so programmers can easily put together applications that work on all these platforms. That said, they're up against some big hurdles. There's no question they can release the stub code for Android and Symbian, and Blackberry would probably adopt it, but the list of platforms above is notable for the absence of two major players, iOS and webOS, neither of which are - for different reasons - going to be particularly third party development system friendly.
I don't think you have the slightest clue what you're talking about. Do you have any idea how the UI works on a keypad phone? What aspects of the UI are not accessible from MIDP? What parts of the phone are not accessible from a J2ME app running in a MIDP system? And don't give me an example of one phone that has a particular feature that there's no API for, because you'll find that on every phone - Apple is infamous for rejecting apps because an app is using a feature it shouldn't. And the diversity of Android handsets means that virtually all of them have features that Android's native APIs don't support, and frequently aren't supported in a way accessible to apps willing to use custom APIs too.
Steve Jobs called it a "Smartphone" at the original announcement. The media willingly went along with the term after all. I have no idea why you weren't able to find the term on Apple.com, but Apple called it a Smartphone from day #1.
They've ALWAYS been a way for "small companies" to take money away from them, slow down their time to market, or exclude them from certain areas, they become a liability. This hasn't changed any of these company's attitudes to patents one jot. In fact, Microsoft, for example, has gone from being fundamentally against software patents, as it was during the eighties, to wholeheartedly gung ho about them, despite the fact Microsoft has suffered a string of high profile, and incredibly expensive, patent infringement losses.
None of these companies are going to turn around and change their mind on the subject because of NTP. They've always known NTP was out there, ready to sue, and they're going to see whatever happens as a win, regardless of whether they end up paying money to NTP or not. If NTP loses, but does so over issues that do not undermine the system as a whole, then they walk away without paying anything. If NTP wins, then the patent system is strengthened and the companies involved see the payments to NTP not as money going to a troll, but money well spent on strengthening a system that ultimately makes things difficult for competitors.
GSM's a bad example. The system was developed "by the government", but only in the sense that the government owned the industry that developed it at the time (this was during/slightly before the big wave of privatizations.) Specifically, GSM started off as a France Telecom project, and was subsequently adopted by the EC/EU after it had already gotten to a point of being clearly a good idea. At that point, it was developed by a consortium of industries, including significant involvement by private groups like Nokia and Ericsson.
This isn't to say that I don't disagree with the ridiculous Tea Partyish crap in the article summary. The US system, HD Radio, is entirely privately developed, and is a big piece of crap that virtually everyone who's tried it has no desire to stick with. As others mention, FM is a highly robust system whose sole disadvantage over the digital systems is frequency use. But that "disadvantage" brings us signals that don't drop out in areas with slightly poorer reception.
The US also has Sirius/XM, Satellite radio systems that, like the digital radio systems, have proven to be wildly unpopular. Again, these systems were not developed by any governments. The developers/operators of the two systems have had to merge just to keep afloat, and last I heard more people were using them over the Internet than via the airwaves.
Personally I think a system that permits more radio choices is a good thing, but the digital systems thus far are not particularly good. It's not that they were developed by governments.
And let's not forget battery life...
What is this "exact same Android phone" you speak of? I spent the last few weeks investigating upgrades to our phones in this household, and the one thing I can safely say is that the Android phones were a pretty diverse lot, size, camera, keyboard or lack of it, processing power, screen quality, camera quality, camera capabilities, styles, and, oh, prices too. The MyTouch Slide we eventually went for even has significant changes to the look and feel of the operating system, not just in terms of (somewhat unnecessary) T-Mobile crap, but also in terms of a revamped voice control interface (which is crap, but that's another story.)
If Nokia wants to make an Android phone and wants to distinguish it from other Android phones, they'd certainly not have a problem in doing so. There's also no reason whatsoever for them to build an iOS phone: all they'd be doing is creating a closed, proprietary, system when they could produce something just as capable and user friendly with an open architecture. Why waste money licensing iOS because of minor UI differences, when it's perfectly within your abilities to make changes to, say, Android or Maemo, that'll change the UI to whatever you want it to be?
I don't necessarily propose Nokia do Android, not because it's a bad choice, but because choice is good, and it'd be nice to see a mobile operator that once-upon-a-time was renowned for its style, come up with an alternative to webOS and Android, but suggesting iOS? Really? We don't need more iPhones. Nokia's problem is that both of its operating systems, Symbian and Maemo, have the same issues as iOS, not that they're not like iOS enough.
With the possible, probably temporary if so, exception of Google, virtually all of these companies love patents. They're not going to do anything that'd undermine the patent system, even if it means dealing with the occasional patent troll. And if one of them "steps out of line", the others will actually do what they can behind the scenes to undermine any efforts that would damage the patent process as part of it.
Sure, they'll all defend themselves against this patent. But not as wholeheartedly as many would assume or like. Suing the patent office? Don't make me laugh.
Kinda like America's "Post Office" and "Amtrak". Although even in America, if you claimed that having to buy stamps or train tickets in exchange for mail delivery or rail passage constituted "taxation", you'd be laughed at.
Not sure about that. MIDP apps do tend to look and feel like other phone components on most of the phones I've used them on. On some phones the means to start them is centralized (though can be circumvented by setting up a shortcut), but others just shove them in as more menu options under, say, the Office, section. The apps themselves almost always have interfaces virtually identical to the native system unless the programmer has chosen to do otherwise. The major disadvantage of MIDP is that you're at the mercy of the carriers being fascists and the manufacturers being whores - I've had at least one phone where MIDP applets weren't allowed to access the Internet, for example. But "native look and feel"? MIDP does that pretty well, actually. How can it not? The keypad-phone UI is almost wholly standardized now, with the differences between manufacturers being limited to the layout the menus, and what the cursor keys do when no menu is displayed.
The difference between a Smartphone and a Featurephone used to be that a Smartphone was programmable by the user. Since phones with keypads started to become more capable, and Apple redefined the term when it announced the iPhone, the term "Smartphone" became a phone that's essentially controlled by a touchpad, with the previous distinction completely blown away. Apple's original iPhone was referred to as a Smartphone even in the early days when Apple was telling developers that the only API on it was the web and had no intention of providing native app support. The irony was that the iPhone, in those days, was less programmable than the average Motorola flip phone.
If I were in the UK government's shoes, I'd concentrate on putting together a three level website, a basic WAP version for simple keypad operated phones, a more advanced version optimized for touchscreen phones, and a desktop version. These make more sense than writing "apps" for MIDP, Symbian (keypad), Symbian (communicator type phones), Android, webOS, Blackberry, iOS (if you get permission), and BREW (Ha ha! Just kidding!)
The sad part is that this is mostly true - relative to the other phone makers.
Virtually every Nokia handset has a number of permissions that enable and disable features of the phone, that are set or unset by the carriers when they're sold. As an example, my old (T-Mobile branded) Nokia 6085 has a crippled J2ME, that (believe it or not) doesn't allow apps to have access to the Internet. Various settings parts of the phone relating to APNs cannot be changed by the user. Essentially, unlocked, it's a voice/text messaging phone when given a non-T-Mobile SIM unless it's reflashed with hacked firmware.
Yes, Nokia tends to ship unlocked cellphones outside of the US (but so do most manufacturers), but within the US, short of ordering from a relatively limited selection from Nokia themselves, their phones are carrier locked, branded, and usually crippled in some way.
Nokia is a traditional mobile phone maker. They make phones they expect to sell to carriers, and they offer those carriers options they really shouldn't be. And so they've had trouble putting together a system that's designed, from the start, to be an open ecosystem. Maemo is waiting for mobile CPUs to increase in power and reduce in price, and has arguably missed the boat. And Symbian has an awkward architecture requiring the locked down aspects of the phone be hardware separated from the OS, or else phones be limited to running screened apps.
I don't think Nokia would have gotten into that state of mind if it wasn't for the relationship its allowed itself to have with carriers for the last few years. And, to be fair, at least they're trying. Motorola has slapped together MOTOMAGX for its voice phones, largely as a replacement for the somewhat long in the tooth custom OS thing they've had around for years, but I suspect they jumped on the Android platform with a sense of relief that someone had bolted something together that will work. The other operators, for the most part, don't even appear to have gotten that far, but ironically that means they're benefiting from the post iPhone fall out in a way Nokia isn't, simply because they haven't invested enormously in entrenched platforms that were going in entirely the wrong direction.
Well, J2ME isn't really a native interface, it's something that integrates awkwardly into Symbian and isn't what you'd want to use if you want to develop a first class Symbian app.
Nokia's kind of missed the boat with a lot of this. It's so used to the notion of developing technologies that can be locked down and crippled by its "customers" (the carriers) that it's completely failed to recognize the damage such acts have done to its own products. And as such it never saw the problem with the app model it uses, as with the exception of phones that have a clear separation of the phone hardware from the "computer" (such as in the 9xxxx series), only "approved" apps will ever run anyway. Unlike Apple, Nokia doesn't have some overarching philosophy that requires the locking down, it's just let decades of whoring itself to the mobile networks ensure it ends up with some very bad technology decisions.
I've finally had a real chance to play with "real" Android in the last few days (a T-Mobile myTouch Slide. Yum) and I have to say, after experience of both Maemo and (at various stages) Symbian, Nokia needs to take a major step back and ask whether it really has the right technologies under development. I think Google and Palm really have the right idea here, and Nokia will hopefully learn from them.
Nokia's "smartphones" (I hate that term, ever since Jobs redefined it to mean "Locked down phone that only runs software approved by the manufacturer" - Nokia has produced smartphones using the original definition, a phone that includes an open architecture pocketable computer, since the Nokia 9000) have run Symbian or its direct predecessors since the Nokia 9290. The OS has its roots in an OS developed originally for the Psion PDAs. The surprise, in many ways, is that it's used for bare bones phones, as its somewhat overengineered for such tasks.
I can't say I particularly like the environment, but to argue that it's unsuited, or unused, for smartphones is to demonstrate a certain amount of ignorance of the history of the OS. Arguably it's on a par with iOS in terms of capabilities, if not slightly more powerful, but lacking the standardized and high quality user interface of the latter. The lack of a requirement for apps to be managed code puts it slightly behind Android.
W-CDMA is not the same thing as "CDMA" the mobile phone standard. W-CDMA is the 3G GSM (UMTS) air interface. It's what AT&T uses for 3G. HSDPA/HSUPA/HSPA+ are enhanced versions of W-CDMA.
Verizon uses the entirely incompatible CDMA2000 system. CDMA2000 is used in other countries, but not nearly to the same extent as GSM/UMTS. Qualcomm, CDMA2000's major sponsor, is no longer working on upgrading it to 4G standards, throwing its lot in with the GSM "LTE" system instead.
So no, there isn't a "CDMA" (in the sense of the mobile phone standard) version of the iPhone, any more than there was a D-AMPS version of the iPhone back when it was 2G.
Not exactly. LTE has always been a migration path from the current voice+data systems, but because it implements everything over IP many people (including the carriers themselves) have assumed it's a "data" thing. This got ridiculous a few months ago when the game of telephone resulted in reporters seriously claiming that the carriers had suddenly got into a panic because "LTE had no voice support". Of course LTE has voice support! It's called IMS.
The funny thing is that the standards for this were actually created back when 3G UMTS was being standardized, and they weren't implemented because UMTS's separate voice channels, and poor bandwidth and latency on the data side, made the standard less than useful in practice - over 3G.
The other funny bit is that part the intention behind going for LTE was to separate the entire stack from the air interface technology, something UMTS was supposed to do but ended up screwing up. A phone implementing a full LTE stack (including IMS), that additionally supports, say, WiMAX, should be able to switch a voice call seamlessly between the two if the phone starts roaming. And, of course, this system works really well when you start sticking W-CDMA and CDMA2000 radios in the same phone...
Anyone who's known Tom for a while knows why she posts under those names. If you'd done even a few seconds of research you'd have found that out by yourself.
If I were you, I'd stop, right now, before you dig yourself into a deeper hole. Sending Tom and myself private emails inviting us to join in on an attack on a mutual friend on the basis of an extremely mis-characterized argument is completely out of order, especially when combined with an attack on Clone's privacy.
Knock it off.