A technological solution to the bandwidth problems is not a miracle we're waiting on. It's an eventuality that is almost guaranteed to fulfill its own mission to put money in the pockets of those who make money on bandwidth. While it gets more and more expensive to make the next technological steps so does the target market.
There's a lot of ways to potentially deal with bandwidth problems. Better peer to peer, better caching and compression, and many other areas of research are going to step in and keep things sane. There's a huge, vested interest in it.
"Well, I'd buy one for a thousand bucks, therefore the premise is wrong." Sorry, that's just not a good argument.
What percentage of people pay more than $400 for a phone? I'd imagine it would be very low. Those who don't pay that much do so for a very good reason: money in the bank making interest is better than money in a gadget depreciating rapidly. Of the people who would pay more than $400 for a phone, you have to substract people who get corporate push email, and people who happen to like their existing phone enough to use it for a couple more years.
The percentage of people left over is big enough to make Apple some decent money, but not big enough to be a landscape-changing event. At best, Apple has a device that will inject some much-needed design sense into the industry, generates incrementally more mindshare for Apple, and lets them not lose tons of money doing it.
Most laptops can't support more than 2GB. So does this mean Vista really does suck for laptops? Yikes.
FWIW, I'm running a 2GB laptop with Vista and I have absolutely no problems. But we'll see how things run in a few years when apps start hogging even more memory.
Windows had dominated the market while OSX was far superior. Now that Windows has (mostly) caught up, how can one even begin to think this market will change? It's not like Apple has lacked marketing power these past 7 years. The basic problem now is that, in the minds of consumers, Apple's "Why Windows?" message has now become "Well, why NOT Windows?"
Valid points, but doesn't address my valid point of being able to configure WM to be leaner and meaner. The fact is, though the option exists, device makers don't do it because they *want* all those "bloat" features.
And to imply that Windows Mobile isn't a large market is just being in denial. It went from being a very niche product to being the forefront marketed products by Cingular, T-Mobile, and Sprint. Judging by the sheer size of the software library and the success of many Windows Mobile software companies, I would say it's not a poor business decision at all to develop for the platform. User interface of the OS has little bearing on whether one can make money on selling software for the OS. The biggest factor, IMO, is good development tools and programmability, which WM has in spades.
IMO, It's pretty silly for a company (Access) to pay $350 million to acquire an unshipped emulation layer for a 10 year old OS, a chinese dev team, and a bunch of guys in Santa Clara who can't ship anything within 6 years of its promised date.
They should pay $3.5 million for 5 developers to write the emulation layer from scratch and integrate it into Access Linux.
Kudos to PalmSource for sweet talking their way into this bad deal.
After reading a bunch of comments here on how bloated Windows Mobile is, I just can't agree. Have you seen what they've done with Platform Builder? You can produce stripped down versions of the OS to reduce the memory footprint. And don't forget that Samsung and HTC are constantly cramming more and more hardware into smaller devices. The Samsung i607 (Cingular Blackjack) is a technical miracle, yet it'll be old news in 1 year.
You say it's bloated, but I say it's only that way because the device manufacturers want to include every feature available.
Finally, it's great to have such a rich API on these devices. Granted, I'm still lukewarm on the value of having message queues and SQL databases on the devices, but having reasonably fast managed code execution, blazing native code speed, and a programming model that is known, established, and well documented is great. Yes, there are some usability issues with the OS itself, but I'm speaking in terms of what the OS provides for developers, not users.
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A technological solution to the bandwidth problems is not a miracle we're waiting on. It's an eventuality that is almost guaranteed to fulfill its own mission to put money in the pockets of those who make money on bandwidth. While it gets more and more expensive to make the next technological steps so does the target market. There's a lot of ways to potentially deal with bandwidth problems. Better peer to peer, better caching and compression, and many other areas of research are going to step in and keep things sane. There's a huge, vested interest in it.
"Well, I'd buy one for a thousand bucks, therefore the premise is wrong." Sorry, that's just not a good argument. What percentage of people pay more than $400 for a phone? I'd imagine it would be very low. Those who don't pay that much do so for a very good reason: money in the bank making interest is better than money in a gadget depreciating rapidly. Of the people who would pay more than $400 for a phone, you have to substract people who get corporate push email, and people who happen to like their existing phone enough to use it for a couple more years. The percentage of people left over is big enough to make Apple some decent money, but not big enough to be a landscape-changing event. At best, Apple has a device that will inject some much-needed design sense into the industry, generates incrementally more mindshare for Apple, and lets them not lose tons of money doing it.
Most laptops can't support more than 2GB. So does this mean Vista really does suck for laptops? Yikes. FWIW, I'm running a 2GB laptop with Vista and I have absolutely no problems. But we'll see how things run in a few years when apps start hogging even more memory.
Windows had dominated the market while OSX was far superior. Now that Windows has (mostly) caught up, how can one even begin to think this market will change? It's not like Apple has lacked marketing power these past 7 years. The basic problem now is that, in the minds of consumers, Apple's "Why Windows?" message has now become "Well, why NOT Windows?"
Valid points, but doesn't address my valid point of being able to configure WM to be leaner and meaner. The fact is, though the option exists, device makers don't do it because they *want* all those "bloat" features. And to imply that Windows Mobile isn't a large market is just being in denial. It went from being a very niche product to being the forefront marketed products by Cingular, T-Mobile, and Sprint. Judging by the sheer size of the software library and the success of many Windows Mobile software companies, I would say it's not a poor business decision at all to develop for the platform. User interface of the OS has little bearing on whether one can make money on selling software for the OS. The biggest factor, IMO, is good development tools and programmability, which WM has in spades.
IMO, It's pretty silly for a company (Access) to pay $350 million to acquire an unshipped emulation layer for a 10 year old OS, a chinese dev team, and a bunch of guys in Santa Clara who can't ship anything within 6 years of its promised date. They should pay $3.5 million for 5 developers to write the emulation layer from scratch and integrate it into Access Linux. Kudos to PalmSource for sweet talking their way into this bad deal.
After reading a bunch of comments here on how bloated Windows Mobile is, I just can't agree. Have you seen what they've done with Platform Builder? You can produce stripped down versions of the OS to reduce the memory footprint. And don't forget that Samsung and HTC are constantly cramming more and more hardware into smaller devices. The Samsung i607 (Cingular Blackjack) is a technical miracle, yet it'll be old news in 1 year. You say it's bloated, but I say it's only that way because the device manufacturers want to include every feature available. Finally, it's great to have such a rich API on these devices. Granted, I'm still lukewarm on the value of having message queues and SQL databases on the devices, but having reasonably fast managed code execution, blazing native code speed, and a programming model that is known, established, and well documented is great. Yes, there are some usability issues with the OS itself, but I'm speaking in terms of what the OS provides for developers, not users.
No, apparently because they make the OS (by their arguments). But Palm might be in trouble...