The Giant Awakes
A little early morning blogging before I head off to work. Here's a post I just saw on Gizmodo (man, I love that site!):
Thoughts on Mobius - Smartphones are Coming
Finally arrived back in NYC after attending the Mobius 2002 conference in Seattle, where Microsoft gave me and the editors of a few dozen PDA and cellphone websites a sneakpeak at what Redmond has on the horizon for mobile computing. We got to check out the new Pocket PC Phone edition, Tablet PCs, and Smart Displays. But what's really gonna shake things up is their Smartphone platform, which is basically a version of the Pocket PC OS for cellphones. The one they showed us had a great looking 170x220 color screen, 16MB of RAM, 32MB of flash ROM, an SD expansion slot, and had MSN Messenger, a mobile version of Outlook, an Internet Explorer browser, and Windows Media Player software built-in. No touch screen though, and there's no way to upload applications except through your service provider. Not sure though if everyone is going to feel entirely comfortable having a Microsoft OS on their cellphone (hopefully Smartphones won't crash as often as PCs do). Those reservations aside, it looks like every other cellphone company will be playing catch-up very soon, since these Smartphones are due to hit by the end of the year and are going to make nearly every other cellphone-based OS look absolutely primitive.
Even though Microsoft doesn't have any deals with the major mobile phone makers, they have enough power both from a marketing and money standpoint to take on anyone. Nokia and SonyEricsson aren't going to know what hit them. I bet you we're going to see incredibly functional MS phones priced insanely low popping up at every geek-center (CompUSA, etc.) in the country.
Symbian & Co., IMHO have taken their sweet time getting their OS out to market and now that it's arrived, it's on super expensive phones with almost no developer community (have YOU tried to program for Symbian? I have and it's a nightmare). Well, we'll see what happens, actually. Supposedly Vodafone ordered 1 million of the Nokia camera-phones for the U.K. to push MMS messaging, so they may be getting really cheap there soon.
Let's hope that T-Mobile can innovate with a color phone soon and that the Symbian guys get off their ass. I REALLY don't want MS in the mobile market.
-Russ