Comments on: The state of mobile OS openness

By: Toby Graham

Toby Graham — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 08:57:27 +0000

Sharapova vs. Ivanovic…sorry but that would be more interesting than Android vs. Win Mobile.

Plus it would be in HD baby

By: Ben Hookway

Ben Hookway — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:51:50 +0000

“Symbian is the most widely used OS in the world today”

Simply nonsense. There are almost 1.2bn phones sold this year and Symbian has only ever been on 206m phones cumulatively, ever, in its history. That is a Symbain number by the way - check the Q1 report.

“Android has been designed to run on almost any hardware”

Again - very misleading. You need a minimum of a 266MHz ARM9 and at least 64Mb RAM to run Adroid.

My point here is that the media gets caught up in what is sexy to write about and misses out the big picture. Most phone sold are mid to low end. All the the OS options above require big processors and big memory. This means expensive phones. They are simply not in the vast majority of phones sold to day because they can’t be built to the right price point

By: DavidCastroFlorida

DavidCastroFlorida — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 01:14:56 +0000

I guess it depends on what the meaning of “open” is, er, is is. Ok, nevermind. The battleground of the future, even for enterprises. Mobile workforce, hello! So its a game of open in the sense that its readily accessible and simple/flexible for others to contribute without fear/concern/care of ownership, right? At least Google entering directly to the fray with Android (once they get it right) really should be an interesting match vs. Win Mobile. Kinda like Sharapova vs. Ivanovic — now THATs interesting.

By: Jamie

Jamie — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:32:09 +0000

As a whole, OS X is as close to being open as you can get without really being “open” and fully cross-platform.

This sentence doesn’t make any sense. By this definition, the Windows based devices are also “open”. The fact is OS X, like Windows, is NOT open source and so should not be considered in the same league as either the forthcoming Symbian, Android or the ones you apparently forgot to cover, LiMo and OpenMoko.

By: surur

surur — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:27:12 +0000

As a whole, OS X is as close to being open as you can get without really being “open” and fully cross-platform.
——————————–

Surely this is very far from true. You cant even execute code on the iPhone without Apple’s permission, and the license of the SDK is as closed as they come, even forbidding open source software I believe.

e.g.

With the release of Apple’s SDK, the development community has come to the rude awakening that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be with its restricted features, hidden methods, and heavy distribution scrutiny. Nobody had imagined that a development platform would be so heavily DRMed, but it looks like the linker even includes DRM from crt.o. Where does this leave developers? Well, it looks like it’s impossible (without hacks at least) to build anything with the Apple SDK that is DRM-free, possibly requiring approval from Apple just to run once the production builds hit iPhones.
http://www.zdziarski.com/papers/iphone.html