GPhone
Like it or not Google’s Android platform will be a player in the mobile phone market, if for no more reason then they are giving away the development software and offering money for the best apps (story here). Any long term reader of this blog knows that I am not a iPhoney fan. The thing just does not have the chops to be a full feature smart phone. It is a great device, and it is lots of fun, but it is closed and it does not have some basic smart phone features. I am on a Windows Mobile HTC / AT&T branded smart phone and like it. I It plays music i.e. MP3’s not Itunes,it takes / stores pictures, it syncs with Outlook, it sends texts, and oh yeah it takes calls. Oh yeah it cost less then half of a iPhone too.
Bottom line though, be it iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, etc they are all relatively (I did say RELATIVELY) closed developed platforms which are only made worse by carrier locked phones. A open platform phone that can go carrier and which allows average programmers to develop apps with little to know investment is going to impact the mobile phone market. Competition is good for the consumer. It is good for the carrier, developer, and manufacturer as well as it pushes them to improve and innovate.
At the end of the day Apple will always make great tech toys (be it the iPhone, the iPod, or the iMac), but the real work of the world is being done on Linux and Windows based boxes. Microsoft is never going to be a open and friendly company to competition. Doubt that look at Microsoft and their decade long argument that Windows Media Player and Internet Explorere where vital to OS, until the EU ruled that they had to go or Microsoft would have to pay huge daily fine. Then suddenly Microsoft figuired out how their OS could run without WMC or IE. Moving on, IBM, Google and Sun do help competitors in their core markets either, but at least these three allow people to work around their products by using their products to make better tools for the masses. Think how bad the Internet would be if Microsoft designed it, and think how few people would be using it for anything other then music downloads if Apple controlled it. Bottom line, I will always be for more competition and for open development of future products.
