Monday, October 15, 2007

Mobile Wars!

Well actually its mobile OS wars.
Anyone heard the news about Google mobile OS? apparantly its supposed to tackle Windows Mobile and not Apple because its a software project not a mobile phone. http://www.electronista.com/articles/07/10/08/google.phone.os.vs.win.mob/

I think its still too early say, firstly cuz the software is not out yet. Secondly, yes Apple has had a great start with iPhone but its still a start (keep in mind, iPhone sales were expected to be three times higher than they actually were in the first 30 hours). Sure its a great product, but its not quite anything revolutionary enough to start a new genere of mobile/portable devices. Apple's Newton was supposed to be just that, long ago, but failed miserably, instead Palm succeeded in its place and now it has more or less disappeared into the crowd.

It sure is very interesting news. But is there room for more mobile OSs in the long run? in the mid-eighties (I'm not old! i just got into computers way too early!) there used to be a whole forest of great home and personal computers, all with different OSs and own breed of software. You dont know any of them? yeah, thats how comprehensively they were wiped out! Mobile OS's case may be a bit different, because content/software is much more platform independant now, but like I said in my previous post (go read it!) for smartphones, its all about market share and ease of use. Ok Symbian has the largest market share by far and its the oldest and most mature mobile phone OS too, so Symbian is not going anywhere. The interesting thing would be to see how the rest of the mobile OS's battle it out!

--
Bilal Zaheer
http://elanist.com/bilal

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am sure once Google mobile OS comes out, it will be great! Why is that so ? Working at Google is fun! One of the employee said in an interview, "Working at Google is the next best thing to not working at all" ;)

If you can get an environment like that, you get creative automatically and you don't have to rely on

#include "fingerscrossed.h"
or
#include "somethingold.h"

Buzz Word! said...

i've tried the "not working at all" thing and trust me, its not much fun. gets boring pretty fast. what I am interested to see is, wether Google's mobile OS actually has more potential to be a PC OS instead of just mobile OS. Someone at MS must be having a few sleepless nights I am sure, because last I remember, one of the main reasons Microsoft wanted to put Netscape out of business is because they felt the browser actually had potential to developed into an OS not just a file viewer/manituplator. And the Google mobile OS news comes shortly after Google came out with the first piece in their Office suite!

naveeda said...

You make good points, but we'll see, i dont submit to the fanboyism of "when google comes out with the OS it will be great" we dont know yet, we'll see. Symbian definitely has been there since ever and wont be easily pushed away, not because of its awe inspiring features or anything but mainly because some of the industry giants back it up. Ever heard of PL/SQL? same story there.