Collateral Damage

[daveon]

Collateral Damage

Shock!  Cringely is wrong again.  I don't have time to deconstruct this nonsense. But nonsense it is.

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Comments

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

I was surprised not to have seen you reply to this one, I thought maybe you had finally removed him from your RSS feed list, something I haven't yet got round to. I hope they don't pay him very much, I suspect they don't.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

No, he's still there, I've just been swamped with pressing F5 on 538 and other political sites for a couple of months.

I have to admit that I missed this announcement by Samsung, and in fact, I'm googling for information and not seeing any. I therefore suspect he's wrong about what they said because that would have been big shit around my workplace.

Motorola have announced that they're getting out of Symbian to focus exclusively on WinMo and Android. That's mostly because Symbian, for all the talk of Open Source, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Nokia, which is another reason that SEMC are hedging on WinMo.

He's also wrong about Symbian, probably because he doesn't really understand what Symbian actually is, the reason they're getting slower is actually down to crappy Nokia hardware not keeping up with the OS. But that's beside the point.

As I've said over and over and will continue to do so while it makes us pot loads of money - just because the operating system is free is doesn't mean that it costs nothing to build a phone around. Your fixed NRE costs for building a phone have remained constant for the last 6 years - a new phone takes about 100,000 man hours of effort to get to market. A "copy product" of an existing phone still takes about 40,000 hours.

Anyway, I'm off to go and look at the huge number of Windows Mobile projects we have in the pipeline ;)

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

I want a phone that is platform neutral when it comes to integrating with the rest of the computers in my life, which is why I'm put off an iphone or Windows Mobile device. I also want lots of free applications to put on my phone, which I also suspect is difficult for both those OSes. I don't know whether son-of-Symbian or Android is better, but they are the one's I'd consider. Mind you, I hardly even buy mobiles, so I'm not making money for anyone.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

To a certain extent you're going to be out of luck with any phone to behave in a platform neutral way for data interaction. Even WinMo has a standard OBEX and SyncML set of APIs so you can write your own sync applications (something Android doesn't currently have) but it'll be a lot of work.

This is one of the reasons that I suspect Google are going to find things tougher than they expected. On the flip side, that does mean and is meaning lots and lots of loverly work for Systems Integrators.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Having been converted to Gmail and Google calendar, Android would be my solution to sync problems. I do want a first rate media player though, and want to avoid Itunes, which I find to be crap in many areas. So a port of Rhythmbox or Banshee from Linux or MediaMonkey from Windows would be needed. I suspect the former is more likely

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I remain to be convinced by Google's OTA sync stuff, we've had long long discussions with them internally about how they expect this to work. Generally speaking I'm actually quite happy with ActivSync.

I'm not keen on phones doubling as media players but I share your view of iTunes. To be fair, iTunes 8 actually has solved a lot of my gripes and the Genius autoplaylist feature is excellent.

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

I see from the latest column that Cringely is leaving PBS, doesn't say what he is going to be doing, maybe commenting on buggy-whips, or giving tips on the best sort of red flag for the man to carry in front of your car.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Most certainly the red flag I think.

He reminds me of that guy in the "this is the man who..." adverts.