TheWindowsPhone

I read an interesting post over at PocketNow in which Chuong Nguyen looks at the likelihood of the new iPhone OS4 starting a fragmentation of the iPhone market. I say ‘Yay!’

Since iPhone OS3-and-under iPhones and iPod Touches won’t be upgradeable to iPhone OS4, Apple will inevitably end up with iPhone users wanting to run apps their devices don’t support, and possibly unable to re-install their OS or legacy apps after a crash or a hard reset. Chuong goes on to compare this to the fragmentation troubles that Android now finds itself facing and from which Windows Mobile has long suffered.

He correctly points out that the schism in Apple’s case comes from a software update, not hardware differences. In Android-land, the fragmentation comes not only by way of software updates (from both Google and the open-source community) but also from hardware differences between devices, like strange screen resolutions, differing CPUs, GPUs and form factors, touchscreen/not touchscreen, etc.

And Microsoft?

Read the rest of this entry →

Engadget has put a nice little chart together that compares key features of iPhone 3 and 4 to Windows Mobile 6.5 and Windows Phone 7. Funny, it almost makes Windows Mobile 6.5.3 look like the most capable OS of them all!

iPhone OS 4

iPhone OS 3.1.3

Windows Phone 7

Windows Mobile 6.5.3

This chart is straight from the Endgadget article. Like I said, I count 6 green boxes under Windows Mobile 6.5.3… more than any other. What do you guys think? Is Microsoft moving in the wrong direction with Windows Phone 7? Losing multitasking, copy/paste and native apps – three things that made 6.x stand out over the years…

[via]

Gigantic Korean electronics manufacturer Samsung has announced it is launching its own mobile operating system in December. Bada (which means ocean in Korean) will be an open-source platform for non-smartphones, giving developers a platform upon which to write apps of all kinds… I guess making them smartphones after all. But is Samsung looking to take market share from the big guys like Apple, Microsoft and Google?

I like what Samsung is trying to do here: they see that, while smartphone sales are still high despite the recession and the future looks bright, there are still millions and millions of plain old cell phones being sold out there. This market is demanding all the same features as the smartphones are getting – music, photos and social networking capabilities – without the hassle that sometimes comes with one. The manufacturers are responding with a hodgepodge of lousy OSes, so there is an opportunity here for leadership and a marketshare grab for Samsung.

I see this creating a better cadre of low-end cell phones, which could ultimately help push up the low-end of smartphones, too.

The official launch is in December, and Samsung will drop the first SDK then, too, so we’ll have a better idea of the range of capabilities we can expect to see on every-day phones then. In the meantime, check out the Bada website for the latest details.

[via]

A recent study of VC-backed software companies developing for mobile platforms found that, while almost 50% of them prefer developing for the iPhone (over the other 5 major mobile OSes), only a minority are committing fully to the platform.

The study showed that only 33% of these companies are developing for a single platform, with the majority (67%) opting instead to develop their apps to run on multiple platforms. Of that majority, a whopping 76% develop for all 6 mobile OSes.

Read the full study findings at ChubbyBrain.com.