This video and post of Lee Williams talking about Google and their smartphone strategy is being spun as some kind of attack on Android, but he’s really just being honest about the way that Google gets revenue. Some people are willing to give up a little privacy to get access to the Google services (I’m one of them), but for many people that privacy is essential for the way their business or organization is run. And with the whole Cyanogen controversy (even with the workarounds) it’s clear that Android is not going to be a hacker friendly platform. Let’s not pretend that it’s a Linux distro for phones.
After a few hours searching the AT&T support forums looking for information on whether or not AT&T will provide a SIM card and monthly plans for unlocked phones without a contract, I visited an AT&T corporate store today. The employees were extremely nice and AT&T absolutely does this. As soon as I asked my question the woman helping me headed to the back to get a SIM card.
The Nokia E51 and the E71 are two of the Categories
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Why Qt is so important for Symbian and Maemo
One of the major problems that the iPhone’s competing platforms (WinMo, WebOS, and Android) is that their development frameworks are so far from the actual hardware. Steve Ballmer has claimed that most of applications on the iPhone are simply dressed up web apps, but the truth is that the iPhone is the only mobile platform that has software (mostly games) that push it’s hardware. This is because these other platforms have chosen to base their development platforms around virtual machines and in the case of the Pre, JavaScript. We aren’t going to ever see software that pushes these phones until they incorporate development frameworks that are closer to the actual hardware.
Symbian has such a framework, but when compared to the iPhone it is extremely complex. This means that even though the Samsung Omnia HD has an ARM Cortex A8 600 MHz processor and PowerVR SGX graphics we haven’t seen any applications that take advantage of it’s hardware. With the incorporation of Qt into the Symbian development process, along with Maemo, these platforms will have an easy to use framework that isn’t burdened by virtual machines and interpreters. This isn’t to say that there will be a huge rush of new powerful applications to Symbian, but that with Qt it will have the entire range of current development techniques in it’s portfolio. If you want to code classic Symbian C++ that will be available, but if you want to use the excellent Qt libraries along with the excellent tools like Qt Creator they will also be available along with Java and WRT, which is comparable to webOS development . This is something that can’t be said for the other platforms.