Mobile Phone Wars
Salon is running an article (seen on Erik's to Diego's site) about the mobile phone OS war between Nokia/Opera and MS. It's an interesting piece, but in my opinion gives too much weight to Microsoft in this market. They're a threat to Symbian for sure, but this piece blows them into something they're not.
One of the more interesting links is to Opera's browser for small screens which can read normal HTML and split the screen intelligently to allow browsing on Series 60 and UIQ phones. I was looking for this before and couldn't find it. Check out the link for screen shots, they're very cool.
I forgot to mention this before when I was talking about the P800, but Symbian OS v7.0 includes Opera as part of the OS. This is very interesting because it makes the phones all that much more usable without having to reformat websites for XHTML. I still think there's a place for cellphone-specific sites however...
I'm not sure if I agree with the article's take that the HTML browsers are somehow going to make or break the phones... that's thinking of cellphone's like they were PCs, and that's not a good comparision at all. Also the article gives too much credit to Microsoft, saying that they knew all along that the big manufacturers weren't going to work with them. That's baloney. MS tried to get the big guys on board from day one like they did with CE devices, but it didn't work and eventually Microsoft had to contract with "the seven dwarves" as Gates calls them.
All in all, the article is very interesting. A good take on what's happening. The one question, however, that wasn't answered is how much the Symbian group paid Sendo to give the finger to MS. Talk about FUD! When a manufacturer scraps a launch 3 weeks before the phone is due? Microsoft's tech must be REALLY bad. Yeah baby! Take that MS! Eat your OWN dogfood.
-Russ