
 The Great Game - wglb
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/07/30/Mobile-Market-Share
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jacquesm
The mobile market reminds me of biology at times rather than technology.
Species are just as as hard to define as mobile devices are (an Ipad has all
the trappings of a mobile phone except that you can't make calls with it) and
the changes come and go faster than you can keep up with them.

Indeed, the numbers are big, very big. But so far most of the players (except
for google, maybe) seem to be very busy to try to create a walled garden with
as much lock-in as they can get away with.

That's a real pity, because 'mobile' to me should be synonymous with more
freedom, and in many cases it seems to be synonymous with less. I think it
should be more free because the big difference between a computer and a phone
is just that the one has a bunch of wires and a size that hold it down and a
phone does not.

Mobile phones are coming from an appliance background, not from a computer
background and telcos have historically been some of the most anti-competitive
entities out there.

So now you get these alliances between hardware manufacturers, media companies
and telcos trying to place you, the user in their virtual restaurant where
every dish costs you money by virtue of the easy way in which they can bill
you (and make those charges stick).

Bandwidth gets sold at insane prices, phones are routinely crippled in both
capabilities as well as connectivity, applications that are available for free
on regular computers suddenly are available only for sale and so on.

I'm still holding out for that open source phone, the one that gives you all
the freedom with none of the hassle, where the only thing you pay for is the
bandwidth that you use (and a reasonable amount!).

There have been a few attempts in this direction but so far nobody has managed
to really make a go of it. I really hope that the size of the market will
attract someone bright enough and with deep enough pockets that the open
source model will take hold permanently.

I know that Android attempts to fill that niche, and maybe it will succeed,
but for now I think it is too beholden to Google to really succeed.

I'm more thinking along the lines of a bunch of maverick hackers that have no
ties to any major corporation that will create a platform that is truly free
and open.

Apple, RIM, Google, Microsoft, Nokia the telcos and so on they all probably
have their own agenda and do not have the users best interest and/or freedom
at heart. That should change.

Phones should be IP devices (IPV6), and all voice calls should be VOIP
connections, also on the mobile networks. Why bother making a distinction
between voice and data traffic, voice _is_ data. No more per minute fees, no
government mandated encryption breaking, phones are powerful computers (more
powerful than anything you could buy for ordinary money up to 5 years ago) so
let's use them as such.

~~~
y0ghur7_xxx
_I'm still holding out for that open source phone_

I too hope Openmoko will make it.

<http://www.openmoko.org>

~~~
jacquesm
I've looked at their phone and the hardware platform is too anaemic to be able
to compete in todays market.

At a minimum they should add a camera and a GPS module, the openmoko phone
would have been fantastic somewhere in the mid 90's.

~~~
mirkules
Or perhaps they should aim at the non-smartphone market.

~~~
jacquesm
That's possible, but the 'hack-potential' of a non-smartphone is quite
limited. Once a fully open sourced phone with that sort of gear on board hits
the market I'm fairly sure that hackers would flock to it.

------
andrewljohnson
Ignorant to think Android is remotely as big as iOS.

The numbers say Apple sells 230k iPhones ipads and iPods per day.

This compares to less than 100k droids per day.

If you are getting into the business, make your iPhone version first. We only
get about 10% of our revenue from Droid.

------
njharman
>[mobile providers] offer about the same service quality at about the same
price

Not in my circle. I pay less than my AT&T friends and they bitch constantly
about connection and service.

~~~
halostatue
The U.S. (and for the most part, Canada) doesn't count. You have two main
carriers and two also-ran carriers; two use CDMA, which is a dead-end, and the
other two use GSM, which is not. Canada has three carriers, and two of them
share a new GSM network (the third, Rogers, has been GSM for a decade).

In Europe, there are more carriers (2-3 per country) and lots more
competition. As I said in a different comment, I paid €5 for a 3GB data plan
for my iPad last month in Italy, whereas I would have to pay $35 for 5GB here
in Canada.

