
Mobility Blues - naish
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/07/18/Mobile-Net-Gloom
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Tichy
"[...]iPhone net clients[...]And, for the first time ever, they’re decently
programmable in a somewhat-uncrippled way."

Actually, my impression is that iPhone is going through all of the steps of
the J2ME evolution, starting all over again. At least there are a lot of
similarities: applications can only access their own "disk space", so no
interaction between applications. Applications can't run in the background.
And then there is the issue of the "forbidden runtimes".

At least iPhone apps can access the address book, but so could a lot of J2ME
devices. Not sure how push works - a lot of J2ME devices allow push via SMS,
and other ways I have never fully understood.

The one advantage of programming for the iPhone is not having to worry about
cross-platform compatibility. Like with J2ME, some phones allow access to the
address book, others don't. Some phones allow sending of SMS, others don't.
Some allow accessing the camera, others don't. And so on - knowing what you
get with the iPhone is a big advantage, but for sure there could be even more
freedom for developers.

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andreyf
I'm not sure if having proprietary standard hardware imposed by Apple will
play out well for them, in the long run... it didn't with computers against
DOS, why would it with cell phones against Android?

~~~
Tichy
To be honest I hope they will fail, but I will probably get an iPhone
anyway... But as soon as viable "open" solutions are available, I will switch.

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davidw
I think Android is stumbling a bit, but still moving along at a pretty good
clip, and that it's the best of the bunch for the time being. I trust Sun more
than Google to be able to "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory".

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andreyf
I think his most prudent concern, that of applications being artificially
limited on the devices, will change quickly when the networks become open, and
that's only a matter of time.

