3 ms·
Mobility Blues
- Tichy 18y ago"[...]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.
- andreyf 18y agoI'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 18y agoTo 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.
- andreyf 18y agoI 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.
- davidw 18y agoI 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".