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Posts: 477 | Thanked: 118 times | Joined on Dec 2005 @ Munich, Germany
#378
Originally Posted by qole View Post
You just shrugged off the most disruptive part of the N900, as if it were nothing! All the phones on the market, including the iPhone, are not open platforms, not the way the desktop PC is an open platform. Even Windows and Mac machines are extremely open platforms, in the way that I'm talking about. You can write any software you want for them, and if it's good and if it does what people want it to do, people will use it.

This openess on the desktop triggers all sorts of unexpected results, because the vendors are not controlling the applications. So now, the RIAA and MPAA are going crazy trying to shut down millions of average teenagers and grandmothers casually downloading the latest music and movies. Telcos and cable companies are falling over each other to offer VoIP and IPTV services, because people are already helping themselves to these things in significant, scary numbers and they want a piece of the pie.

What I'm trying to say (and others here, too) is that the N900 will bring the desktop paradigm to the mobile market. The vendors will no longer control the apps, and all hell will break loose.

Well, hell for vendors, heaven for consumers.
Very good point. In short: Apple sells you a unix iPhone but keeps the root password. To me this is unacceptable, and the main reason why I have a N810. For the same reason, I refuse to buy branded phones.

But first this is not new. Symbian and WinCE/mobile are also similar to the desktop paradigm. You can write your own applications for them. You can buy applications for them. The vendors do not control those applications.

(Interestingly, neither WinCE/mobile nor Symbian succeeded in creating a decent market for applications. In a fraction of the time, the iPhone did.)

Second, I am not really sure that the N900 will be as open as you think. Dr. Ari Jaaksi had puzzling comments on the "necessities for open source developers to embrace paradigms necessary to the phone industry like drm and closed source".

Furthermore, you have been intoxicated by the PC/windows/linux model. Everyone here seem to ignore that a smartphone may be a computing platform, but it is not a pc. The pc model emerged in the 90s, before the Internet was popular, and the technological choices which were made at the time reflect that (and we all know what disastrous consequences some of those choices had). A smartphone, with limited battery and computing ressources, always on connectivity, high hardware variability, high bug resilience and designed for a market of non-specialists implies different choices. If you want to make some money, that is. You may want to read this article for details. It is mainly advocating the iPhone against the google Android platform, but the arguments adapt to maemo as well.

So: close, but no cigar. I still do not see the N900 being revolutionary at all. It is just another smartphone. One with great hardware specs, but htc already knows how to do that. One with a voip client, but this is old news. One which runs linux, but htc, motorola and google already do that. You have nice freeware for it (and my thanks go to those developers!), but no commercial applications, so the choice is limited and not really adapted to the general public. Sorry, I still do not see this as a revolution, a new computing platform or even a platform with any future relevance.
 

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