Via Engadget: I’ve always admired developers who can delve right to the very core of devices and hack them to do their bidding. I’m not THAT technically capable myself, but love to see the results as sometimes, it pushes the actual industry into new directions that it might not have otherwise explored.
This may not be one of those moments, but geez I thought it was cool – a hack of the increasingly-popular Nokia N900 smartphone to run the default Maemo operating system from the internal device storage, and Android from a partition on the SD card.
In a week where Apples closed mobile platform is likely to get another shot in the arm, this is a refreshing post to remind us of the power of open platforms and the way they can change the game for developers.
For the past 3 years or so I’ve been a member of the Adobe Community Expert program, which has been an excellent program designed to engage community leaders known for various Adobe technologies and platforms and provide ways for those people to reach the broader developer community. A big thanks to the Adobe team for including me again for another year, and this time under the newly re-branded banner of Adobe Community Professional.
I’m looking forward to a slight change of approach to the Adobe ecosystem this year with my new role at Vodafone Hutchison, and certainly as FP10.1 and a slew of new devices hit the market.
There’s something very familiar about the concept that has been released for the next version of Symbian – Symbian^4. There’s been a lot of negativity around the aging Symbian OS and UI for sometime, with growing unhappiness from the time the first Nokia touch-screens started to roll out, and users feeling like the old S60 3rd Edition OS had just been shoe-horned onto a touch-screen device.
But if these early concept illustrations are anything to go by, the newly “opened-up” Symbian OS will be taking cues from the leading operating systems as well as keeping some elements of familiarity. To me this is a very Android-esque design, with a widget-style approach (that actually looks more like widgets than what the N900 has at the moment) and stylish floating palettes. There’s also a little hint to the iPhone with the multi-desktop indicator across the bottom, and a suggestion of the Maemo approach with the top title bar indicating a “drop-down menu” for more options.
Of course, this is just a mockup shown on concept devices, so there’s nothing to hang your hat on at this early stage, but it makes me feel like things are headed in the right direction for Symbian.
[Via All About Symbian] Mobile industry analyst Tomi T Ahonen has written up his thoughts and predictions for the smartphone market in 2010, covering all of the major players. It’s a very interesting read (especially for my new focus this year on iPhone and multiple platforms) and gives some important perspective to a much-hyped market segment that is skewed along geographical lines (see his comment on the US market in context to the actual size of the global smartphone market).
You’ll get the feeling (especially US-readers) that the author might be a bit of a Nokia fan, but overall I think he gives a pretty balanced and well-informed opinion. I’m not sure the mention of “bloodbath” in the title of the article is in fact warranted, but I do agree that 2010 will be an even more fiercely-fought period for ALL device manufacturers than last year.
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for January, 2010.
I'm currently the Team Lead for "Appland" at Vodafone Hutchison Australia, based in Sydney. Views on this blog are my own and not that of my employer. More about me.
For the past 3 years or so I’ve been a member of the Adobe Community Expert program, which has been an excellent program designed to engage community leaders known for various Adobe technologies and platforms and provide ways for those people to reach the broader developer community. A big thanks to the Adobe team for including me again for another year, and this time under the newly re-branded banner of Adobe Community Professional.
