To make it more clear: today is nothing but 1985 in PC operating system times. Apple has just introduced the Macintosh (iPhone), an OEM-based Windows OS is about to come out (Android), while the developer friendly Amiga is currently have more users than anyone else (Symbian), while the older Atari (PalmOS) and Amstrad (Windows Mobile) are still fighting for a while more. And of course there are myriad other smaller OSes that are not based on the older command line doctrine (”feature phones”), that will almost eclipse in a few years.

The point of my analogy above is that while we don’t know who will finally make it and get that same 95% market share in the mobile industry (as Windows 98 managed to achieve for PCs), that day is coming. It’s unavoidable, because as these devices mature and do “more”, people will rely on them more. And when you have too many people rely too much on these devices, then these people need compatibility between all these devices. And this eventually creates the “monopoly”. We are 10-12 years away from such a “monopoly”, but it will eventually happen. Either through elimination or consolidation.

The real question is: will Apple redo the same mistake with the iPhone as they did with the Macintosh by not opening it to OEMs?

I am talking about the apps currently available or soon-to-be-available on Google’s Android and iPhone’s Installer.app. Take a look (.pdf) at Android’s top-50 third party apps. I personally need zero of them. And while my iPhone is jailbroken, out of the 150+ binary apps currently available for it, I have only installed Terminal.app just in case in the future something shitty happens and I need to fix it manually. In other words, I see nothing that changes the way I do things in my life with these apps. Maybe because I don’t want to change my life. But I definitely need features that I take for granted on the desktop.

What I need is the kind of functionality that can’t be brought by third parties but require strong integration with the system and the hardware. I am not interested for example in a non-integrated random third party IM application, because that lack of integration would be more glaring in the mobile environment than an equivalent third party IM app on a desktop OS. Namely, on my phones I always need these:
* Multi-IM (ICQ/AIM/Jabber/Y!/MSN/GTalk) with full A/V support.
* VoIP SIP with A/V support (not Skype, preferably GizmoProject).
* A2DP/AVRCP/PAN/LAP/Obex Bluetooth support.
* Video recording and more still camera settings.
* Cut/Copy/Paste support and Text Select support.
* Adobe’s Flash Lite 3.0 browser plugin with video support.
* File manager/picker that system apps support automatically, e.g. Mail.
* T6 support like this one.
* UPnP server/client support and internet radio integration.
* Sound recorder (this can be done by third parties without integration repercussions).

The only third party app I am interested in seeing, and use only a few times a year, is possibly Skype. Nothing else. Ok, and a few games. But the BULK of what I need, they HAVE to be fully integrated with the system so they don’t behave like poor cousins, and therefore, it has to be Apple’s (or Google’s) job to implement and not the developer’s community.

The only phones that do a lot of what I need are Nokia’s Symbian S60 v3.1 phones and some of the newer Windows Mobile ones. Problem is, I am not willing to go back to a non-touchscreen phone environment (and the new touchscreen Nokia phones don’t inspire me at all), while Windows Mobile’s interface is The Suck.

So I am on “the waiting”.

Now that Nokia has released some video and screenshots of their upcoming interface I can only say (without having used one) that it’s nowhere as good as an iPhone. If you look very carefully you will notice that their new interface is nothing but their old interface, re-arranged and with touch support. It still has what it feels to be touch-based soft-keys (jeez), it still uses a stylus for many operations including input (I type much faster with my iphone than any traditional full keyboard stylus-based input), while the overall look and feel just doesn’t seem as clean and straight forward as an iPhone’s. Plus, it’s so easy to walk on Apple’s patents, that would make it impossible for them to innovate in any big way interface-wise.

It is my opinion that when it comes to interfaces and feel-good vibe, Apple has zero competition. Just zero. I have yet to see any touchscreen device from either Motorola, Samsung, LG, MS or Nokia that even touch Apple’s superiority in usability and looks.

And I am not even an iPhone fangirl. I guess this chart of mine won’t change a lot for the years to come.

And the time has come to rate the new iPhone 3G. This is a product that doesn’t meet my expectations. Absolutely none of my software needs were met, and only two out of my seven hardware requirements were met. Heck, Apple didn’t even bother upgrading their 2 MP camera which is shitty and its controlling software is under-featured for a luxury phone like the iPhone is.

And no, the upcoming “App Store” won’t fix these needs that I have because either many of my needs require true integration so they need to be delivered by Apple, or the restrictive license agreement for the SDK prevents the creation of such apps from third parties. In other words, it fucking sucks.

This is not to say that the new iPhone 3G doesn’t have some nice additions, like Exchange (which I personally don’t need), MobileMe Push (which I personally don’t need), 3G (which I personally need only occasionally as EDGE/WiFi are more than enough for my needs), GPS (twice a year need), little additions here and there. So where are the things I need daily, like cut/copy/paste and Flash?!? The iPhone 3G’s software still feels like a fix v1.2 release rather than a real v2.0. This Apple announcement today was very underwhelming for me. There is no way in hell I will be upgrading my iPhone hardware, and I will think twice before going in to the pain of upgrading the software (especially as my unlocked iPhone will get locked if I do). There is nothing for me there.

Update: “Apple shares fell 4% after the iPhone announcement, as some investors were left wanting more from the gadget maker,” reports CNN. Good to hear that there are others who felt the same way as I did.

But these days are gone. There is no point doing that anymore for the future browsers and handsets. Most phone manufacturers these days use either the Safari engine, or license Opera or they try to fake it by licensing Netfront and not give it enough RAM to play well with big sites (Sony Ericsson, this was for you). Most manufacturers now want next-gen browsers. Teleca went out of the mini-browser game last year, while today Openwave, the most popular mini-browser company on the planet, laid off 200 employees today, and they put a stop to further development of their browser (they’ll only do maintenance now, I guess). Thank God my JBQ left this company in time.

This is not to say that mini-browsers won’t be encountered anymore. Nokia still has their own S40 browser, Motorola has their terrible little P2k browser, while LG/Samsung fluctuates between Openwave and Netfront these days. Truth is, no one uses these mini-browsers. The halt of Openwave’s browser today is a testament to that, as Openwave once had 52% of the mobile browser market, and right now are below 20% just a few short years later. Besides, if someone was unlucky enough to get such a low-end handset for free from their carrier, they are much better off by installing the impressive Opera Mini instead.

This is not to say that we should not be writing mobile sites anymore. There are BILLIONS of people still who don’t own a smartphone but they still use one of these micro or mini browsers. Heck, even the mobile IE/Opera/Safari-based browsers DO need a simpler desktop-version site layout with not too much CSS and Javascript to render fast/well-enough. But the point is, the world is going towards a mobile system that can’t be characterized as “limited mobile” anymore, but a mini version of anything desktop. The keywords here are “full-featured browsers”.

A few years ago I said that 2010 will be the time that I will start using CSS and XHTML for my mobile sites instead of cHTML. My estimation seems to be good. Thing is, I don’t have the enthusiasm to do that anymore. I am seriously thinking of giving away my mobile autodetection script, the one that powers OSNews and Gnomefiles.

As you know, today Motorola announced a split in two, while an insider’s email tells all about the terrible situation in the company that even lead to deaths/suicides. The insider cites the no-interest and no-knowledge of the execs to runs such a company as the reason for the failure.

I will have to clarify one point though, which I believe was a catalyst in Motorola’s current failure in the cellphone market. And that point is the way they treated their Linux phones. They missed a huge opportunity.

I was one of the first reviewers in US to try their EZX Qt-embedded Linux-based phones back in the day. These phones were mainly developed and manufactured in Asia, with minimum support from their US offices. MontaVista provided the (poorly supported afterwards) modified kernel. The first such phone was released in 2003 and it wasn’t half bad for the time.

Between 2004’s version of the OS, and the newest one’s released in 2007, the changes in the OS were MINIMUM. Having tried most of these EZX touchscreen models over the years, it was more that obvious that no real engineering went on behind the scenes, just some bug fixes and some small modifications here and there. It felt like “ok, we got a UI that works now, you are all fired, we only keep a few guys to maintain the thing”.

The problem was that Motorola-US didn’t care about these phones. They saw them as something that was done in Asia, for Asian markets only. They didn’t have the insight to think that “hey, we have a next-gen platform that works, why don’t we fully invest in it and go beyond Symbian v2 and v3, or UIQ, or Windows Mobile or Palm?”. Instead, they were short sighted, and they kept rehashing hardware designs running the old Moto OS, which looks like it was sprang out of the ’80s. Motorola’s basic phone UI (the one found on the non-Linux phones) was the worst I have ever encountered on mainstream phones.

What Motorola failed to realize was that the cellphone market changed their buying decisions from “hardware”, to a “software decision”. People want to run real, native, apps on their phones. End of story. After the initial boom of cellphone designs in the early ’00s, people don’t care anymore if the new RAZR is 1mm thinner than the previous model. Phone form factors and battery life have become good-enough in the last 4 years for almost all manufacturers, and so the interest and market differentiation has shifted towards software solutions instead.

Motorola would be alive and well today if they had actively maintained their EZX line, if they had innovated on it (their UI is still not as great you see), if they had open sourced everything after getting a QT license from Trolltech (no matter the cost) to allow free development of apps, release an SDK etc etc. I mean, think about it. Motorola had at least a TWO year head start in EZX development compared to Symbian v3, UIQ v3, and the iPhone. THEY could have been the big market players today after all these years maturing their touchscreen product.

Instead, they shunned their EZX phones, they completely missed the importance of an SDK (old readers of this blog will remember my rants about it), they started about 2-3 different Linux international mobile groups that have seen ZERO lines of code (this is equivalent to what we make fun here in the Silicon Valley, that is, someone wants to start writing an application and he first starts by creating the web site for it…). Then, they said something about joining the Android group, leaving all their partners of the other mobility Linux groups in peril.

Obviously, Motorola is a company that doesn’t know what it wants. That’s why they can never do anything right. I hope the company dies or bought and assimilated. They deserve nothing better. I just hope their employees find new jobs soon and get the hell out of there.

MobileBurn posted their recent press release where the Viewty LG phone can now capture 120fps at VGA resolution (previously it would only do so for QVGA). Instead of releasing a firmware upgrade for everyone to have access to that small feature and possibly other bug fixes, they just re-release the same god damn model in to the market, leaving everyone with an already purchased Viewty in the cold.

I hate LG. And I go on record with that.

Now, many people online are putting the blame to HTC for not being as serious regarding the software they are including with their devices. To me, HTC is like any other Asian company: products with short life cycles, not many official firmware updates (if any), poor software engineering. And Microsoft knows this. Which is why I personally put the blame to MS and not to HTC. HTC is being HTC, just like LG is being LG (which is even worse in comparison). Microsoft on the other hand, they hold the upper hand by owning the operating system. They should have never given HTC a license if HTC (or MS) didn’t have a fully working accelerated driver for the ATi graphics chip HTC used.

But of course, both companies went after the easy money. Both HTC and Microsoft should take responsibility for this and either offer refunds, or sit down their asses and complete the driver and offer it as a free download.

I don’t claim to know what’s in the contracts between Google and their Android Alliance, but I surely hope Google takes precautions in the future, because most Asian manufacturers are as care-free as HTC is (and usually, worse).

I wrote this blog post purely as an affected owner of a TyTN-II smartphone btw, and not for any other reason. I am just venting out because spending $800 for a phone that has a driver speed equivalent to 1990 with Windows 3.0 is unacceptable.