The Google Phone Is Doomed
The Google Phone Is DoomedAs always, Dvorak thinks different. His analysis of the gPhone, is, unfortunately, pretty accurate. Right now, its just fluff. Google has chutzpah to think that it can pre-announce by a year, provide no SDK, and yet have developers rush to its fold. Microsoft, and Nokia have both pooh-poohed this announcement, and, much as I would like to disagree with them, this time they are right. My group is going with the Blackberry 8820 phone for our research!
--Update--
The SDK is out, and it is very nicely done. It plugs into Eclipse and comes with an emulator. I even managed to get the HelloWorld app to run on my Mac in a few minutes. Yet, there is no support for low-level control of wireless networks (which comes with the BlackBerry). So, we are still going to go with the BlackBerry for now.
Yogesh Swami's comment is that the Nokia N800 is a better platform. We'll definitely look into that.
1 Comments:
This is absolutely spot on. Most of the stuff that Google has released recently has not been a big success, and this will probably be another example. When it comes to mobile devices, I think it's not the OS, rather the usability aspect of the device itself is the real challege. iPhone has covered some new ground, but I guess the game has only begun so far.
This might sound self-serving, but Nokia's N800 (and the upcoming N810) tablets are based entirely on Linux and open-source (GPLv2) software (including the development environment, called Maemo) and yet no one talks about it. In fact, I would say that N800/810 is a more research friendly platform than blackberry (for example, one can ssh to the N800, run xterm, ifconfig, tcpdump etc. right on the device itself. Also, changing kernel modules for networking (TCP congestion control for example) is as simple as on a desktop). We handed out 200 of these to people in Stanford, and never got them back :-)
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