Michael Mace has written about the war between Nokia and Apple, and how “When two elephants fight, the loser is the jungle.”
The winner is hopefully going to be us, the developers. When platforms fight, they tend to get more desperate and do things to spite the competition. They will all crave developers.
The Apple-Nokia war finally got underway on August 29, when Nokia announced an array of new music-capable phones and an online music store. The two companies had been eyeing one-another like wrestlers outside the ring for more than a year. Apple entered the mobile phone market, but only in the US, where Nokia is a non-factor. Nokia openly declared that it’s a computing company (link), but its non-phone products so far have been different flavors of lame.
But the August 29 announcements put Nokia and Apple on a path to direct confrontation. I haven’t seen a lot written online about the importance of this conflict. I think that’s probably because many of the people who follow Apple’s business closely are based in the US and have trouble taking Nokia seriously because it’s a secondary player here. Meanwhile, Nokia’s most ardent followers are in Europe, and look at Nokia’s actions in light of its regional conflicts with SonyEricsson and the European mobile operators.
But when you stand back and look at what’s happening in the industry worldwide, it’s clear that Apple and Nokia both want very badly to be the dominant mobile computing company for young adults. That makes a huge, relentless conflict between them inevitable. They’re like two armies trying to take the same hill. One’s coming from the west, the other from the east, so there’s not a lot of fighting at the moment. But as soon as they reach the hill, there’s going to be an explosion.
Michael goes into great depth on:
What Nokia announced, and why it matters
The new phones
Apples new products
Relative strengths of the competitors (Or, how to piss off both Apple fans and Nokia fans in the same post.)
How they’ll fight
A shift from hardware design to systems design
The operators lose control
What does it mean for users?
Only a brief mention of Microsoft, and no mention of Android.
Nokia Intellisync Device Management delivers single service-optimized device management platform that seamlessly combines OMA DM and Nokia Intellisync Mobile Suite device management technologies
New York, NY - Nokia unveils today the newest device management features of Nokia Intellisync Mobile Suite. The next generation release offers single platform to manage both OMA DM compatible mobile devices as well as devices running Nokia Intellisync Mobile Suite client. This technology approach provides flexibility to support a wide variety of mobile devices and operating systems with advanced device management functionalities such as device configuration, application management, asset collection, help desk, theft-loss protection and recovery…
Prior to 3rd Ed fp 2, S60 Java had traditional CLDC VM architecture where all API code (class files) were compiled into the virtual machine executable. Now the Java API implementation code is no longer in the VM executable but will be dynamically loaded when needed.
This means that Java apps should start up faster, and we also get access to more features, and we will get more and more over time.
Some will complain saying that “Java is meant to be portable”, but personally, I want to be able to get close to the metal from time to time, so give me the opportunity.
There are a couple of PHP developers out there, and Nokia has announced that they can code on the S60:
I can now reveal that we at the CCNC conference in Las Vegas in January, 2008 will demonstrate and release what we call the PAMP stack.
PAMP stands for Personal Apache, MySQL, PHP, so yes, the full LAMP stack will be made available for S60 smart phones. In addition, there will be PHP extension modules that provide access to the core functionality of the phone. And on top of PAMP you can basically install any LAMP based content management system. For instance, Drupal can be installed off the shelf.
Yes, a fair amount of memory is needed and it’s still pretty experimental stuff, but it runs quite nicely on E90.
Wow, I was surprised to see JavaScript come to the phone, but now PHP?
The N95 has an accelerometer in it, and as soon as Nokia released the C++ API, the inevitable happened. The lightsaber was born, and now version 1.1 is in the wild which includes:
No lag when swinging
No space in between saber hum when idle
Light Saber green light emulator
Text that says “Press OK to Start”
Nokia Activity Monitor API
The Nokia Activity Monitor displays charts and statistics, in real-time, about your movements while walking or running. It counts the number of steps, and determines the distance covered and the energy expenditure. Summaries are stored in a diary so that you can compare your activity level on different days, and over longer periods of time. Your steps are detected by analysing the output from the accelerometer in an S60 smart phone. Currently, the Activity Monitor runs on the N95 only. The Activity Monitor is most accurate when you attach the phone to your belt, or upper arm. It also works well if carry your phone in a pocket of your clothing. It might underestimate the number of steps if you keep the phone in a bag that you hold in your hand (as opposed to over your shoulder), and the most difficult case is when you hold the phone in your hand.