41–50 of 177 posts
Mr. Ondesign (can I call you Josh?), your website sure does use a lot of CPU when it's in the foreground. What is the deal there exactly?
"I owned a string of PalmOS devices during this period. Their ‘app store’ was literally boxes of software in a store which you had to install from your computer. No different than 1980s PCs." That's not really true. Mobile devices around that time were designed as peripherals of the PC, so you could download apps to PC and install them by cable-syncing. Palm apps were just .PRC files. It really wasn't too complicated…
With a bit of tongue-in-cheek... 1. Data networks It's an open question of using WiFi as the universal carrier - we're not at that point yet; but it's not a question of using existing GSM networks. It's going to be hard for carriers to deny, after some point, minutes to paying customers. 2. The cost of entry - OS, cloud store, apps This happened time and again. Remember when Linux has appeared on the stage? Seen port…
a combination Microcells and picocells, however might be doable, you use mesh networking to tie the picocells to to each other, and back to the microcell, ideally its a slow speed low power network, around 900 mhz, providing a access method for text messaging, and push notifications (sub 100kbps, think of it as a faster control channel), Data could be mesh even between handsets, passing (some) data thru to the nearest base. A higher speed network used for more intensive data use situations that goes directly to the nearest micro or picocell, For voice calls or in rural areas, you could default to the regular BTS.
There's a very strong argument here but the claim appears to rely on the author's expansive definition of "smartphone", in which he encompasses app stores, cloud servers and networks. Perhaps he has a point about the difficulty of investment in taking on these well established players in the field, but I don't feel it's entirely accurate to claim that smartphones themselves cannot be successful. A new phone with a ba…
Exactly rather than focusing why a smartphone can't succeed, I'd like to see how and why a phone can succeed. If anyone thinks that the mess in the Play Store and the development environment of Android doesn't leave a bad taste in your mouth they should really re-consider thinking that Android is going to be around forever. I would like to ditch this platform the first moment I get. There are a lot niches that are no…
cough Ubuntu cough In all seriousness, if he means smartphone from a hardware perspective, I might actually agree. The startup costs there are crazy high. But, if he means software, no. Ubuntu is doing it and doing it very, very well. I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it. All Android using hardware manufacturers are crazy to continue with Android now that Google owns Motorola. Look at the Moto X. Nothing can…
Ubuntu is doing it well? How many phones have they sold? What is their installed base? What % of marketshare?
Ubuntu just released V1 of their phone in October. Anyone who knows phone manufacturers and carriers knows how long they soak something in their labs.
Ubuntu has all the pieces in place to be an awesome option. Plus, they have their carrier advisory group with some great names showing their is some carrier interest.
Ubuntu has a company behind it and an owner who seems to want to compete in this market and has very deep pockets. Ubuntu itself has pedigree and history as well as working with hardware manufacturers and chip companies.
I mean, if your only metric of what is possible based on what is current numbers, Android would never had made it out of the gate, or should have folded after the Nexus One or even their next phone (can't remember the name), both of which were TERRIBLE and sold poorly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way I read this article, It is less about building new smartphone but more about the next technology shift that is going to change the direction. Basically, as oft repeated Ford statement goes, 'if you asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horse'. So, at this point, smartphone business is settling into a faster horse business. So, I would really expect the next big thing to be not a be an iPh…
The biggest problem the smartphone solved was boredom. That's the reason for it's popularity. At it's core ,boredom might be manipulated neurologically, so maybe you won't feel bored and just feel content with whatever. If we're going to aggressive means as neural implants ,this seems a more interesting option. Another options(without opening skuls) is something that offers far better experiences. Maybe more immersiv…
Sorry, but you don't seem to be offering anything new here. We know there are large capital costs for hardware businesses. We know network effects exist for phone applications. We know UI performance is a key issue in smartphone adoption (currently). Maybe "It's Hard To Build A Smartphone In 2013" would be a better title. But to suggest people will be using iPhones and Androids in the year 2050...Yikes. I pray that f…
Don't take any title literally. He is obviously not talking about 2050 or 2525 (if people are still alive, still alive).
He's talking about the market as is -- and an obvious timeline of around 10 years comes naturally from what we know of the tech industry and the pace of change.
I was at UIQ back when the iPhone "happened". It really was as pivotal for the industry as he says. I quipped that the iPhone made us irrelevant and Android made us redundant. I was surrounded by people with strong ambition and vision, at UIQ, Symbian, at our owners Motorola and Sony Ericsson, who wanted to build the iPhone and knew how to build the iPhone long before the iPhone was announced and before they knew any…
Mr. Ondesign (can I call you Josh?), your website sure does use a lot of CPU when it's in the foreground. What is the deal there exactly?
Animated spinning ... things... rectangles? Around the planet logo. Rendered into a canvas without any throttling.
Sorry, but you don't seem to be offering anything new here. We know there are large capital costs for hardware businesses. We know network effects exist for phone applications. We know UI performance is a key issue in smartphone adoption (currently). Maybe "It's Hard To Build A Smartphone In 2013" would be a better title. But to suggest people will be using iPhones and Androids in the year 2050...Yikes. I pray that f…
His point is that you can't be successful building something that is essentially the same thing as a smartphone. You can build something that disrupts the current smartphone market, but it would likely need to be something more than a smartphone (a la Google Glass.)
The network effects you mention are exactly the point: network effects are especially powerful in things like mobile app stores because they create a tipping point market. That means if an early entrant or set of entrants into the market can capture enough market share, they create extremely high barriers to entry. The more market share they have, the more powerful the network effects are and the less likely a new entrant is to have success.
If you're a smartphone developer, chances are you develop for iOS and Android. It would take tens of millions of users adopting a new platform for you to start developing for this new platform. But you're not likely to get tens of millions of users without a large app library.