June 2nd, 2008
Time for LiMo and Android to stop talking
Ed Burnette has a great piece out today in Dev Connection about Google’s choice of Apache as the main license for its Android phone.
Some pieces will use Eclipse, some GPL V.2, and there will likely be some proprietary bits as well, he writes. That’s nice.
The LiMo folks have also been a-twitter since Verizon decided to join its camp rather than hang out with the Googlers. (The most recently-delivered LiMo phone, the Purple Magic (right) from Purple Labs, looked like a Razr with a penguin on it. Blech.)
But, as a fan of both systems, I would like to kindly ask both sets of developers to close their mouths for a while and get to work.
Press releases, alliances, and application possibilities won’t win this market. It’s designs that will win this market. If neither group can create something as compelling as an iPhone interface, neither will go anywhere.
It’s the proprietary iPhone which has changed the mobile game, demonstrating that with the proper interface people actually will go for mobile data in a big way.
What LiMo and Android are designing, now, is not a mobile phone, but a handheld Internet client. The winner will be the one who makes it most attractive to move the most data back-and-forth on a mobile network.
But as of now, neither group is really in the game. I have yet to see anything compelling from either group beyond press releases.
No more press releases, please. No more FUD. Send me a phone when it’s ready, and I’ll decide whether it’s worthy. By “I” and “me” I mean the marketplace.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 06/02/08
