Linkbait 11
This week’s. And last week’s, when I was lazy.
- RIM will port its BlackBerry Messenger to Android and iOS. Brilliant strategy or horrendous mistake? It’s the Messenger that makes the BlackBerry platform so popular among the youth, and now they can get it on competing platforms, too. On the other hand, the Android and iOS versions will have less functionality and may cost money. And more people might come to love it, and RIM may make the jump to a service provider, which is where the money is.
- Tomi’s forecast for the 2011 smartphone market. Nokia and RIM in trouble; Apple doing fine but needing an iPhone Nano, HTC and Samsung best positioned to take advantage of Symbian’s downfall.
- Nice graphics of the US smartphone market by vendor and by age. Young people prefer Android to iOS or BlackBerry because of the price.
- The Microsoft software updates planned for about now are late. After the failed update that broke some Samsung Windows Phone 7 devices, this one’d better be good.
- Anyway, what we web developers care about is not this update but the next one, codenamed Mango, which will contain IE9. It was slated for October, but reports say Microsoft isn’t going to make that deadline. Others maintain, however, that it will come on schedule because Microsoft’s partners (Nokia!) need it.
- Then again, Nokia expects the transition to Windows Phone to take two years. Also, the deal with Microsoft hasn’t actually been signed yet.
- HP’s webOS will ship on PCs, says HP boss. Although I don’t doubt HP wants this very much, I’m wondering if webOS is ready to run on a non-touchscreen traditional computer. The article expects webOS to lie on top of Windows, which makes me wonder what the point is.
- SMS is a cash cow for the operators, but new services are trying to steal mobile messaging away from them. Jason Grigsby has the overview.
- Jason also discusses cheaper iPhones. Why is Android so popular? Because it’s cheaper and good enough. Now if Apple would also make cheaper phones, it’d have more of a chance to break out of its 15% or so market share.
- Disney has acquired a company that builds HTML5 games that will sell outside the app store.
- The Wall Street Journal has 200,000 subscribers on iPad and Kindle. Sounds impressive, until you remember there are 30 million iPad and Kindle owners. Less than 1% takes a subscription.
- The iPhone 5 will not have NFC payments. As far as I’m concerned this is good; the current NFC (Near-Field Communications) for payments are too dependent on the user having a credit card, and possibly expensive terminals. One source said that the lack of a standard made things even more difficult.
- Why Nokia failed: it wasted 2,000 manyears on several UI layers that didn’t work.
- Speaking of Nokia, it sold Qt’s commercial licensing. Nokia repeats that it will continue to develop Qt itself, but that commercial licensing is outside its core business. Since there was no outcry, I assume this sale doesn’t make much of a difference for Nokia’s Qt strategy: you can still write apps with it that will run on both Symbian and MeeGo. How important this is is another question entirely.
- Some kerfuffle about the Nitro JS engine in iOS 4.3: it only works in the browser. and not in apps that use the UIWebView component (such as PhoneGap). Firt probably has the right of it: it’s more like a missing feature or a bug than a deliberate attempt of Apple to throttle web apps. After all, Apple knows very well web apps are the future (see Safari’s general quality for proof).
- Have a tip for next week?
