I don’t write about the iPhone that often – Skydeck’s goal is to support every phone in the world – but it has had an extraordinary impact on the industry and I have a few predictions.
Lots of people have predictions though, so let me review my past performance before I ask you to take me seriously.
zzzPhone is a brave attempt to take the build-to-order model pioneered by Dell for PCs and apply it to the cell phone market. Several blogs have covered them and the New York Times picked up the story today.
This is the kind of innovation that open access makes possible. The market for the zzzPhone today is probably no more than a few tens of thousands of units worldwide, so it wouldn’t make sense for a major carrier to do a deal with them. But zzzPhone doesn’t need permission from a cell phone company to launch; their phones will work on any GSM network, including AT&T and T-Mobile in the US.
But even with open access, there are big challenges ahead for zzzPhone. PCs are not like cell phones and the Dell model may not succeed.
PDAs are all but extinct, low-end digital cameras are dying off, and mp3 players and even watches are threatened. A lot of people in our industry predicted it; many consumers prefer to carry a ‘Swiss Army’ cell phone instead.
So why are so many people carrying two cell phones?
A new survey by In-Stat reports that about one quarter of the “career age” (age 30-65) cell phone users in the US carry more than one handset, and that this number has grown by over 40% in the past year. That’s more than 20 million people.
Skydeck can confirm this. We asked 1,000 cell phone subscribers* over the age of 18 how many phones they carry, and 14% said two or more. That means 30 million Americans have at least two cell phones.
Skydeck isn’t working with Google. We’ve read the same articles and heard the same rumors that you have. So these are just educated guesses. But everybody else is doing it, so why not us?
Steve Jobs just announced on the Apple blog that Apple will release an SDK for the iPhone in February, subject to some form of digital signing scheme (like Symbian Signed).
We hope that this isn’t limited to dashboard widgets. We hope that all we have to do to get an application signed is to prove that it is not malicious or harmful to the network (as opposed to getting commercial approval from Apple and/or AT&T). Assuming this is the case, it’s another important step towards open access.
Posted by Jason on Aug 8, 2007 in Phones | Comments | Share
A few months ago I wrote about Motorola’s embrace of open platforms. Several people pointed out that Motorola had never committed to releasing SDKs for writing native Linux apps, suggesting that the company’s investment in Linux was only for the benefit of Motorola and its carrier customers.
They had been hinting at it for a long time, but yesterday at Linuxworld Motorola confirmed that they will be opening up to third-party developers. Cynics may focus on the term ’select developers’, but I think this is consistent with a phased release of a major development platform.
Motorola also announced a set of web development tools based around WebKit, which represents another step towards open standards, although in this case they’re playing catch-up to Nokia and Apple. Motorola continue their campaign against vowels: collectively, their Java, Web, and Linux development platforms are now called MOTOMAGX.
Finally, they confirmed that the Razr2 will be the first Linux-based phone from Motorola to ship in North America. (You can buy an unlocked Ming at CompUSA or Amazon.com, but no carrier sells it.)
It’s not on sale yet, but we got our hands on our first Razr2 on Monday night. We don’t normally do this, but we thought we owed it to the gadget fiends out there to post the unboxing …
