Russ comments on yesterday's Salon article about the Mobile phone wars. An excerpt:

I'm not sure if I agree with the article's take that the HTML browsers are somehow going to make or break the phones... that's thinking of cellphone's like they were PCs, and that's not a good comparision at all.

This is true, and I think it's actually part of the reason why Microsoft has had such a hard time getting into the market. Remember the first versions of WinCE? They looked just like a mini-Windows. They were not at all useful for handhelds. Not until Pocket PC (CE 3.0) did Microsoft get it right, and they had to copy a lot of Palm's approach, and they had to simplify a lot of things (The advantages and disadvantages of affordances also apply in this case, maybe more so than in others). With phones, it's going to be a similar curve, but they may never get there, since at Russ says it's not a good idea to talk about phones as if they were PCs. Except, maybe, in Japan, where so many people actually use their cellphones for browsing instead of using a PC.

Plus: The cover story in this week's Economist is "Computing's new shape: Smartphones and Handhelds."

Categories: technology
Posted by diego on November 22 2002 at 1:04 PM