OSNews

cute editorial eugenia, atleast if you wanted a flamefest

the question one must first ask oneself is, what is a smartphone. is it a phone with pda like abilitys or a pda with phone electronics? if its the former then the first smartphone was a nokia i think, a big brick that you folded out to get access to a keyboard. if its the latter then it just recently that they have shown up (blackberry, palm treo).

now then lets look at the diffrent brand of "phones" on the market:
-qtek have some, all wince based.
-hp is starting to make some by mutating their pdas. here we are talking wince again as basicly thats what have allways been used for the ipaq (atleast that i can recall)
-palmone to is mutating their pdas by sticking phone electronics into them. they use palmos but palmsource is looking into using linux as the backend for its next gen palmos. and it complicates matters that there is 2 diffrent corporations, one that makes the hardware, one that makes the os as one dont know what os plamone will use in the future.
-you have blackberry, a newcommer (and i dont know what they are using).
-nokia have some, first using their own os and then going symbian (that one can argue is based on the existing nokia phone os).
-sonyericsson have the Pxxx line. they are running symbian. but its the only SE series of phones that use it.
-siemens have none that i can think of (unless the symbian based ones can be called a smartphone).
-motorola have some that use wince and have done some development on using linux in phones (this was stared before the smartphone got "defined").

those are what i can think of that have smartphones out.

still, linux on the pda is going strong, and thats where qtopia was first aimed. sharp have a series of pdas based on linux and using qtopia (alltho they originaly used a inhouse os). i dont recall if any of those have phone ability. but as phones move closer to pda and pda moves closer to phone then it may well be that linux can simply jump the gap when the pda and the phone becomes one and the same.

the thing is that there isnt any newcomers thats pushing linux, but there are establised brands that are looking into using linux to speed their development (motorola, sharp, palm). others are going the easy route and licence wince, slap it into a device with some phone electronics and thats it (qtek, hp).

the thing is that unlike the desktop pc, the phone and the pda have allways pushed features over os. hell, the only reason that wince started showing up on phones was that microsoft allowed the hardware companys to make changes to it that would would be unheard of if it was windows on a desktop pc.

i allso want to poke that comment about the desktop war being lost with the release of win95. i dont think so. more and more tasks can be done on the linux desktop. and we are seeing people moving/returning to the mac. the thing is that if all you want is a desktop with office, mail, browser and im ability then a preinstalled linux box can serve you well. people as less asking about "can i run this app?" and more about "can i access this page, my mail or these files? can i do task X?". basicly the desktop pc is turning into a overgrown pda