Mobile OS Wars And Casualties
If you follow the mobile market, then you know that there are essentially 4 operating systems that are really making wavies. The two oldest are the Blackberry, which is closed source and private, and Symbian, which was recently purchased by Nokia and made open source and free. Both of these systems are rather old school. Their basic code was written before the days of social networking and user generated content. The last two are the newest, the Apple iPhone, which is closed and private, and Google’s Android, which is open source and free. Both of these two systems were freshly created with the newest Internet applications in mind.
There are lots of other programming languages for mobile devices that you just don’t hear much about anymore. Sometimes you hear about the open source effort of Linmo, a kind of open source Linux for smartphones, mentioned in the same sentence as the Google Android, which borrowed heavily from it. But without a big company and an even bigger marketing effort, it is unlikely that it will be able to compete with other free, solid operating systems. The other big loser is Java for mobile phones, also called J2ME. It has dropped in importance so much that Handango, a top distributor of mobile applications, will not even distribute free J2ME applications anymore. Ouch!
Tags: Android, Apple, Blackberry, Google, iPhone, Nokia, Symbian