At the moment, especially in the ACTUAL smartphone world, we have some new platforms emerging (and I'm including the iPhone here really) - we've got quite a bit of embedded linux coming through (Maemo, Android) and the stripped back OSX on the iPhones has some unixy bits at its' heart.
These OSs come from a long line of OS cores stretching way way WAY back to when a single monolithic machine used to service hundreds of people who interacted through dumb terminals, sharing CPU time and resources with everybody else. I studied IT just at the tail end of this era, just before the Uni I was at replaced the VAX systems we were using with clusters of the latest Sun workstations.
Crucially, the Unix OS core these huge machines used to run persisted. This case-hardened core is now in these smartphones, so although the stuff on top will probably remain a little flaky in some OSs, the core should be relatively solid.
"Feature Phone" OSs had the problem that their OS core wasn't up to the task: Symbian's issue was that Series 60 was frankly shite (although my UIQ handsets were pretty bad for crashes as well).
As for blackberry? Well, I've used a Pearl, and frankly it's the clunkiest horror I've come across, but I couldn't comment on the stability of the platform as I couldn't bear to use it for more than 5 minutes... yuk.
I think smartphones will actuall get pretty reliable - and this is coming from a mobile phone software test engineer of 7 years industry experience, where I saw Feature Phone OS platforms stretched to their capacity in terms of what they were being asked to do.
Perhaps what we finally have here is a convergence of hardware and software: hardware fast enough to run full blown OSs, and software which can finally be in your hand and survive to perform some complex and useful computing tasks.
I think this is a good time - but maybe not for existing manufacturers: who wants another smartphone every 12 months? If the hardware is surviving, and the OS is patched with updates issued (e.g. Apple) to get you the latest version (minus new H/W features of course) then maybe we'll look to keep our handsets much longer, so less profit there.
We live in interesting times. And yes, it does feel like Apple kicked the shit out of the encumbents and forced them to do something... esp Nokia, who still haven't formed a coherent strategy. Oh, and SE, who appear to be falling off the edge of the world.
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Next gen less reliable... maybe not?
At the moment, especially in the ACTUAL smartphone world, we have some new platforms emerging (and I'm including the iPhone here really) - we've got quite a bit of embedded linux coming through (Maemo, Android) and the stripped back OSX on the iPhones has some unixy bits at its' heart.
These OSs come from a long line of OS cores stretching way way WAY back to when a single monolithic machine used to service hundreds of people who interacted through dumb terminals, sharing CPU time and resources with everybody else. I studied IT just at the tail end of this era, just before the Uni I was at replaced the VAX systems we were using with clusters of the latest Sun workstations.
Crucially, the Unix OS core these huge machines used to run persisted. This case-hardened core is now in these smartphones, so although the stuff on top will probably remain a little flaky in some OSs, the core should be relatively solid.
"Feature Phone" OSs had the problem that their OS core wasn't up to the task: Symbian's issue was that Series 60 was frankly shite (although my UIQ handsets were pretty bad for crashes as well).
As for blackberry? Well, I've used a Pearl, and frankly it's the clunkiest horror I've come across, but I couldn't comment on the stability of the platform as I couldn't bear to use it for more than 5 minutes... yuk.
I think smartphones will actuall get pretty reliable - and this is coming from a mobile phone software test engineer of 7 years industry experience, where I saw Feature Phone OS platforms stretched to their capacity in terms of what they were being asked to do.
Perhaps what we finally have here is a convergence of hardware and software: hardware fast enough to run full blown OSs, and software which can finally be in your hand and survive to perform some complex and useful computing tasks.
I think this is a good time - but maybe not for existing manufacturers: who wants another smartphone every 12 months? If the hardware is surviving, and the OS is patched with updates issued (e.g. Apple) to get you the latest version (minus new H/W features of course) then maybe we'll look to keep our handsets much longer, so less profit there.
We live in interesting times. And yes, it does feel like Apple kicked the shit out of the encumbents and forced them to do something... esp Nokia, who still haven't formed a coherent strategy. Oh, and SE, who appear to be falling off the edge of the world.