Smartphone Market Share
Wed Jan 10, 2007 · 301 words

I'm really excited about the iPhone. Finally a mobile device that looks great, tackles some serious UI problems with fresh ideas and sports a “real” operating system, made by the same house as the HW to boot (although the specs on that one are still nowhere to be found). They could've dropped the camera to maybe squeeze some extra battery life out of it, but never mind. Got me excited about mobile app development again! A couple of things I didn't quite get:

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The mobile phone market - 952 million units. Yeah, but how many of those were actually smartphones? Hard to find any exact evidence, but Symbian reports shipping 37 mil units in 2006 and they're almost 73 % of the whole smartphone market. In other words, smartphones sell waaay less than digital cameras. Frankly, I'm quite surprised they'd let this kind of bug slip into the Keynote.

CalDAV support. One of the biggest reasons why companies buy expensive Nokia Communicators with even more expensive Exchange servers is that they provide an end-to-end “cross platform” (mobile + desktop) solution. OK, you can make Exchange email work over IMAP, but what about collaborative services, ie calendars? Apple will be putting CalDAV support into Leopard server, but to this day there's not a single CalDAV client for mobiles out there. Would've been nice if he'd touch on this subject, or at least showed a glimpse of the client running. Especially since 3'rd party software will apparently not be supported on the iPhone.

Good show otherwise. Apple TV looks really cool too. Thinking of buying one just for the sake of trying to make it work without iTunes (although I'm sure someone will have had it figured out by the end of this week).

One things's for sure - WWDC's gonna be awesome!


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