> And RIM’s BlackBerry was still the most popular smartphone in the world.
If your world was the USA. Symbian/S60 was the dominant smartphone OS.
> What Miner and Google gambled on, and it seems bizarre in retrospect, was that the carriers and the manufacturers would be good at customizing and improving the user experience of the base operating system.
No, the problem was that the available OS's had huge (leave it to the handset vendor) holes (Symbian), or that their competitors had control of the available 'easyish but hard' options (Nokia dominated Symbian). Or that the other options were crap (Windows Mobile), or required S/W engineering experience which was not easily obtained (generic Linux).
The miracle of Android was that though it had some gaps in it's implementation, was good enough, and sponsored by a somewhat benign entity (at the time).
However, the reason for the handset manufacturers trying to differentiate, no matter how incompetently, or not was that the problem that Android solved also holds a curse. That is that the handset manufacturers do not want to repeat the PC experience of comoditizing the hardware market - What has happened before will happen again - unless we try to retard things.
The only way Google can reduce manufacturer freedom is to become truly non-free, on the day that happens, Android will fork.
Yep exactly, and that was why the Symbian Alliance formed. It was to prevent microsoft from doing what they did to the PC world. This is also one of the reasons ARM thrived instead of Intel.
The other lesson that is still being battled is patents, Internet protocol is essentially free. Wireless is not.
The other main difference is carriers, they are the gatekeepers to the valuable, yet resource limited spectrum that mobile phones need and therefore have a much larger control over the value chain than ISPs do for the Wired Internet.
NO! The Symbian Alliance Formed because Nokia wanted to control its competitors to such an extent to make them never able to best Nokia. They did that by doing closed versions of Symbian that were never open to the Symbian Alliance.
That happened later, Symbian spun out of Psion. The first Symbian based phone was the Ericsson R380. The biggest difference between all the members were that the ones who took control of a UI built up more control. These were effectively Nokia and Docomo, hence why Symbian was used so much in Japan on their "feature phones" and S60 became strong.
UIQ used by many of the other manufacturers was never developed by any of them and was effectively an orphaned UI company.
Only Japanese Symbian phones would qualify as featurephones because they lacked the ability to install native apps.
The rest of the Symbian devices were real smartphones, for example the popular N95. (They didn't have QWERTY keyboards, but that doesn't make a smartphone.)
> And RIM’s BlackBerry was still the most popular smartphone in the world.
If your world was the USA. Symbian/S60 was the dominant smartphone OS.
> What Miner and Google gambled on, and it seems bizarre in retrospect, was that the carriers and the manufacturers would be good at customizing and improving the user experience of the base operating system.
No, the problem was that the available OS's had huge (leave it to the handset vendor) holes (Symbian), or that their competitors had control of the available 'easyish but hard' options (Nokia dominated Symbian). Or that the other options were crap (Windows Mobile), or required S/W engineering experience which was not easily obtained (generic Linux).
The miracle of Android was that though it had some gaps in it's implementation, was good enough, and sponsored by a somewhat benign entity (at the time).
However, the reason for the handset manufacturers trying to differentiate, no matter how incompetently, or not was that the problem that Android solved also holds a curse. That is that the handset manufacturers do not want to repeat the PC experience of comoditizing the hardware market - What has happened before will happen again - unless we try to retard things.
The only way Google can reduce manufacturer freedom is to become truly non-free, on the day that happens, Android will fork.