Until I can use the same software I use on my two computers, on a mobile phone, I don’t consider the “smart phone” to be a general purpose computing device. Paul Graham has a similar metric, he wants the device to be capable of hosting it’s own development environment.
Graham, among many others, has done a good job of describing how Apple has crippled the iPhone in this regard by locking down the platform and imposing a broken app store model to “publish” software that runs on it. Instead of re-hashing the ecosystem issues surrounding mobile phone platforms, I have a technical wish list:
- Hardware and software feature parity with best smart phones out there:
- Quality touch interface, high resolution display, good battery life, all the right radio hardware (GPS, GSM, Wifi, UMTS), sufficient storage and CPU power
- Software to support standard phone use-cases out of the box: turn-by-turn navigation, tethering, web browsing, full multimedia support, camera functions, etc.
- The same Open Source UNIX-like operating system I use on other platforms: this happens to be Linux
- A familiar, quality package system like Debian’s.
- The ability to cross-compile and run any application I could use on my PC (this implies X11 support).
- Support for standard peripherals (USB host/otg).
Neither the iPhone, nor any Android-based phone meet these criteria.
The Nokia N900 comes very close, but it’s still missing software support for some standard smart phone use cases. Although I’m a bit disappointed about the Maemo -> Meego move throwing dpkg out in favor of RPM, I still have hope for the Nokia, and I’m interested to see them finish the software (Hi Edwin).
Finally, I want hardware support for an external display. That might sound weird, but if a phone is really a general purpose portable computing device, then you should be able to “dock” it at your desk, like one does a laptop. Maybe I don’t “get” smart phones, but I prefer the view that the world is wrong.
Anyone with me on this? I would appreciate some comments.
Update: The Nokia N9 prototype running Meego seems promising. I guess we’ll see when it’s launched.
{ 1 } Comments
Definitely a good wish list.
You are right, the N900 is very very close to this list. There is a opensource project working at getting the usb host part working, but only for devices that need very little power from USB, like I assume a keyboard might work.
On the other hand I am dissapointed that OVI Maps are still at version 1.0 instead of 3.0 on my N82 where OVI Maps are 100 times better.
Other than I can’t really complain, except that I am sometimes jealous of the cool apps that are out there for android phones…*grin*
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