Platform Battles and Ecosystem Battles ...
<< Personally, I think Nokia's labeling of Asha full touch handsets as "smartphones" will not be widely accepted by the world at large. If nothing else, it's going to make Elop's stated goal of establishing Windows Phone as the third ecosystem that much harder! :) >>
Nokia is fighting the smart device 'ecosystem battle' with Windows Phone, not the new full touch Series 40 Asha 'smartphone' platform and application user interface (UI) which is supported by the latest iteration of the venerable Series 40 Developer Platform 2.0 and associated developer toolkits that enable development of Java apps and web apps for full touch 'smartphones' (using Nokia's terminology) to provide a 'smarter experience' (using Nokia's terminology).
Distinctions somewhat blur between OS and platforms (and even ecosystems), and some have said that JavaME is an OS. It is a platform and a run time environment used by several of the RTOS (Real Time Operating Systems). Sava JE was one of several 'OS' utilizing or targeting Java ME.
Samsung's Bada (bada) was marketed successfully as a smartphone OS which it really is not, at least by itself. It's middleware with a kernel configurable architecture and it uses the Nucleus RTOS which Samsung also used/uses in its feature phones. It is or was middleware, an application framework with user interface layer which runs on top of Mentor Graphics' Nucleus RTOS. It was/is supposedly capable of supporting a Linux kernel but I'm not sure it ever did, and Samsung planned to use it to fight an ecosystem battle although they did not get too far with that and it's evidently been subsumed by Tizen, the MeeGo successor.
Me? I've always felt that bada was an ersatz smartphone platform -- a smarter feature phone platform. I feel the same way about full touch Ashas.
Will some or all of the research agencies that keep smartphone scores (ABI, Canalys, Gartner IDC, Strategy Analytics, et al) track full touch Ashas as a smartphone platform? I dunno. Not sure I care provided they can compete effectively and profitably with other low end to mid-tier full touch smartphones. There is no universally accepted definition of a smartphone so if Nokia wants to call full touch Ashas 'smartphones', or market them as 'smartphones' which they started doing in Q3 -- let them have at it.
Cheers,
- Eric - |
