Hi all,
For a long time I’ve been frustrated by the people around me considering buying iPhones, Androids and Symbians without really understanding anything about these platforms and only judging popularity hypes.
The purpose of this article is to educate consumers, and explain what the inherent limitations of each platform are (and why they should buy an N900 instead).
My main mission is not even to convince people to buy the N900, but more to prevent them from spamming the world with more devices carrying the ‘bad’ platforms.
To have people vote with their money so that companies will see that the good platforms sell more than the bad platforms.
I invite anyone with a similar mission to refer people to that article, post links in other forums and blogs.
It seems Nokia isn’t investing much in marketing the N900, and maybe we can all do that for them.
If we educate our consumer friends, and maybe convince some journalists to publish the facts so that more consumers will know them, maybe we can help Nokia sell more, thus cause them to invest more effort in that platform.
Your article is so long it will only be read by people who already know how things work.
good point.
did you read it? do you intend to? do you have any suggestions how to solve that problem?
another problem is that it is much too technical, but that's what people need to know.. the reasons why one platform is much easier to develop applications for, thus possibly resulting in more third party applications.
good point.
did you read it? do you intend to? do you have any suggestions how to solve that problem?
I skimmed it. You could separate the technical stuff into a different article with anchors, and link to them when you need to justify something. A shorter version with lots of bullet points and simple decision->effect statements is what you need if you want the average consumer to understand.
There are 7 completely unnecessary paragraphs in the beginning. If you need an outline, do it in one paragraph, then get to the point.
one word of caution, though:
you make the argument that development for the iphoneOs / symbian is a costly process, requiring you to pay the platform provider just so you can distribute for that platform (the "certification problem").
until the Ovi store (finally) gets relaunched, it's still unclear how to deliver commercial apps for Maemo through "official" channels.
of course, this doesn't hinder OSS development which takes place on maemo.org extras, nor does it prevent commercial developers setting up their own repositories and payment systems. it's just something worth noting IMO.
thanks for letting me know.
the ovi store suxx (sounds too much like symbiansigned.com).
but that demonstrate my point, the ovi store is not part of the platform (unlike apple store), you can set up your won repository and provide links to it from normal web pages (not complex for a user to configure).
like what firefox did.
and if you're a developer with no web server and just a small app that took a week of work, you can distribute it through http://my-maemo.com/ which is also not part of the platform.
if my-maemo.com today doesn't provide developers a payment system (like the ovi store does), then tomorrow a your-maemo.com will rise to provide that service. (just like it can happen for windows mobile based phones)
so the point is, that in both windows mobile and maemo, an application is just an executable, and a developer can publish it without any limitation from the platform or the platform 'owner'.
as for symbian, there you can also distribute applications outside of ovi store, but you can't distribute them without certifying them.
