Benoit Schillings says open source is coming to a mobile handset near you. The Qtopia Greenphone by Trolltech brings the freedom of Linux to the cell phone. Fully open and customizable, the folks at Trolltech want to provide the environment and hardware, and allow the community to figure out what applications are relevant.
The big guys are thinking this way too. Both Motorola and Nokia have open source websites (http://opensource.motorola.com and http://opensource.nokia.com/).
The people that are building the hardware are giving us the tools to create and deliver applications to mobile devices.
Now, we just need to convince the carriers to allow us to deliver these ideas on their closed, locked-down, expensive networks. Not sure when that’s going to happen. Must be why everybody wants their cell phone to do WiFi (yeah, I’m going to get a Nokia E61 as well).
Ah well, we’re heading in the right direction . . . aren’t we?
We have a cool app that allows developers to bypass the carriers and deliver any data they want over any HTTP enabled network. We already have live demo's showing real time local search from a windows mobile GPS enabled phone. (The Lat/Long becomes part of the HTTP header stream). It works over any network that can carry HTTP and the client has Open API's for developers to extend.
Cheers,
Peter