Nokia's answer to iPhone - Tube

I am happy to see the detailed video review of Nokia's Tube (5800 XpressMusic) in Engadget.

Like everyone, i have been a loyal Nokia fan for years and off late, my skepticism on Nokia's smartphones was also clarified after I bought a Nokia E61. My E61 has been the best phone ever I had got till date. And Symbian s60 is the best OS ever.

Looking at the videos, I am sure Nokia's Tube will be a huge success, if not for touchscreen, but at least for the features packed in it and for usability sake.

You may refer to this link to read through the specifications of this phone.

Silverlight vs Flash - War for mobile web dominance

Microsoft (Silverlight) and Adobe (Flash) are trying desperately to push their respective technologies for developing RIA (Rich Internet Applications).

Both seem to be taking this further ahead to mobile devices. Recently, Microsoft had signed a deal with Nokia to integrate Silverlight on Nokia's latest S60 based smart phones.

Adobe though having a dominance in the PC space must be doubly worried after Steve's comments on why Flash may not suited for iPhone.

I found this post from Robert Scoble providing interesting insight on why Apple may feel that Flash is not good for iPhone. More than the article, I found the user comments more intreseting.

Also, it got clear to me from the user comments that Apple was trying to port Flash 8 (and not Flash Lite - stripped down version) onto the iPhone.

What makes you browsing experience in iPhone and Nokia N/E series phones great ?

You should thank Webkit, the open source web browser engine*, for the wonderful browsing experience.

This what the Webkit home page has to say:

WebKit is an open source web browser engine. WebKit is also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the engine that's used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other OS X applications. WebKit's HTML and JavaScript code began as a branch of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE. This website is also the home of S60's S60 WebKit development.

Apart from Apple (as the Safari web browser in their Mac OS X, iPhone and iPod Touch) and Nokia (in their N and E series of phones), Google has also included Webkit as the default web browsing engine in its recently released Android platform for mobile devices.

In his post, Bob Cringely reasons as to why Webkit is such a strategic project for Apple and why it would also be the driver for the rumoured iTablet (you find my previous post questioning as to whether Apple's PDA would click or not ?).

You may also find it interesting to read this post by Om Malik about Webkit's rise to popularity. Gives you a quick round up of where webkit stands compared to its competition.

Webkit is still evolving (but fast) and has a long way to go before winning hearts of hardcore Opera Mini fans like myself :). Read this post in Wap Review to know why Opera Mini 4.0 is better than Webkit on a Nokia (and I completely agree with that).

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Web Browser Engine - This is the piece of software which downloads the html web page from the address specified by you, processes it and renders it back on the screen of the display device. The screen could be anything from your PC Monitor to an iPhone's touch screen.

Race for Linux based Mobile Operating System

Phew.. what a journey through the world of mobile internet devices, mobile web browsers and operating systems for mobile devices. I am referring to the link after link journey of mine that was spawned from the links given in this post by Schrep on Mozilla's plans for going mobile. Schrep talks about what are Mozilla's plans to take Firefox onto mobile devices. In his post he had given reference to Intel, Nokia and couple of other links pertaining to how mobile web was really taking off and that it justified Mozilla's focus for a mobile browser.

During this journey (browsing) today, one aspect is very clear, that is, there is this race towards coming up with a Linux based mobile operating system.

Let me elaborate more.

First, I read this interview of Matt Zimmerman (CTO of Ubuntu) where he explains about Ubuntu Mobile, an effort by Ubuntu to bring an Ubuntu flavor on mobile devices. He says that there is a possibility of mobile devices coming up with Ubuntu Mobile installed, as early as 2008!!!

Next I read about Nokia's Maemo initiative where they have come up with a framework for mobile internet devices built on top of any linux operating system running on any device (including mobile phones.. possibly).

Then I read this news on how ARM is trying to come up with a better version of Linux well suited for mobile devices. You can find more information about ARM Mobile Linux Platform here.

And then Intel has its own initiative on bringing Linux on mobile internet devices called Moblin.

And finally how can I forget about the rumoured Gphone which many say (like this latest news on Fotune and The Register) that it is Google's effort in bringing in their own Linux-based operating system for mobile devices.

So what do you think are the least common denominators from all the above news.

Linux is going to dominate the embedded device space:

Mobile phone vendors like Nokia, Motorola and Palm either have their versions of embedded Linux running on their phones and they are under development right now.

Its not just mobile phones but other devices like Internet Tabloids would also run on Linux.

And from my experience on set top boxes, I know Linux has made in-roads there as well.

Chipset Vendors are desperately trying to define a mobile platform based on Linux:

All mobile chipset vendors (like Intel, ARM, Broadcom, etc.) seem to be defining a Mobile Linux Platform where they are more than willing to provide support to the developer community in supporting their hardware. Reason, they see lot of potential for mobile devices and they want to make their platform developer friendly.. especially Linux friendly.

Today's browsing on internet has been very useful and given me a lot of perspective on mobile computing.