This weeks biggest losers were Intel, which will have to face up to the failure of MeeGo, and Google, which is facing some revitalized competition from Nokia and Microsoft in Mobile as well as a humiliating plunge in market-share at Verizon now that the iPhone is available to those customers. Both firms will recover, no doubt.
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| Yes, for the moment. Picture from KniBaron |
This endless battle of the tech giants is great to watch, and great for consumers too because what's happened here is real innovation. Windows Phone 7 has all the makings of a great mobile O/S, except, perhaps, for cut and paste. It's also a big step up in design and usability over the iPhone, and once multi-tasking arrives it will be the equal of Android and the iPhone, if not better.
HP showed some cool thinking earlier this week too. The hardware, release date and lack of price data were all disappointments, given the moving target they are chasing, but there was vision in software and evidence of execution skills in spades.
The ability to transfer applications between phones and the tablet and back again was impressive. Lots of companies have talked and thought about how phones, tablets, and PCs should work together, this is the first demo I've seen of how it really can work. And the extension of this to PCs and laptops could make WebOS a powerhouse in mobile devices.
Contrast this flurry of real innovation with what's going on the network operator side of the equation: lots of marketing and fluff mixed with a bit of price gouging for good measure. The network operators are busy tweaking their offerings but only at the margins. In the core the same vision still stands: high prices for poor service with lots of strings attached.
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