there’s an article over at the nytimes that goes over the fact that some|a lot|all pc manufactures are entering the phone business. good thing or bad thing, i’m not sure. i’m more on the indifferent side of things related to cell phones considering i use my cell phone for voice communications only. data plans are cost prohibitive for me to be hip, cool, and part of the in crowd. playing with my friends’ iphone is kind of a treat in the same manner that going to a friend’s house in the late 80s to play nintendo was a treat.
back on topic, maybe it’s me but it seems that each time the pc industry as a whole enters a new market, nothing terribly interesting ever happens. the closest thing to the phone market is the pda market. in the late 90s and early 2000s, all the top tier pc manufacturers released a pda that was built around microsoft’s windows derivative-name-of-the-month (i think ibm was the only one to oem palm os) and every single pda looked the same and had the same hardware characteristics. the computer companies were lazy not designing (and differentiating) their own product, using some generic microsoft reference hardware/specs to build a pda. the same can sort of be said about the mp3 player market that everyone jumped on once apple legitimized the market. can the same be said about the relatively young phone market? from window shopping, the windows mobile devices already look and feel the same. will google’s android provide some variety to consumers?
