PDA: June 2008 Archives

Well, other than paying for it when purchasing a Palm or a Treo, that is. That's why I was startled that Apple is going to charge users for an OS upgrade to the iPod Touch:

WWDC Apple will release version 2.0 of the iPhone operating system in early July, CEO Steve Jobs has revealed. Existing iPhone owners will get it for free - iPod Touch owners, however, will have to cough up $10.

iPhone 2.0 offers the ability to view and edit iWork documents - files from Apple's own Pages, Numbers and Keynote apps. More users, we suspect, will make use of the upcoming OS' ability to handle Office documents.

So, phone users get it for free, non-phone users have to pay? Of course, because Apple has total control over iPod market. AT&T would never agree to a pay upgrade for a phone, since they're billing those customers monthly.

The grass looks less and less green when it comes to switching to Apple.

As much as I enjoyed the look and feel of my T-Mobile Dash, I couldn't take the fact that, because it was Winders Mobile, it re-booted itself several times a day. No surprise this statistic:

Smartphones running Linux look set to become far more commonplace within the next five years, market watcher ABI Research has forecast.

The firm's VP, Stuart Carlaw, reckons that Linux will feature on 23 per cent of smartphones by 2013. He added that that share of the market will put the open source operating system in second place in the smartphone popularity stakes, putting it behind Symbian and ahead of Microsoft's Windows Mobile worldwide.

Combine the move to Linux by companies like Nokia with Palm going to Linux for the next version of its OK and perhaps we'll see fewer WinMobile phones.