TheOpenAnalyst

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While the Googlers want to talk today about improvements to GMail for mobile, there remains a serious concern for you to discuss this weekend.
Is Google really good at being part of an open source community?
There are three types of mobile source projects:
1. One-company projects. 2. Multiple-company projects. [...]

Vodafone never put much stock in open innovation, or tapping outsiders for ideas. It didn’t need to. The company, after all, had grown into the world’s biggest wireless telecom operator on its own. But with such interlopers as Google and Nokia starting to tromp on its turf, Vodafone became a convert. “We were a bit [...]

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Last week, I spent a lot of time with the folks from Symbian, the mobile operating system that Nokia (NYSE: NOK) paid $410 million for, only to turn around and donate the assets to an open-source foundation. What I wanted to know was how the employees—who were once programmed to make profits and [...]

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OpenMoko said it will not be making successors to its open source Neo FreeRunner smartphone.
Speaking at a conference in Switzerland, OpenMoko CEO Sean Moss-Pultz said the company will discontinue development on the next iteration of its Linux-based smartphone, as the FreeRunner only sold about 10,000 units. The company will focus [...]

OpenMoko’s work to develop an open-source smartphone is on the rocks.
Over the weekend, the company’s executive director, Sean Moss-Pulz, said that staff cuts would be implemented, and Ars Technica spotted a mailing list post from OpenMoko’s vice president of marketing, Steve Mosher, confirming that the successor to the FreeRunner is delayed, and might even have [...]

A startup called Rhomobile announced the first formal release of its dual-licensed, open-source framework for smartphones. Rhodes 1.0 enables “write-once” development, using HTML and Ruby, of native smartphone applications for iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and now Android, the company says.
Rhodes reduces development costs by “up to five times” by eliminating the need to develop [...]

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Informa Telecoms & Media has released a report saying that Android smartphone sales will outstrip iPhone sales by 2012, based on the idea that “open” handsets will do better than proprietary systems. For the same reason Informa predicts that Symbian’s decline?its share of the smartphone market was 49 percent last year, down from [...]

At this year’s GSMA Mobile World Congress, 3 ½ hours were devoted to the topic of “Mobilizing Open Source”, which was no doubt spurred in part by the increasing attention Google’s open-source mobile operating system, Android, has drawn. While open-source products have, for the most part, been pushed into a corner and untouched in the [...]

The big news from the GSMA Mobile World Congress this year: New phones using the Android, LiMo and Symbian open-source operating systems are rolling out in 2009.
What’s unusual is that it is not the handsets themselves that are creating the buzz so much as what is under the hood and invisible to the user, the [...]

Microsoft may do the unthinkable with Danger, the mobile software and services developer it purchased last year: Go open source.
Bloggers are abuzz about the possibility since one claims he received a query from a recruiter looking for a NetBSD developer to work on the Danger Sidekick mobile phone. Microsoft acquired Danger early last year.
Microsoft [...]