Wait unitl the 4 new UI's for series 60 are released.
The replacment for the 7650 is here... THE SVP!
Clearly M$ are a force to be reckoned with. They have all sorts of advantages that mere mortals can only aspire to ... familiarity for all those people that use desktop computers is just one of them.
Symbian has a bit of a head start with the existing phone makret - most strong players from the handset world having a share helps. Indeed, it was only the threat of the Msft on the horizon that made them all club together and do something about it (choosing Symbian in the first place and then solving some of the many sw problems that existed with the platform).
But where is the Symbian plug in for Wondoze or Linux (think about it). Where is the army of sw developers that Microsoft mobilises at the raise of a finger. Where is the strategy to neutralise the threat off .NET (or at least learn how to interoperate with it). A very large proportion of the business world is currently working out how to deliver their core service via this sort of infrastructure ... making it pretty easy for new services to be developed for the mobile device.
When you start to look into the tsunami coming ... where most significant services are delivered via a .NET or web services framework ... we all better stop kidding ourselves that Symbian wins as a result of the involvement of the phone device manufacturers. If the mobile community cant work out how to get interesting services into the hands of people that will actually use them ... then someone else will and it will probably come on the back of a Msft powered device (coz that appears a bit easier to some).
The reality is that we need to innovate like hell ... lift our heads out of the sand and look at what people really need. And that means that the Operators have to take a tumble to themselves and stop choking the market and the developers need to get a decent vision - stop fiddling about with silly stand alone utilities and embrace the notion that this is a connected (small) computer with limited memory functionality ... so shift some of the smarts needed back into the (web) services infrastructure (rather than moaning about a lack of memory).
I can see I am in danger of lathering at the mouth ... so </rant>. And BTW, I have a lot of respect for Msft ... just dont personally feel like endlessly upgrading my desktop sw to fill Bills pockets with cash (and that is something they have an awful lot of - cash).
Overlooking the MS good/evil debate for now (do we REALLY want to get into that here?), I want to go back to the '7650 is not a PDA' thing.
P.ersonnal
D.igital
A.assistant
Now, Personnal, hmm. its my phone, not anybody else, so Tick one.
Digital, yup. Its a digital device so tick two.
Assitant, well it certainly helps me! remembers all my phone numbers, address's emails etc, stores notes, plays games, Hell it does a damn site more than the last few PDA's ive owned.
So, YES. The 7650 is most definately a PDA. It is also a phone. Its a bl00dy good bit of kit too.
It has amazing potential, im all for pushing a product till it bleeds, there are things that we can do with the 7650 that nobody would ever have imagined when designing it.
I think its this expandability that is the key here. Ever since phones had the ability to download new software they stopped being a passive piece of consumer kit and moved into the computer/palmtop/pda area.
You could argue for years about the catagory it should fit into, but they never solved that one with the palmtop/laptop portable debate so dont bother.