Grinds my gears: The decline of mobile phones

The mobile phone business is big. Really big. This in turn generates many competitors in the market for mobile phones. Arguably this is a good thing in terms of MS-style dominance, but bad in an other – it breeds fashion, style and battling statistics.

To some people, the only distinction between old and new handsets is how many features they have, how many different fascias you can buy for it, or how many mega-pixels can the camera capture. Some of my friends have even bought hugely expensive handsets as they looked ‘purty’.

This has meant that some mobile phones have merely morphed into a fashion accessory rather than an object of engineering brilliance. After all the technological advances in voice transmission, it can simple come down to how nice it looks.

Voice-over-IP is one of the best leaps in technology as far as phones go that we’ll see in along time, but why do no phone support it? It could be because each new phone that comes to market is backed by one or a few networks that try they’re best at locking out all competition. This is where my rant this evening lies

Smartphones are the future, but phone locking features heavily in all Windows Mobile OS phones. Devices running this operating system have a bootstrapping-style chip which prevents not only the OS from being replaced, but also forbid the change of network (easily).

You may say that this is only just Microsoft that are being anal about their Operating system’s security but no… Apple’s new iPhone not only block OS and network changes, but they lock out all third party apps from being installed. This is a step down a path that is very difficult to come back from in my opinion. The mobile phone’s future will be locked, proprietary, expensive and slow to progress if this style of OS implementation keeps going.

In my eyes, the future is with a small fully open sourced phone called openMoko. Not only is it stylish, but any programmer or hacker is able to change any part of it’s OS design and functionality. I can’t wait to get my hands on one.

To change the mentality of all phone manufacturers, a major mobile phone producer like Nokia would need to produce a phone which was completely open source and be successful with it. All the hard-nut Linux-followers would buy it, and perfectly normal, Joe Doe users like me would too.

An open source mobile phone future is a much better one – locking for MS phones yes, but also the choice for a free and unrestricted platform with a huge and promising future.

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