I generally tend to stick to technical side of things in my blog, but yesterday news around mobile were just too many and too relevant not to warrant a blog post. You know about the stories, I guess, so this is just a short summary, with a couple of comments.
Microsoft buys Nokia Phones
Nokia has come up with some nice phones, but was really struggling as a company. Microsoft gave them cash some time ago, and is giving more now. Plus buying the mobile division. So Microsoft is now a hardware company. Well, it was already producing the Surface tablet (with very little success so far), but this is a very significant change.
As Thurrott says, now Microsoft will have full control and responsibility of Windows Phone (twitter.com/thurrott/status/375226961943334912). Risky. Also if I were a Microsoft stockholder I won't be happy with the prospect of having as CEO the person who "ditched" Nokia. How will this affect Windows Phone 8 and WinRT market share overall is hard to tell.
1 Billion Android Activations
Google has announced 1 billion activations, that is devices known to Google Play and other Google services. This doesn't include Amazon Kindles and some of the low-cost models that come with specific app stores other than Google Play Store.
I think this is an impressive result. To me it marks the day the entire world entered the mobile era. Of course, this is great given we are very close to shipping Delphi for Android, with the ability to create applications for the majority of those billions of phones.
It is not a Windows world any more, which is why Microsoft is betting more and more on mobile. Nice to have the best Windows "native" development tool that is becoming the best Android "native" development tool.
KitKat and Marketing
The other unexpected news for Android was the announcement the the next release (technically 4.4) will be called once more with a cookie name, this time starting with the latter K. This was expected. But picking a commercial name like KitKat in partnership with Nestle, well that was really unexpected. I think it would be great to see how much money was involved in the deal.
Anyway, I encourage you to have a look at www.kitkat.com/. Impressive marketing spin, presenting a sweet at a phone. And some good fun at Apple. More seriously, we'll get ready to work on 4.4.
iOS 7 Coming Soon?
Meanwhile Apple could not stand still and is pushing their September 10th event. Likely the announcement of a new iPhone 5, along with iOS 7. We'll see what comes out.
Rest assured, Delphi is ready for the mobile future.