Palm's feeble attempts to sell Pre's with those alien chick ads (don't tell me she's human, she looks bizarre) ads aren't going to go anywhere. Palm's dead. Sorry. Too little, too late. They should just adopt Android and concentrate on devices, if anything at all.

Microsoft, they're just coasting until they can strong-arm device manufacturers into exclusivity deals and force everyone else out of business or into niches. Our only hope is the light gleaming off Balmer's bald head will ruin the Power Point presentation and no one will give in.

Nokia, they don't give a shit about North America. As long as they're dominant in the rest of the world who cares about us, Canada + USA < .5 G people!!!

Brew MP – as long as Obama is footing the bill to keep people working I guess it'll live on. As soon as it has to show a profit say bye-bye.

Bada – WTF?! Same goes for Maemo. And Access OS. I wish these companies would quit dicking around and get behind one FOSS mobile OS (Android?) and make it kick ass!!! At least Intel got smart and dropped Moblin onto the “community” before it became a boat anchor for them. They should have gotten on the Android wagon though (or Google on the Moblin wagon if you prefer).

PS: Google uses Java as much as Python and more then anything else. GWT is written in Java for Java!!! App Engine supports Python and Java (actually, it supports Java byte-code, so any language compiler that produces java byte-code is supported by Google's app engine).

Also have you sent your email to Palm, Apple, HTC, Nokia, Google and RIM yet? Telling them to stop all this silly smartphone development because your WAP phone is just simply good enough.

Log in every time: no (persistent cookies are supported)

Off line: I don't think so, but besides Bell's inability to provide a consistent coverage in a major city my browser/phone is always online!

And don't start me on Nokia, between QT, Symbian and Maemo they can't even agree on a common system for own devices. (N97 = Symbian // N900 = Maemo). Honestly they should just pick one solution instead of promising to release and participate in further Symbian version. Anybody who used a PSion in the 90's will admit it was cool in 1997. Are you still using Windows 95? Of course not. Technology moves on. How many accounting packages are still being written in COBOL? Exactly SQL and Oracle database are the way to go, we moved on, so should the mobile phone makers.

At the very least, RIM is only pushing out one OS. That should make it a lot easier for them to move onto a BSD / *Nix platform or risk being left behind like Palm, WinMo, and even your chavvy Nokia.

The Java install base is huge. The community is very active. There's strong corporate support. There's no international standards org that can be lobbied by Microsoft into perverting Java for their own use (MOF a US judge flat-out told MS to layoff the Java perversions). And there's so thing as a malloc() function!!!

Btw, QT in this context refers to Trolltech's (now Nokia's) cross-platform C toolkit. If you've used KDE you've seen QT in action.

The “HATE” on Java is simply down to the fact that building your operating system on it is a very slow and very old way of doing things in an a hyperactive market like mobility. Last summer, Boy Genius Report referred to it as “an incredibly miserable Java OS with so much security and encryption and smoke-blowing APIs” .. “Their OS architecture is fantastic, their use of security is what makes them so trustworthy. But, as each handset release comes closer and closer, people start to see the bigger picture. And that’s the fact that RIM’s OS is more than antiquated, it’s borderline laughable.”

It's not only about being able to run Flash or QT, it's about making sure your OS meets existing customer demands. A WebKit browser will be nice , but only if it meets HTML5 or at the very least HTML4.01 standards. Stripping out core functionality like AJAX, CSS and XML support doesn't make it standards compliant. There is a YouTube app for the BlackBerry and it's using the same 3gs video codex standards that most phones do including the iPhone and 1.5 Androids, which means only a small portion of all the YouTube videos are available but it's entirely up to YouTube to respond to customer demand for those devices. In the case of the iPhone it was a obvious requirement to it's user to see skateboarding dogs and idiots getting kicked in the nuts. This forced Google's hand and became part of the original iPhone applications. To this day I'm not sure I've ever heard of RIM leaning on any content provider or application developer for application. They've pretty much sat back and waited for devs to jump aboard. They did make a plea last year by offering cash incentives, but after the initial headline, I never heard anything again.

The BB Storm does most things I need it do while I'm on the move. The exchange email support through the BES is by far the best in the industry, and I have tried a lot of other solutions. However the issue is that all of the apps I enjoy using right now might not even be around if RIM keeps loosing developers to platforms like Android and the iPhone's version of OS X. I recently got wind that a social networking start up had it's Android app donated by helpful volunteers, but have had to hire a full time BlackBerry developer to roll a much needed BlackBerry app. Stories like this prove just what a pain in the ass it can be to support the BB users.

Also, WAP browser ?! Those 2 words should not be used together in the same sentence as it sort of implies some kind of web browsing experience which it clearly isn't. I suggest: WAP Gopher. Yeah, that's more like it.

Until BB brings out that rumoured WebKIT browser, it will continue to still be a sub par smart phone when compared with Android phones or the iPhone itself.

Adi

But I don't get what all the hate on Java is?!? We can't all be Nokia and buy QT, some people need to rely on existing standards.