by Daniel Arroyo

Contributing Editor - WIIE

The days when your mobile phone was more like your watch than your PC are over. Mobile phones are no longer closed pieces of hardware with a fixed set of pre-loaded applications. The importance of 3^rd party applications adding after-market value to the product is increasing. At the heart of this are the different development platforms offered by different players in the wireless industry.

Let’s take a look at the most important ones and what they have (or don’t have) to offer.

Google’s Android

In an attempt to better control the distribution of its services (maybe also its ad distribution engine…), Google bought and is bringing to market yet another Linux-based mobile OS: Android.

In fact Google’s Android is more an application framework than an OS. The Linux kernel was probably chosen to power the application framework because of its open source nature and thus the lack of control and licensee fee. So was the Java-like Dalvik virtual machine which was chosen citing better performance but it’s likely another move to prevent outside dependencies.