Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Open Source Browsing Solutions and Mobile Devices
Posted by Janak Parekh in "THOUGHT" @ 07:00 AM
"Nokia has tapped Apple Computer's open-source knowledge for its next-generation smart-phone browsing. The new browser for Nokia's Series 60 smart-phone software package is expected to debut in June. It will incorporate some of the same open-source technology--WebCore and JavaScriptCore--found in Apple's Safari Web browser, which is based on KHTML and KJS from the open-source K Desktop Environment's (KDE) Konquerer browser."
I'm less interested in a hybrid Nokia/Apple/KDE solution from a Pocket PC user's perspective per se; I'm more interested about the fact that Nokia is adopting a mature open-source web browsing technology to power their next Series 60 phones. If the renderer approaches anything like that of Safari, Nokia will easily leapfrog many of its competitors and have the most powerful browsing solution available. As the article implies, Minimo holds out a similar hope for Pocket PCs. Believe it or not, open-source is slowly becoming more important -- and beneficial -- in the PDA world as well as the desktop world as PDAs' computational power and toolsets continue to approach that of desktops'.
I'm less interested in a hybrid Nokia/Apple/KDE solution from a Pocket PC user's perspective per se; I'm more interested about the fact that Nokia is adopting a mature open-source web browsing technology to power their next Series 60 phones. If the renderer approaches anything like that of Safari, Nokia will easily leapfrog many of its competitors and have the most powerful browsing solution available. As the article implies, Minimo holds out a similar hope for Pocket PCs. Believe it or not, open-source is slowly becoming more important -- and beneficial -- in the PDA world as well as the desktop world as PDAs' computational power and toolsets continue to approach that of desktops'.
