windows mobile

Engadget has an interview up with the Peter Chou, CEO of your favourite handset maker and mine, HTC.

The highlights:

--HTC has been working with Google on Android for over two years.
--Mr Chou doesn't see Android entering the Enterprise...yet.
--Currently existing WinMo hardware won't be recycled to run Android.

Mr. Chou seems a little guarded in his enthusiasm for Android vs. Windows Mobile, which I can understand; the HTC-WinMo alliance has been very good to HTC. It is clear, however, that he regards Android as a new opportunity not just for his company, but mobile handsets in general.

Head on over and check out the full interview.

Engadget is reporting that Microsoft gave up the goods at their Mobius conference and showed off the next version of their Win Mobile OS.

Our first impressions: very slick, and has a lot of features that just about any WinMo user will agree is way overdue. In other words, we're expecting users will be stoked -- no doubt about it.

I run WM 5 on my HTC and it's about thrity different kinds of suck, so Microsoft has nowhere to go but up.

There seems to be some reticence brewing on the developer side over adoption of Android. Zdnet is reporting on the issue.

What it basically comes down to is fragmentation of the market. As MobiTV CTO Kay Johansson says in the piece, “Right now, Android just adds to the headache of developing different versions of our applications for different operating systems.”

On the PC side, the Microsoft and IBM-compatible (remember when they were called that? Now it's known as x86) combo standardized the platform, for better or worse. This means that a developer can write for Windows and be sure that the vast majority of users will be able to run the software without any additional development work.

Of course the Mobile phone market is different. We have Symbian, Palm, Windows Mobile, Java mobile (sucks!), etc. On the mobile LINUX front there are a number of initiatives: LiMo, OpenMOKO, Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded, Qtopia. It's ugly out there. This is undoubtedly the prime impetus for Google's move in forming the alliance and releasing Android: an attempt to standardize. Whether it succeeds of fails in that goal is what make Android either an industry-changing product or just another mobile OS.