Talk about mobile computing

Rodney Gedda

Rodney Gedda is the former deputy editor of CIO and former editor of Techworld.

Last year I blogged about how Nokia’s N900 was a mobile device that had a lot of potential due to support for standards-based software. In the past week two N900 developments lend some weight to that claim. Firstly, the initial release of Firefox Mobile debuted on the N900.

A Mozilla-based browser has been in development for the Maemo platform for a while (see this page – http://browser.garage.maemo.org/) and now it’s a fully-fledged port of Firefox backed by the Mozilla Foundation.

Android and Windows Mobile ports are on the way, but what makes the announcement significant for the N900 is it is leveraging its Maemo roots in community development. And I bet the folks at Nokia are loving the end result.

As the developers at Mozilla point out, Firefox won’t be ported to the iPhone because of Apple restrictive app approval and distribution process.

As I’ve said in the past, the first step to open mobile computing is allowing people the freedom to manage their own software on their device. That’s not to say app stores don’t have a place. But having to rely on a proprietary distribution system to install applications is way too restrictive for the broader software market, especially for enterprises.

Here is a simple analogy to communicate this restriction – would you buy a PC that only allowed you to install software approved by the computer vendor?

Again, the N900 leads the way here. The software supports a proprietary app store (Nokia’s Ovi), but it also allows the freedom of using a community software repository (Maemo’s Garage) or a separate third-party – in this case the Mozilla Foundation.

So if you’re an ISV you want non-restrictive mobile environments so you can distribute your application directly to consumers. I know this sounds obvious, but since the dawn of the commodity smartphone era (iPhone, S60, Android) us consumers have been flooded with app store, app store and more app store news.

The next big – albeit nerdy – bit of news was the announcement by Toni Nikkanen of a successful “port” of Mac OS X to the N900.

To get OS X running on the N900, Nikkanen used PearPC, a PowerPC emulator. Again, the significance is that PearPC is commodity open source software. It runs on Linux, Windows and now the N900.

How ironic is that? A Linux-based smartphone from Nokia can run Mac OS X yet the iPhone OS-based (itself based on Mac OS X) smartphone from Apple can’t run Mac OS X applications, let alone the full operating system.

We’re at the dawn of the mobile computing paradigm and more devices that support open software will hopefully lead the way as fast as the closed smartphones we have today.