[ Thanks to Jason
Perlow for this link. ]
http://blogs.zdnet.com/perlow/?p=12224
“In my fairy-tale scenario — or at least in what
seems like fantasy today, I described a mobile computing world
where a customer walks into a wireless carrier store, picks a
“body” or device form factor that they want, activates service,
then and runs whatever smartphone OS they want on it —
Android, Windows 7 Phone Series, Palm WebOS, Symbian, MeeGo,
BlackBerry, or even iPhone.“Today this is a non-starter because device development by the
handset manufacturers and the wireless providers is difficult. When
a new device is created by a handset manufacturer today, the
operating system that runs on it has to be optimized with device
drivers specific to the hardware on that handset and software
specific to that carrier. The manufacturer may have build processes
that help speed development, but it’s still no walk in the
park.“This process takes a long time because while you may have one
model of device that can be targeted to multiple carriers, things
like OS software that supports transceiver chip sets may have to
change in order to accommodate the network technology being used as
well as a myriad of other things that make a new device launch on a
carrier a big hassle”