Who Needs A Mobile Phone Operating System?

With all the focus on who is going to win the mobile phone OS wars, here's an interesting analysis that suggests it really doesn't matter. If the phone is seen as the ultimate "thin client" then it's not the operating system that matters, but the browser. The piece suggests that this is the vision that Openwave sees, and why they may be better positioned than others. Of course, a similar attempt in the PC world never went very far. However, the mobile phone world is not the same - as there isn't the same entrenched dominant OS to deal with, and storage and processing are much more limited on the device (meaning you can do a lot more if such things are centralized and reached over the network). Of course, the one major hurdle to this view is the simple fact that people like having local data and applications - partly for the speed factor and partly because they don't trust their data to be out on a server somewhere.

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