The New New Walled Garden
One of the interesting aspects of smartphones is the ability to download applications. In theory developers can write apps that take advantage of the telephony and data services. The confusion comes from who decides what apps you can download and use? In the case of Microsoft’s Smartphone platform, the carrier has the ultimate control on what apps can be downloaded and run on the device (make sure to check out the amusing MS Smartphone number dialing bug at the bottom of the article). I suspect the same will be true when Danger opens up the Hiptop platform to third party software developers. It’s already true for BREW. Carriers would be very foolish to cripple devices by making it hard for developers to create applications and limit what users can download. If they want users to adopt new data devices they are going to need a wide choice of applications. Let’s hope the learned their lessons from the WAP walled garden days.
