OStatic

Matt Asay and IBM's Savio Rodrigues have a couple of interesting posts up today on the topic of open source and mobile technology. RIM needs more open source argues Rodrigues, in reference to Research In Motion, which is behind the BlackBerry. Asay points out that the future of mobile, however, will be owned by the company or project that best appeals to developers, especially open source developers. From my perspective, that's true at both the software platform and application levels.

Slowly but surely, Apple has been trying to crack the Chinese market with the iPhone. There have been many obstructions, and China Mobile has already expressed its desire to push Android-based phones, such as Dell's, throughout the country. As MacNewsWorld reported late last week, though, the iPhone's slow boat to China has finally arrived. China Unicom, the second largest wireless provider in China, announced on Friday that it will start carrying iPhones in this year's third quarter. Is there likely to be a smackdown between Android-based phones and the iPhone in China, and how free and open will China's government allow cutting-edge smartphones to be?

GigaOm has a very interesting report up today on the actual size of the app economies for both the iPhone and Android. There are some fairly shocking data points, which come from mobile advertising startup AdMob, and they illustrate that both Apple's App Store and Android Market are big businesses, with lots of promise. These shockers include: 1) there are some $200 million worth of applications sold in Apple?s iPhone store every month, or about $2.4 billion a year; 2) the Android Market brings in about $5 million a month or $60 million a year; and 3) each month, Android and iPhone users download approximately 10 new apps. I agree with the GigaOm post that the Android numbers will probably rise sharply as many new handsets arrive before the end of this year. It's also interesting to think how big these businesses will be in 10 years. Check out more here.?

Today, JKOnTheRun notes that HTC--the first hardware maker to back the open source Android operating system--may be putting Android on over 50 percent of its future phones. If true this is a big blow to Windows Mobile, the platform on the major portion of HTC?s lineup for some time, they conclude. I have to agree, and this is yet another example of Android's pronounced momentum in the smartphone market, where we're going to see large waves of Android handsets arrive this year and next. Android is shaping up to be a hugely influential open source platform.? For Android phones to really get competitive with the iPhone, though, the cool factor matters. This is much more important than it may seem at first glance.

Consider the different approaches to openness taken by the two companies with (arguably) the greatest product differentiation, most thriving ecosystems and potent cash-flow generation engines in the [mobile arena]: Apple and Google, writes Mark Sigal on GigaOm.? Apple and Google are playing out a classic proprietary vs. open game of tug-of-war with the iPhone and the Android platforms. Sigal argues that the fly in the ointment with Google's Android strategy is that Google has to set limits on what will work with deployments of the Android platform. How much of a problem is that, and how truly open is Android? Check out Sigal's post for more thoughts.

After much teeth-gnashing from the developer community, Apple has finally dropped its draconian and restrictive non-disclosure agreement (NDA) on the iPhone software development kit (SDK). In the seven months since the SDK showed up, Apple has taken much heat from developers and iPhone users alike over its lack of platfrom openness. The platform still isn't open, but it is a step in the right direction for Apple to eliminate this NDA. Here's what this means for the open source phones that will be competing with the iPhone.

At yesterday's Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, where Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone 3G and numerous other initiatives, it became very clear that the coming battle among smartphones will be largely decided on? the basis of who gets the best applications. Applications built with the upcoming iPhone 2.0 SDK looked very mature, and there were many demonstrations showing how easy they were to create. What does this mean for Google's Linux-based Android mobile platform and the wave of Linux-based phones expected later this year?