OStatic

BusinessWeek recently did an interesting article on a major shift in company strategy at telecom giant Vodafone, called Vodafone: Embracing Open Source with Open Arms. It focuses on how the company, following a string of huge acquisitions over the past few years, is looking away from doing more expensive deals and looking toward open source and crowdsourced strategies for introducing more innovative applications. From the conditions in the current economic environment to new opportunities on the mobile applications front, this makes a lot of sense, and more behemoth companies should be thnking this way. Here's why.

Announcements are arriving out of the Mobile World Congress going on in Spain, and one of the big pieces of news is the successor to the T-Mobile G1 Android phone: The HTC Magic (G2). It will be released by Vodafone, and is sleeker and thinner than the G1 phone, which HTC also does the hardware for. The thinness is achieved through the loss of the hardware keyboard, though, and HTC is retaining the G1's proprietary headphone jack. Also, the HTC Magic won't be available in the U.S. initially. It will arrive first in the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, France and Italy.