Well, I got news for you. Most of the capabilities for connectivity is already available right now…The issue is that traditional cell phone carriers want to lock it down, because the more open/unlocked these features are, the less profits they can extract from you. That’s why carriers like to lock down things like tethering/etc. Most smartphone has cell/wifi/bluetooth, limitations to always remain connected using different means is hampered by the carriers…because carriers obviously don’t like things they can’t charge for.
That’s the significance on some of these open O/S (android in particular and variants)…Because they are finding ways to non-phone devices such as instrumentation/netbooks/medical devices.. That’s something you won’t be seeing in a closed platform in the short term.
Profits/dollars for third party companies and developers for mobile O/S apps were once limited by the cell phone carriers (Verizon/ATT/Sprint/etc and corresponding carriers overseas), because traditional O/S were designed specifically only for cell phones. These open O/S’es changes the playing field significantly since you aren’t exclusively tied down to a cell phone (subject to all the dogleashes from service providers). That’s why I don’t waste time trying to build a one-hit app on a cell phone, too much of a PITA these days…The bucks are in platform porting and applications to other non-traditional uses where you have much less competition and red-tape to hoop through. If Sun had structured J2ME as a complete stack as Google did for Android versus a bunch of generic API’s, it wouldn’t have ended up as the way it did.
Android isn’t necessary the most advanced of best platform. But what it does have going for it is (1) open-ness (2) backing/marketing from a company that you know isn’t going away in the near future. Lots of people wanted an open platform, but don’t want to jump on it because fear of whether it’s going to be around tomorrow (concerns of support/sustaining/etc).
