Another win for mobile open source
This may not be a big deal in the U.S., where the mobile market is backwards and most people access the Internet via their PCs. But it is a big deal.
Ericsson has been among the biggest boosters of Symbian, a mobile operating system that dominates the space and is highly proprietary. But the world market is moving away from such proprietary systems, and this is yet-another recognition of the fact.
Sony-Ericsson comes to the Eclipse party bearing gifts, namely a plug-in which integrates the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE) with a Sony Java platform already used by the Sony-Ericsson P990 smartphone (pictured), and a plug-in that lets developers control the Java Application Manager on Sony-Ericsson phones from inside an Eclipse-based IDE.
="" of="" benefits="" the="" expects="" street.="" one-way="" a="" not="" is="" sony-ericsson="">Of course, this is a two-way street. Sony-Ericsson expects the benefits of Eclipse to flow to its customers, both consumers and service providers. It's all part of an effort to integrate the Internet more-tightly to mobiles. (How backward is the U.S.? We still call the item above a cellphone.)Again, this may not matter in the short term to U.S. consumers, who mainly use mobile data networks that are tightly-controlled by such networks as Cingular and Verizon, but it will matter in more competitive markets. Eventually, those benefits will flow here, starting with those networks to be created through the government's recent spectrum auctions.