The state of vendor lock-in on handheld services?
In this day and age it seems as though the word smartphone has replaced (or at least become synonymous with) the traditional phones we grew up with. These devices try to tackle the usual on-the-go services: PIM, messaging, casual browsing, multimedia and social networking. However with this is also an attempt to lock users into proprietary services, say for example, Flickr. I’ve been wondering for quite some time which mobile OS actually fares better on this, with the choices being the iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and WebOS (that’s Palm Pre).
This is best explained through example, so let’s take Mr Hip and Trendy who are well versed in navigating Facebook for their friends, Flickr or Picasa for their latest photo albums, Last.FM for the music, iTunes for their personal collection, YouTube for cats doing funny things and Twitter for trying to up their cool. Now let’s take away the Hip and Trendy part of all that and leave us with somebody who wants to do things their own way.
We have a neatly categorised library of music and video files on our home computer, and a few re-encoded video files on a remote server specifically made for mobile viewing. None of this iTunes schrwap. We run a shoutcast service for streaming, easily accessible through dyndns. Our latest photo albums, ebook library, and latest LaTeX-compiled (to pdf) essays are neatly stored on our home computer, all tagged as necessary for Nepomuk, and mirrored to the remote server. We have a similarly synchronised set of .ical files for calendars and appointments, and vcards for contact information, and of course mail is on our very own setup on our server. As for social networking, an own-hosted modded WordPress install is used for (micro)blogging. We don’t mind a little Facebook here and there, but would also love to be kept connected on IRC. Of course it’s a-given that our remote server(s) are all equipped with (S)FTP, SSH, and Webdav support.
I don’t know much about the current state of smartphones but perhaps for those that do – can I bend it to use what I use and still feel a decent sense of integration? With this I mean drag-and-drop transfers for files and multimedia, seamless switching between local and remote locations (with support for above protocols), directory synchronisation (rsync?), PIM synchronisation as necessary for ical/vcard/mail/rss with a custom and remote location (or at least importing), and perhaps clients available (terminal emulation, anyone?) for SSH, IRC, and streaming.
Can I actually use my services the way I want them on a smartphone in this day and age?
I know I’ve had somewhat limited success on my own aging Windows Mobile phone, with third-party apps accomplishing iCal sync, SSH (putty), IRC, mail and RSS, and luckily it isn’t tied to nonsense like iTunes when I want to transfer music over. However the rest of the long-dead OS shove these few glimmers of freedom away in a dark and dusty corner of the market. I quite honestly wonder how the rest is doing – so I ask again:
Is it possible?
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