On Wed, 2009-06-03 at 10:12 +0100, G T Smith wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Roger Oberholtzer wrote:
On Tue, 2009-06-02 at 09:35 -0500, Andrew Gould wrote:
<snip>
On the PC side, it is not exactly rocket science. As a minimum, phones have contact lists. Contacts tend to have some basic common features. Name, address, phone numbers. Yet there are as many ways to get that information as there are telephone models. Of course, the phones can and do make differences where logically there need be no differences. I know this is the same of many technologies. But it does not mean it is still a good idea for telephones to continue this insanity.
Actually data synchronisation is quite tricky. You really need to take a look at the SyncML spec to realise some of the issues involved...
It has been made tricky by how it is implemented. Of course, if you make both sides of the link, you are in a better position to get it right. I would like Nokia to pay more attention to the PC (Windows/MAC/Linux) side of this. I would be surprised if they could not make software on the phone that could talk to the software on the PC. So, my complaint is not only the lack of open source software for this, it is the lack of vendor software. I could even live with a closed transport if the software involved is ok.
I would not have a big issue with this if the companies (1) supported more than Windows - and even that support is often crappy, and (2) made quality software, instead of what looks to be a second tier component made with a low budget and little or no usability testing. Ever have to update the software on a Nokia phone? It runs a number of apps sequentially that are each laid out different, so it is unclear that it is all part of the same process, and that have odd redundancies that make you think it has possibly failed the first time and is trying again with a different method. This is a Nokia eXpressMusic accessed on Windows.
Phones are *not* PCs, they have to comply to national and network requirements (which do vary somewhat). When you take into account locking of a phone to a particular network often the network defines what applications (and services) the phone can provide and how they are provided.
Exactly my point: for the telecom part they had no choice for the reasons you cited. But if they had a choice, it would have been as vendor-specific as the PC side of the telephone communications, where they do have the choice. As to telephones not being PC, I was not meaning that they were. I just mean that a telephone has two paths of communication (1) telecom for, well, phone calls and all that, and (2) PC communications for things like contacts. -- Roger Oberholtzer OPQ Systems / Ramböll RST Ramböll Sverige AB Krukmakargatan 21 P.O. Box 17009 SE-104 62 Stockholm, Sweden Office: Int +46 8-615 60 20 Mobile: Int +46 70-815 1696 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org