On Wed, 2009-06-03 at 08:11 -0400, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
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,
No, I think your over simplifying. It is really a genuinely hard problem.
Explain why I can hook up an iPhone to a Mac or Windows box and get all the features I think Nokia et. al, should provide? Backups, sync, updates, app installs and deleting 'just work'. No painful leaping from program to program. This is of course because Apple are in control of both parts of the puzzle. What is to stop the other guys from doing the same. This is one of many reasons iPhone sales are doing quite well.
I would be surprised if they could not make software on the phone that could talk to the software on the PC.
I have no doubt they could; but it is very expensive and there just isn't any return.
See comment above. As phones are more than phones these days, perhaps Nokia and the others are missing a market wish that others understand.
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.
This is less and less true; more and more devices "just do IP" which from an implementation/engineering stand point makes sense. Setting up an IP connection over blue-tooth may be one easy solution - it works with Palms and WinCE devices. Then you can sync over IP to a SyncML/OMA-DS service. Just install Funambol - this is how I test syncronization, no carrier required [since it is obviously cheaper to test with de-activated phones].
Don't you think that Funambol is a bit much for one guy needing to sync contacts? So slight on Funambol intended. -- 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