The Smartphone wars - The Contenders

And now start the smartphone wars. It matters a lot for the Americian, rich European market and the Japanese market. But very less for the Indian market (where I get my money from).
Its a three cornered contest (although many would like to add the the falling mobile giant into
this).

In the fruit corner is Apple, in the pseudo ethical corner is google and in the ageing corner is microsoft. All have realised that the next frountier is a device that is more pervasive than the personal computer - the mobile phone and want the capture the consumer of this market by providing devices that further their business interest. And u may ask what this is , well for Apple it is the Digital Media, for Google its advertising and for Microsoft it is well s/w, and in the long run advertising.

Apple: Clearly the front runner. They changed the landscape of the smartphone industry by introducing the iphone. They have THE device, an amazing application platform, apps to choose from and imortantly a fanatic following .

Google: They have the geek crowd. They try to portray themself as the champion of the open source community. The Andriod platform has the fallen Java developer behind it, a fragmented device story and a lot of free apps. Importantly their open source association gives than a few fanatical followers and an alternatively to apple. The OEM have a alternative platform for their device and a app market ( Till Nexus one this was ok, but with the platform provider competing withe the OEM then may not sound very attractive any more). But for all the fragametation that has crept into the Andriod platform Google has a lot of money and also knows the mobile device is the way to get more business.

Microsoft: The desktop winners. Woke up recently with a clean break from their traditional platform, with a different approach to the smartphone (UI). Obvioulsy they are depending on the .net/silverlight/xns developers to shore up their popularity. With no devices in the market its too early to speculate where they will go. But with the radical change in approach ( UI and app platform), the preexisting developer base and the pile loads of money they will be in this for the long term.



I'll ruminate over these and other aspects of the smartphone wars in the days and weeks that follow

Yahoo Stock Data Download

I am writing a WPF program to download a display stock data ( primarily price ). All I wanted to do is to get the price at regular intervals and display the data. In this what i needs was given the price to get

• Latest price
• Time

It probably sounds trival for most of the application programers using web services, but not for me. I program embedded systems and uses programs written by others which use the web services.

So I used the best means to learn how to do this a quick google search. Did not yeild the desired aka a simple way of doing this, nor did the visit to the yahoo developer sit. At last I came across this site that explains how to do it, in the way I can understand easily.

All that needs to be done is get the data using the following formal:

http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s= a BUNCH of STOCK SYMBOLS separated by "+" &f=a bunch of special tags

The tags definition are there is the linked website.

Now that my blocker is resolved, I get back to programming the app.