[Cialug] cell phones with wifi

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 11:32 AM, Don Cady <doncady at gmail.com> wrote:
>  > The iPhone's browser is OS X Safari, based on the Konqueror (sp?) engine
>  > that is probably familiar to Linux folk.  I believe that the Konqueror
>  > engine is used in another cell phone/brand as well but I cannot recall the
>  > brand/model at the moment. A bit of Googling will probably find it for you.
>  <snip>
>
>  Nokia may be who you were thinking of, as they ported Webkit to
>  symbian for their phones. Andriod is using Webkit so far for it's
>  browser too, so you've got Symbian, Android, and iPhones all running a
>  version of webkit, which will soon pass Acid3.
>  hmmm... who's left out?  <g>
>
>  Things look up for web apps with mobile phones in mind.

Webkit is the way of the future for mobile applications and it is
becoming available to GTK applications. Apparently embedding webkit is
very easy and its resource usage is extremely low compared to
embedding gecko (historically speaking).

The good news is competition in the browser space will be hot for a
while yet. The bad news is we won't be able to get away with ignoring
safari and webkit based browsers.

I haven't been able to successfully build webkit for GTK or test it
outside of konq or safari. But there is a very impressive amount of
effort being put into integrating it.

P.S. I ordered a plain phone without a contract and will stick with my
current pre-paid plan for a few more months. I really do want to see
what changes when android hits the streets. I expect a shake up.

I think three things will change the market soon:

 * wifi and wimax based data plans
 * the prevelance of "unlimited" plans that are coming out - these are
$99/mo plans and include unlimited min, unlimited text and unlimited
data.
 * phones like android and iphone that assume a constant data connection

By this time next year someone on this list will have used wimax,
every vendor will be offering unlimited plans for < $100 and some will
be marketing "unlimited plans with some limits" for under $99 (think
"whopper jr.") and several people on this list will have discussed how
to sync their android pdas with linux and possibly the creation of a
central iowa mobile developer's user group.
-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode