iPhone 2.0 lets open source in through back door

With the first Apple iPhone open source developers were like burglars breaking windows, forcing their software onto the device.

Thanks to the Apple iPhone SDK they’re more like beggars now. Knock on the back door politely and you might get a beer.

But that’s a long way from walking through the front door like an honored guest, Funambol vice president-marketing Hal Steger told ZDNet today.

“They’ve been less than forthcoming in extending the olive branch directly to us. We’re viewing Apple as a proprietary mobile platform. They’re still basking in the glow of their success.”

The Mac-ambivalence may be behind media response to Funambol’s Wireless Sync announcement yesterday. The Washington Post called it a direct competitor to Apple’s own MobileMe.

Not really, said Steger. “It’s apples and oranges.” MobileMe is far more limited, almost a MiniMe next to the synchronization services Funambol is offering.

Apple’s attitude will change only when it faces real competition, and Funambol CEO Fabrizio Capobianco writes in his blog that the iPhone 2.0’s pricing is designed to forestall that. “Surprise. It is a mass market phone,” he enhused.

The low price is based on direct carrier subsidies, just as your “free phone” is subsidized now, as Apple is forced to forego its piece of AT&T’s data revenue and the carrier, in turn, raises the price for those contracts.

You can do that when you’re the only game in town. When will that change? “We’re tracking the other platforms closely,” Steger said, predicting some Android kit will arrive by year-end.

Funambol will be ready. ”We are a Switzerland, in that our strategy is to provide solutions for all the leading platforms,” Steger concluded. Hopefully that doesn’t mean they outplay the Czechs, lose, and get their key man’s knee broken.

Time for LiMo and Android to stop talking

Ed Burnette has a great piece out today in Dev Connection about Google’s choice of Apache as the main license for its Android phone.

Some pieces will use Eclipse, some GPL V.2, and there will likely be some proprietary bits as well, he writes. That’s nice.

The LiMo folks have also been a-twitter since Verizon decided to join its camp rather than hang out with the Googlers. (The most recently-delivered LiMo phone, the Purple Magic (right) from Purple Labs, looked like a Razr with a penguin on it. Blech.)

But, as a fan of both systems, I would like to kindly ask both sets of developers to close their mouths for a while and get to work.

Press releases, alliances, and application possibilities won’t win this market. It’s designs that will win this market. If neither group can create something as compelling as an iPhone interface, neither will go anywhere.

It’s the proprietary iPhone which has changed the mobile game, demonstrating that with the proper interface people actually will go for mobile data in a big way.

What LiMo and Android are designing, now, is not a mobile phone, but a handheld Internet client. The winner will be the one who makes it most attractive to move the most data back-and-forth on a mobile network.

But as of now, neither group is really in the game. I have yet to see anything compelling from either group beyond press releases.

No more press releases, please. No more FUD. Send me a phone when it’s ready, and I’ll decide whether it’s worthy. By “I” and “me” I mean the marketplace.

Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983.