I use a BlackBerry Curve and I love having a smart phone: take notes, all my contacts, calendar, and email, twitter, facebook, google reader, google news, browser. Most of my friends that have smart phones, have IPhones. The rest of my friends have mobile phones that just phone or text. I also use Firefox (plug-ins and extensions rock!) and I use the WordPress blog software. And if you weren’t aware, I’m a programmer. All these seemingly random things are floating around in my head making tech soup of my brain.
Here is what I came up with:
Background: Web services acts as a translation layer between a browser and a web server but on the web server side of the wire. The web service has a set of rules it has to obey in order for any browser to use it and understand its response. This means the browser and the server are totally unrelated: different operating system, different programming language.
Idea: A new smart phone specification just like the web services specification in that it makes the phone platform-neutral for applications. You build your application for the smart phone in such a way that it can be used on any phone regardless of the base operating system of the phone. The glue would be a translation layer between the application and the operating system. As long as your application conforms to the rules of the translation layer, your application can work on the phone. The translation layer wouldn’t be a language-specific rule but rather a behavior-specific rule.
Once the translation layer is specified and agreed to by the major mobile phone manufacturers, you can do some pretty cool things like building a sandbox on top of the translation layer. I think of Firefox and WordPress as sandboxes. They provide this great space for you to write applications on top of Firefox and WordPress, to expand the features available.
So you write one application that conforms to the specification, then you can install the application on any operating system that conforms to that specification. Go beyond phones, what about computers or cars? Anything that obeys the rules can run your application.
Oh so cool!