Stephen Withers
Thursday, 05 March 2009 12:04
Opinion and Analysis
Page 3 of 4
If all you really want is a mobile browser that's a bit more ergonomic than a smartphone, you don't really care about the operating system.
Go into a local mobile phone store and listen: how many people specifically ask for a Symbian phone? Or a Windows Mobile phone? Come to that, they don't even ask for an OS X phone.
So if 'real' netbooks were being sold in the same way as most mobile phones - heavily subsidised or even free with a data access contract - would people bother which OS they ran?
Or would they care more about quick startup times and low cost?
Presumably the carriers would care about cost, because the the less they have to pay, the smaller the subsidy needed to get the upfront price down to whatever point is deemed appropriate.
Australia's already seen
Vodafone offering a Dell netbook with internal 3.5G modem for $0 upfront, and apparently subsidised netbook deals are to be found in the US and Europe.
(Maybe I should have paid more attention to David M Williams' December 2008 commentary "
Dumbass consumers squander netbook experience by rejecting Linux", although I'm not completely convinced that what I described as a high-end netbook is just a small notebook.)
So what's all this got to do with Symantec? Find out on
page 4.
