(keitai-l) Re: kddi + opera

From: Frengle, Nik, VF-JP <nik.frengle_at_vodafone.com>
Date: 08/30/04
Message-ID: <67EA1F678C9E0446978FEB829F643DCC0245BBF6@VFJPOTM-WIEX002.intra.j-phone.com>
Tom,
When I was doing some journalism, I had the impression that Qualcomm's PR people were among the busiest. I am not sure whether they had anything to do with this press release or not, but there are a couple of choice quotes from Opera's press release that I found somewhat 'iffy':
"KDDI has enjoyed tremendous success in the mobile services market, and has surpassed NTT DoCoMo, a unit of Japan's former phone monopoly, winning more than three times as many subscribers to their 3G mobile service." 
And this one:
"Unveiled in 2001, BREW is Qualcomm's open source application development platform for wireless devices that leverages the existing and emerging features provided by Qualcomm's CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) chipsets."

With over 55 million customers, I am not quite sure that DoCoMo has been 'surpassed' by au's 17 million yet ;-)
And correct me if I am wrong, but Brew is only available on Qualcomm chipsets the last I heard, and the big Q has never been really shy about suing anyone they believe are infringing their IPR, so I am wondering where I can openly access their Brew sourcecode? 'Open Source' seems like a difficult thing to credit Brew as. If they are talking about their development tool being given away at no cost to developers, this is somewhat different from 'open source.' The fact that to put a Brew app up costs about $500 a pop to do, by paying a designated provider to do proprietary testing, also makes me think that aside from their lack of open sourcecode, the spirit of open source is not even there.  
Too bad Opera felt the need to embellish the truth (or to allow Qualcomm to do it for them), since Kyle is right: It is a great browser, at least the version available on Air H".  
Best,
Nik Frengle
Received on Mon Aug 30 08:04:10 2004