Developers will have their say

I guess I'm not the most appropriate person to do predictions about the PDA-smartphone market (I'm using this now almost forgotten word, PDA, as my personal homage and because it's the Multimedia-PDA functionality what is really interesting to me, the Mobile Phone functionality has little interest for someone that some months spends less than 1 euro in calls), I just have my own very limited experience with a few of these gadgets and some theoretical knowledge.

Being a rather pro-Microsoft guy (that also loves open source, I don't see any contradiction on this, but it would be long to explain...), it would be natural that I felt rather attracted to Windows Phone 7, but that's not the case because my rather lame experiences with Windows Mobile 5 and 6 have made me quite reluctant to any Microsoft offerings in this sector.

Currently I have a jailbroken (thanks black rain!) iPod Touch 2G, that for 180 euros seems absolutely unbeatable value for money to me. My main problem with it is that my specific model only admits tethered jailbreaks, and well, that the idea of being forced to resort to jailbreaking for having a really useful gadget is shitty, if I'm paying for the hardware, why don't you fucking Apple give me full control over my legitimate purchase???

Because of this I've been following with growing interest the evolution of Android, waiting for the release of affordable (prepay card is an absolute must for me given my minimum consumption) gadgets, and it seems we're almost there, with some models around 300 euros that seem rather acceptable. I was dreaming of Android as some kind of open source iOS, that as such would be fully accessible to tech-aware users.
These dreams have almost vanished as I've realized that with regards to Freedom, Android is little better than my Iphone OS. I mean, you get an open source OS, but tainted by each manufacturer so that in the end you need to root it (sort of jailbreaking) to get full access to it...

So, when I found this excellent article today, I could only add new variables to the equation that sooner or later I'll have to solve before buying a new toy...
I absolutely agree with almost everything said in that article, Microsoft has been treating us (developers) really (and increasingly) well. Things like Linq, C# 4 and the DLR, COM (using it, not creating it) should be in the Tate Modern of Software Development... and programming for the Windows Phone could end up being so fun that would make us (developers, wow, it's good to feel as if we had power over those masses of programming-unaware poor sheeps) change trends...

The article reminded me of this crazy video of Steve Ballmer gone nuts (I think I had first watched it on this interesting Swedish documentary against consumerism).

This Ballmer's video is also great :-D