The Smartphone Wars: How are the mighty fallen
<p>HP <a href="http://www.timescolonist.com/business/Hewlett+Packard+replaces/5447359/story.html">replaces the hapless Leo Apotheker</a> in a manner not very well calculated to reassure anyone that HP has a bright future.  Granted, Apotheker&#8217;s performance &#8211; typified by the now-it&#8217;s-dead-oh-maybe-not fumbling around the TouchPad &#8211; was dismal.  But the new CEO&#8217;s first move was to reassure everyone that Apotheker&#8217;s cunning plan to turn HP into a low-rent clone of SAP is still on track.  </p>
<p>How are the mighty fallen. HP was a great company once.  Then they spun out the instruments division to focus on printers and lost their culture of excellence along with it.  Now they&#8217;re thrashing.  Sad.</p>
<p>In other news of the stupid, there&#8217;s evidence that Nokia (remember Nokia?) is developing a <a href="http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2011/09/29/nokias-meltemi-project-tipped-to-bring-new-low-end-linux-os-to-the-next-billion/">Linux-based OS for its low-end phones</a>.  Yes, that&#8217;s right, they dropped Meego/Maemo &#8212; which actually worked &#8212; only to start an entirely new OS development project.</p>
<p>On a more cheerful note, Samsung is <a href="http://www.androidpolice.com/2011/09/21/att-samsung-galaxy-s-ii-kernel-source-code-released/">pushing kernel source code out the door.</a>  This after hiring the Cyanogen lead.  Good stuff; they actually seem to get this open source thing.</p>
<p>From the excellent StackOverflow site, a report with statistics indicating that Android passed iOS in developer mindshare on that site at the <a href="http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/09/android-vs-ios/">beginning of 2011.</a></p>
<p>And Amazon finally moved; the <a href="http://geeks.thedailywh.at/2011/09/28/amazon-kindle-announcements-of-the-day/">Kindle Fire</a> is out.  G+ points us at the <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/mollywood/status/119064687076843521">funniest tweet</a> about this.</p>
<p>The business press had already begun to notice that Apple is <a href="http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/218294/20110922/top-ios-5-features-already-existent-android-devices-iphone-5-ipad-ipad-2-iphone-4-iphone-3-gs-2005-g.htm">chasing Android&#8217;s tallights</a>. Then Apple <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/04/iphone-apple-launch">announced the iPhone 4S</a>, and it&#8217;s a big yawn. iCloud?  Me-too voice recognition features?  Really, Apple? Is this the best you can do?  Gawker has a <a href="http://gawker.com/5846600">hilarious post</a> on how overblown the media hype was, but even that fails to convey what a boring, derivative-seeming product the 4S is.  How are the mighty fallen. </p>
