I know that's not the focus of this article, but the size of the user base can be very deceiving. It makes a huge difference how many different devices are out there. For example, while you can say that the number of Windows Mobile users is 30m, that doesn't account for the number of different devices, sometimes with very different capabilities, that a developer would have to cater to in order to actually reach that user base. iPhone OS and webOS currently run on basically only one type of device (for most purposes), while there are dozens of different ones for Symbian and Windows Mobile for example. How many of those would a developer need to purchase in order to do proper testing? How much more complex code would need to be written, more testing done, etc.?
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Mobile Evolution is a look at topics related to the evolving mobile space, with a dash of Web 2.0, from a perspective of a small business owner.
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I know that's not the focus of this article, but the size of the user base can be very deceiving. It makes a huge difference how many different devices are out there. For example, while you can say that the number of Windows Mobile users is 30m, that doesn't account for the number of different devices, sometimes with very different capabilities, that a developer would have to cater to in order to actually reach that user base. iPhone OS and webOS currently run on basically only one type of device (for most purposes), while there are dozens of different ones for Symbian and Windows Mobile for example. How many of those would a developer need to purchase in order to do proper testing? How much more complex code would need to be written, more testing done, etc.?