The Smartphone Wars: How are the mighty fallen

HP replaces the hapless Leo Apotheker in a manner not very well calculated to reassure anyone that HP has a bright future. Granted, Apotheker’s performance – typified by the now-it’s-dead-oh-maybe-not fumbling around the TouchPad – was dismal. But the new CEO’s first move was to reassure everyone that Apotheker’s cunning plan to turn HP into a low-rent clone of SAP is still on track.

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’re thrashing. Sad.

In other news of the stupid, there’s evidence that Nokia (remember Nokia?) is developing a Linux-based OS for its low-end phones. Yes, that’s right, they dropped Meego/Maemo — which actually worked — only to start an entirely new OS development project.

On a more cheerful note, Samsung is pushing kernel source code out the door. This after hiring the Cyanogen lead. Good stuff; they actually seem to get this open source thing.

From the excellent StackOverflow site, a report with statistics indicating that Android passed iOS in developer mindshare on that site at the beginning of 2011.

And Amazon finally moved; the Kindle Fire is out. G+ points us at the funniest tweet about this.

The business press had already begun to notice that Apple is chasing Android’s tallights. Then Apple announced the iPhone 4S, and it’s a big yawn. iCloud? Me-too voice recognition features? Really, Apple? Is this the best you can do? Gawker has a hilarious post 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.

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