Via
Cory at Boing Boing, here’s a great Wired
post-mortem on how all
the corporate vested interests (including Apple!) turned a nice concept for a
new, music-playing mobile phone, into a useless, DRM-hogtied,
designed-by-committee turd.
That’s worth a read, in itself. However, what really blew my mind was this:
Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice president of Nokia and head of its multimedia group, has bad news for the [music] labels. … He pushes a couple of buttons on the [phone’s] keypad. Up pops Symella, a new peer-to-peer downloading program from Hungary. As the name suggests, Symella is a Symbian application that runs on Gnutella, the P2P network that hosts desktop file-sharing apps like BearShare and Limewire. It was created earlier this year by two students at a Budapest engineering school that for four years has been exploring mobile P2P in conjunction with a local Nokia research center.
Symella doesn’t come installed on the N91; Vanjoki downloaded it from the university Web site. “Now I am connected to a number of peers,” he continues, “and I can just go and search for music or any other files. If I find some music I like and it’s 5 megabytes and I want to download it – the carriers will love this. It will give them a lot of traffic.”
I had no idea the platform was that open, at this stage. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next…