One specific idea, pre-approved for Y Combinator funding | Hacker News Reader

One specific idea, pre-approved for Y Combinator funding

paulgraham.com

12 pointskf26 comments

The Danger team already accomplished what you want with the sidekick. Word on the street is that Danger 2.0 (android) was acquired by google a few years ago. Everyone I know who works at google (except the lame people) hate it. Maybe you can figure out how to poach all those people.

Getting anything interesting onto an existing carrier's phones is a nightmare. Not only will you need to make a better phone OS, you will have to start your own MVNO. Helio has made an attempt - their "ocean" device might be worth looking at.

I used to work on Razor software. I knew it was junk, but where to start fixing it? There is a deep problem with the companies that create mobile phones- carriers are their customers, but not their end users. The only company that seems to be innovating at all is Apple, which has enough clout to ignore what the carriers tell them and just bring something to market that users might want. What can a startup do in this space? Sell their software platform to a phone company? Motorola is taking ten years to switch to Linux/Java platform. The only hope for mobile phones is that Wi-Fi or some other technology will become capable of competing with the carriers. Until then, most of the innovators will be holding their breath.

Check out OpenMoko http://openmoko.com/press/index.html. I think most phone companies have a vested interest in keeping their phones closed but OpenMoko might be a good alternative. It might be the 'firefox' of mobile phones.

It'll be interesting to see if OpenMoko can make a start of it. I used to work in the wireless business and nobody is going to put their operating systems on their phone.

What will be interesting is whether they can be the operating system that a bunch of the Taiwanese ODMs use to become serious players in branded handsets (rather than just making them for other people).

You're right. The big players might be hesitant to open up their OSs but from what I hear even they know how bad their platforms are. I think some crazy team will take OpenMoko and run with it which will cause the big guys to sit up and take notice.

Check out TAT[0], they make incredible looking mobile UIs. Also check out the concepts from the Nokia design team[1].

[0] http://www.tat.se/conceptlab/

[1] http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=NokiaDesign

(Just realised I'm posting far too much in this story. Mobile UI is a great passion of mine. I think it's been downhill ever since the Nokia 3310. If any one else is passionate about improving the mobile user experience then please contact me at mobilaunch@danshub.com, I wish to pursue a startup in this area soon)

I was at CTIA a couple months back and got a demo of Openwave's "Adaptive Mobility" suite. The site doesn't show very much, but I remember it being a pretty slick, personalized UI for cell phones. I think they've opened it up to allow people to develop widgets for it too. The problem is that it's just a java program that runs on the cell phone OS, when really it should be the OS itself.

http://www.openwave.com/us/products/adaptive_mobility_suite/

I think everything should be better than a RAZR. We use it as a worst-case target device at our company. But, more generally, the power of carriers is definitely a problem, and as I hear it's way worse in the US. Their biggest nightmare is voip in the mobile, obviously, so I guess they simply try to lock down any innovation in the usable mobile platform area.

The main way to do this involves hacking/cracking firmware. Go onto p2p and you'll find ready made images for a variety of phones. However, it is a painful process for each phone, and phone model type. You're basically working on many to get one, instead of working on one for many.

This article sure makes the OpenMoko look good: http://research.operationaldynamics.com/blogs/andrew/software/openmoko/doing-open-the-right-way.html

I love my Blackberry interace-and it does multi app support no problem (I frequently flip between GMail, my browser, Google Maps and my email inbox).

Anyone else here love their Blackberry interace or hate it? Anyone here have an interface they like (and why)?

Next funding round? So you plan on waiting until 2008 for someone to even start on it?

This page has been up since the application form for the first wfp was announced if my memory is correct. Very little progress has been done in mobile user experience in 5-7 years so a few more months wont harm anyone.

Imagine if someone had jumped in 5-7 years ago...

I would imagine they would still be trying to get operators to adopt the OS. Mobile is tricky and slow, it's only now starting to open up.

Wouldn't this (supposedly) be the iPhone?

The iPhone interface is certainly revolutionary but there's room for another player in the mobile GUI marketplace. I'm not sure how you could make money with this, but it's something useful that users want, so YC would say you can figure out how to make money with it later. Probably by licensing the interface to the major cell phone companies, they're going to want to catch up to the iPhone.

I think the challenge here is not to match the iPhone's interface, since that would require matching the iPhone's hardware.

What would be better is a plug-in-able OS that would make the RAZR's menus tolerable (and maybe could be used on phones with even worse hardware).

The RAZR is quite locked down. I tried to create a better UI for it [this was several years ago when I had a RAZR. worst mobile UI ever] but the problem is that the only way in is to create a java app that has to be launched by the user. This java app is hidden deep inside the menu system your trying to fix.

Nokia S60's on the other hand are a dream to customise. I'm working on a new application launcher for my E61 right now and the difference is stagering. Being able to run python on your phone rather than java or C++ makes development tolerable. Hopefully nokias widgets coming this year will allow access to phone APIs from JS/CSS/HTML, then mobile will be as easy as web apps.

I love the look and feel of the iPhone UI but there are some niggles. The phones main 'dashboard'/start screen wont scale. Every app is an icon on a grid. As soon as you have more applications than screen space there are going to be problems. It's interesting to see that apple also has a poor application launcher UI (fidner) on mac os x too. I wonder if someone will be foolish enough to create a quicksilver equivalent for the iphone?

rms: how did you find out about this page?

It's on pg's index.

You mean a manual crawl through http://paulgraham.com/ind.html ? I've often wondered how all the stuff there is organized. New essays we can find out about, but how is one to know when something else is added to this index?

There's no date on the link, so it's not clear how recent it is.

Yeah, I just went through most of the index by hand, mostly for the purpose of submitting here. I'm an addict.

It could be bigger than that. I think it'd be huge if someone came up with some phone interface that didn't suck that could be found on the more common, more affordable handsets.

Just buy an iPhone

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