Interesting times for the MS Smartphone 2002. I’ve been pretty anxious to get my hands on one so I can start porting software like PocketFeed to it, but, after Sendo dropping it, and now the uproar about Orange SPV’s locking out 3rd party applications that haven’t gone through the signing process, it will be interesting to see if the device catches on (i’m not sure on the cost, but, apparently it’s not terribly cheap).

On one hand, I can totally understand that Orange (and Microsoft) wants to protect the network and devices from malicious applications roaming around. On the other, without 3rd party apps, ANY platform is dead. In yesterday’s Smartphone chat, someone had the idea of a 2 level certificate security - 1 for standard apps that wouldn’t allow access to the radio (that any developer could easily get), the other for full system access. Sounds good to me!

In other news, Samsung’s Smartphone was just approved for the US.