Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!

Now taking bets. The stakes are high, and there's no pointspread info yet, but the winner will likely take all:

QualSoft vs. NokiAppleTI.

Ahh, divisive battles in the war of convergent devices and technologies.

Get info (and lots of background) regarding Qualcomm and Microsoft alliance here.

Get info (and not so much background) regarding Nokia, Apple and TI (well, really just Nokia, but I like saying "NokiApple") here.

In the QualSoft corner, this snippet:

"Qualcomm and Microsoft have a lot in common, and not just intense scrutiny by anti-trust authorities and huge market influence. They share some key strategic goals, notably leadership of the emerging mobile content and media industry, and control of the device architectures for this sector. They are both venturing out of markets where their dominant position is almost unchallengeable in to new waters where they face different and powerful competitors.

This means they also share several common enemies, most importantly Nokia. So, while the close alliance hinted at by last week's announcement of a smartphone collaboration may be seen in parts of the wireless industry as the gathering of the forces of darkness, it is also highly pragmatic and shows the two giants huddling together for warmth as they face increasingly critical challenges in the world of ubiquitous connectivity and mobile multimedia."

And in the Nokia corner, this snippet:

"Nokia has been licensing Series 60, which runs on the Symbian smartphone operating system, to other vendors in a bid to create a de facto standard. This effort has gained importance as the competitive differentiation on high end handsets has shifted from the operating system itself to the higher layers, notably the user interface and browser.

Gaining multivendor support for Series 60 was the first step in the effort to take, on mobile devices, the role enjoyed by Microsoft on the PC – thereby mounting a major challenge to the Windows giant as enterprise and consumer activity shifts inexorably from the PC to mobile devices.

The next stage is to go fully open source, with the aim of accelerating uptake and creating a major developer community – always Microsoft's trump card in any battle against Windows and the .Net software architecture."

Yummy. Agi has the Nokia 770 (the wi-fi tablet that's NOT a phone, referenced in the article), by the way, and it's awesome. I might review that at some point.

I really hope it goes Nokia's way--they're so much more innovative, I find, and I'm tired of Microsoft, and Qualcomm's BREW, while cool, is very restrictive even from a user's perspective. As the article mentions, QualSoft's alliance is a gathering of dark forces in the mobile industry.