The 'evaporation' of voice and text

I'm posting this from the Symbian Smartphone Show, thankfully being held this year at Earls Court rather than the annoyingly out-of-the-way Excel Centre. Thus far I do not have much to report, save a couple of incremental enhancements to existing products (keep an eye out for a piece on the new QuickOffice).

I can however relate some splendid examples of mobile industry bollocks, particularly this gem from a Motorola executive: "Texting and voice are slowly evaporating into the rear view mirror." Linguistic linguine aside, this is absolute rubbish, as any operator will tell you. Or, as the analyst Dean Bubley snorted when I repeated the above line to him: "Yeah, SMS has really 'evaporated'. Around $100bn worth of evaporating"...

The Motorola exec continued: "Data revenue excites carriers, so they invest in their infrastructure." Again, rubbish. Carriers hate data - they're forced to offer flat rate usage, so it doesn't profit them in any significant way. They'd like a slice of the services using the data, but the data itself is not the issue. They do invest in infrastructure because of it, but that's out of competition rather than being "excited". Anyway, back to Motoexec...

"So we enter into that beautiful circle of life. The developer is at the centre of that circle." Nuff said.

The big unanswered question at this point is that of what will happen to third-party code within Symbian code, once Symbian's code gets open-sourced. More of this later, when I interview Symbian's tech chief David Wood, but the chats I've had thus far today indicate some interesting interpretations of the GPL...