Those with a Slingbox at home and a smartphone in your pocket appreciate the on-the-go mobile viewing that Slingplayer Mobile provides. Currently, Slingplayer Mobile supports most handsets running Windows Mobile, Symbian, and the Palm OS. The recently released Blackberry beta client supports select GSM Blackberry handsets and the iPhone compatible version is slated to go through the App store approval process some time in Q1 2009. This leaves Android and the newly announced webOS as potential future candidates for upcoming versions of SlingPlayer Mobile. A forum post over at Sling Community by MegaZone, Community Manager for Sling Media, sheds some light on the future of SlingPlayer Mobile. According to MegaZone, Android is the “next logical platform”. With several handsets already slated for release, many handset manufacturers committed to producing future handsets and carriers from around the world lining up to offer an Android handset, Android is a platform that is certainly worth the cost of development. Palm’s webOS on the other hand is, at this point, not as attractive as Android according to the Sling rep. MegaZone writes,
From what we have seen it looks like webOS is an all-new environment, so it would need an all-new SPM which would not be a small task. At this time we’re taking a wait and see approach to webOS. When it ships we’ll watch the adoption rate and decide if it warrants developing SPM for webOS or not. Keep in mind it has currently been announced for one device (the Pre) on one carrier (#3 and currently falling) so it remains to be seen if and when it appears on additional devices and carriers for the worldwide market and achieves a significant market share.
Burn! Whether his view on Sprint, Palm and its webOS is shared by other member of Sling Media remains to be seen but if it is indeed the consensus, then a mobile version of Sling Player for webOS may be a long time in the making.
[Via Zatz Not Funny]
