Free?
For a moment I thought they'd open sourced it. I get free updates on my Nokia all the time, not really news.
I did tethering on my 6 year old cheap feature phone. Unless it means turning the phone into a Wifi router, but I thought that was common on high end phones these days too.
I can't remember the last time I paid for a development environment. I think it was AMOS on the Amiga 15 years ago. (And good it was too - though I still think that the official SDKs should always be free, whether it was the Amiga back then, or Windows, Linux, Symbian and Android now.)
DyXym: "In the short term it probably makes no difference since Apple is sitting on top,"
I agree with your post, but this isn't true - Apple aren't on top. They're about 5th place in phone companies, and 3rd by "smartphone" OS share. The reason it makes no difference is because of the large companies that will churn out Iphone apps no matter what, whilst ignoring the more popular platforms.
Spongibrain: MS give the Express versions away for free. And Qt for Symbian, and whatever SDK Android uses, are free (and open source).