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Mobile year

March 21st, 2007
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2007 must definitely be the year of the Mobile in the Internet calendar. Mobile apps and devices are popping up each day from numerous companies and service providers. Broadband perception (and reality to some extent) is there, flat fees and ADSL a-like prices are coming real soon, and mobile phones (and browsers) don’t cease to amaze me. Mobile operators never really got the Internet “thing” but they know all about ARPUs and big bucks so it was only a matter of time until they get it right. They may still shoot themselves in the foot a few more rounds, but they’ll get there I’m pretty sure.

Now let us reviews the last few months: Opera launched their much improved Opera Mobile and Opera Mini web browsers, changed their search provider (and business model) from Google to Yahoo!, Nokia left Opera and started their own next-gen browser, Apple announced the iPhone with what has go to be one of the most all time hyped products shacking the industry with polarized opinions, Google confirms a lab project on a Mobile device as well, every respected mobile operator in the world is either reinventing their old clunky WAP portals to XHTML (probably clunky too but hey, it’s ‘da web and be must the there with youngies) or adding rich Java applications to access their services. The Widget’s plague and the whole AJAX frameworks mambo jumbo is going mobile real soon too. And today Yahoo! launched Onesearch which I tried and found very impressive (side note: I predict Yahoo! is buying Opera, fit’s like a glove).

Business: service providers (like Portals) and Mobile Operators are the obvious wanna be players but there’s a third entity starving for a piece of the pie. Mobile device manufactures. Nokias, Sony Ericssons and the soon to be Apples of life made it very clear that they won’t settle with the hardware. They want to go services, content, user experience control and customer retention. Guess what, my W800i is binded to Blogspot on MMS posts and I can’t change it. And I can’t change my default browser too. And it’s only the beginning.

Let’s enjoy the rest of the year and see who’s going to be the enabler and the provider. It’s going to be fun.

English, Tech stuff

  • I'll wait for the iPhone and express my opinions on it after proof of it's existence is seen on any Apple Store near me. Other than the zillion posts about what's expected and supposed to be about it, there's really not much information about the way Apple is going to allow fiddling into the OS or not.

    And I really don't care if the manufacturer wants to take control over the apps you install on your Mobile *IF* they do pretty much everything I need and they do it well. I'm very pleased with the iApps I get on OSX for instance. Just don't hard-code my E-mail config to any Yahoo! or GMail and I'll be fine if excellence prevails on everything else. I'm still curious about the whole mobile widget phenomena too. Let's wait and see how open this iPhone will be. Apple may be as evil as the world dominator next door but they sure know what you want. Or at least they know how to convince you of that :)


    Yes, there are far too many platforms, twisted "standards" and variants, details and hardware features than any user or developer would want. It's well known fact that you can't buy a cellphone to do just the obvious these days: TALK!
  • Funny that a hyped up article ends up referring to the biggest "shot in the foot"

    As you said,

    "Guess what, my W800i is binded to Blogspot on MMS posts and I can’t change it. And I can’t change my default browser too. And it’s only the beginning."

    This is exactly what's keeping these devices tucked in under the pillow until they suffocate. Apple is doing the same.

    From my own experience, the best period ever for the mobile world came up after sony ericsson and nokia adopted symbian os as their operating system for smartphones.

    That's the problem though. Too many "operating systems" on the market and no real path to follow. I guess we've seen this before on the pc world.
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