Two observations that point in the same direction: the OS of your mobile doesn’t matter. It’s the internet compatibility that makes all the difference. First an old post by Nokia Linux web tablet product manager Ari Jaaksi:

“Today, we run Linux, X, Gnome, Flash, and friends on Nokia N800. Our big idea form the start was to run –as closely as possible– a desktop Linux stack. Others will start to do the same and I predict that mobile software will thus eventually die. All we need is software that runs everywhere.”

Then we have the announcement from Apple about how third party applications will be basically mobile widgets running AJAX. Thomas Bailey comments:

“I speculate that the other announcement of Safari coming to Windows and apparent lack of an iPhone SDK may be loosely related – notepad and a browser is all that is required once you move away from using table spaghetti for layout and design. In providing a web runtime which closely reflects the phone and making it available on Windows, a much larger potential developer base can be leveraged – could Safari be the SDK when used in conjunction with an “iPhone profile” ?“

Bailey (and Apple) is on to something here. There will be an application platform that bridges the PC world and the mobile world and a significant part of that platform will be the internet. The question is who will drive this platform? Can many different platforms co-exist? If Apple is to be truly successful, I would have to be able to run their iPhone mobile widgets on other devices as well. The iPhone might be a huge hit, but it will not be that big. So, when will we see the APIs available to javascript on an iPhone publically available and ported to other devices?

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