The Mobile Web Tablet

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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I’m at the Von Europe listening to presentations on fixed mobile convergence (FMC). Current topic is “quad-play”, the new holy grail for operators. Quad-play is what you get when you combine TV, fixed phone, mobile phone and broadband access in one package.

In my world that translates to “internet, internet, wireless internet and – you guessed it – internet”. Voice and TV will be applications running on top of internet. What I need from my operator is a fast and stable IP connection. No more, no less. We’re not there quite yet, though, so in the mean time we will have to pay for different data transportation technologies for different mediums.

FMC is also a way for operators to prevent their customers from switching provider. The more you buy from one vendor, the less likely you are to change.

FMC is not Mobile 2.0. Internet Mobile Convergence is. The telecom world thinks that IMS (as in IP Multimedia System) will provide this bridge. Some other thinks that IMS is a bloated, over designed and unnecessary technology. I think the latter ones are correct.

Never the less, different technology worlds and markets are converging. Internet is the driver and quad-play is a temporary transition stage. No matter what the operators tell you.

Updated: Nicolai was also there.

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Something is happening in the world of mobile phones. Something big. Very big.

The driving forces for the change include the miniaturization of the components necessary for building a PC, the cost of wireless high speed internet access and the platformization of mobile phone software.

Signs of the change include how the company that practically invented the personal computer, Apple, is removing the word “computer” from its’ name while the company that turned the mobile phone into a consumer product, Nokia, keeps talking about how they really are building “multimedia computers“. Adding to that, already mobile PCs (laptops) are outselling desktops and they keep getting smaller.

Somewhere in the middle, Bill Gates sums it up nicely:

“The phone is going to be the PC, and the PC is going to be the phone.”

What does that mean to the industry? As I’ve mentioned before, the mobile OS war is a dead horse race. Even though Symbian has shipped 100 million copies of its’ OS (a completely irrelevant number since that includes many different flavors of the OS, like UIQ and S60 in different and incompatible versions) the smartphone of the future is a pocketable PC with a flash drive in stead of a hard drive and a fuel cell battery. Most likely running the latest Windows Vista-version.

So, yes, Bill Gates is right.

On the other hand, running Vista in a phone with a display the size of a small credit card is overkill no matter how you look at it. Most phones will be ultrathin clients running light-weight applications in XHTML, Flash Lite, mobile java or some similar application platform. The underlying OS will, from an application developers point of view, be irrelevant.

Will they be called computers? If you by the word computer mean “device capable of running user installable applications”, then yes.

If, on the other hand, you mean “computing device with keyboard, screen and a mouse running a window-based multitasking operating system like Windows XP or Mac OS/X”, then no.

But honestly, does it matter what we call it? The mobile phone will become a small window to the web, with small widget-like applications running within open application platforms. Is that a phone?

Is it a PC?

Or is it a mobile web tablet?

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Doubtless, Google is going mobile. But regardless of the rumors the Google Phone is about as likely as a Microsoft PC.

Building and selling a phone at the scale that a Google Phone would require is a lot of work and requires a huge infrastructure. Selling boxes with hardware in them is a completely different business than what Google is in at the moment. They might as well start selling breakfast cereals.

Building software (like an OS based on Linux), applications (like Gmail, Google Maps Mobile etc.) or search engines based on location or pattern recognition (the building blocks of the mobile internet) is another matter and much more likely for Google.

Then again, Microsoft does sell the Xbox, which is sort of like a Microsoft PC, so you never know…

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That last post got me thinking. The fact that I can’t get the name of any person calling me by having the phone hooking up to a web service and looking up the name from the phone number is such a sure sign of how far from The Mobile Web we really are that I’m going to make this my Mobile Web latmus test:

When I can buy a phone from the major vendors (LG, SEMC, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung) that, without me installing any special software, does that for me, then we’re there.

The web and the telecom industry will finally have merged. The telecom industry gets it and the web industry has the tools available to make it happen. Until then, we’re really only playing around. It’s like the PC-industry before Windows 3.1. The internet before Netscape. It hasn’t happened yet.

I’m guessing it’s about 2-3 years away.

By the way, does the iPhone support that? Anyone know?

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This blog is as young as spring time here in Stockholm, so the Carnival of the Mobilists is a good way of getting readers. Dorrian Porter hosts the carnival #71 where I contributed with one post.
The blog Everything and the Mobile Software Universe adds some thoughts to the post.

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Martin Geddes has an observation:

It’s official folks. You can access the Internet when mobile, but the Mobile Internet is dead.

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