So, all we can do is drool over videos such as this one, taken at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week:

Updated: Engadget has a review. I like this:

The Honeycomb look and feel certainly has the work of a single mind written all over it — while we know this is very much a team effort (something we discussed with Matias in our interview at CES), it’s also clear that someone is steering the ship with far more resolve than ever before witnessed in this OS. From a purely visual standpoint, Android 3.0 comes together in a far more cohesive manner than any previous iteration of the software, and the changes aren’t just cosmetic.

• Motorola: 27.4 million devices.
• LG: 24.4 million devices.
• Sony Ericsson: 22.3 million devices

In a few months time the top five chart can be completely rewritten. I wonder if Motorola will even be in it!

What about Apple? Well, their target is 10 million iPhones sold by the end of the year. That’s about the same number that any of the three manufacturers above sell in one month. Impressive for a “new guy” but hardly a dent in the overall mobile phone industry.

What’s the platform? Russell writes:

Moto has now launched phones with every conceivable OS there is: Linux, Java, Symbian, Microsoft, and yet, there’s no sense that there’s any effort to create a unified target for developers.

Where’s the independent developer community? Relates to the previous question as you need a clear platform strategy to attract developers. Russell again:

The developer.motorola.com site has a decent set of specs for their phones, but doesn’t seem to have any sort of forum or way to interact with other developers. (If it is there, it’s hard as hell to find.) And why are Moto’s Linux phones still only available in Asia?

Where’s the Internet strategy?. Russell:

Why isn’t Motorola doing anything to embrace the obvious next stage in mobility, starting with a decent mobile browser? Hell, Apple has neither an open platform nor a dev community and yet they seem to be getting lots of converts just by providing a great browser on their iPhone.

The platform, the developers and the internet. There you have it: the corner stones for a successful mobile 2.0 strategy.

Iconic mobile phones are otherwise few and far between. For a consumer market the size of the mobile phone market, the following is quite interesting:

[...] there are now only two mobile phones in American history that consumers ask for by product name: The Motorola Razr and the Apple iPhone.

I would have added the Blackberry, but OK. This is nothing short of a failure for a market that size. Truth is, most mobile phones are clones of each other. Even the last couple of years explosion of features (cameras, mp3 players, web browsers, games etc.) hasn’t produced a single phone that really sticks out with personality (I’m probably a bit biased when I say the Sony Ericsson T610 is a candidate).

Innovation has been in features, not in usability, design or marketing. Apple has changed that. None of the features in the iPhone are completely new, but the packaging is.

Time for the established players to start afresh and stop the cloning.

If I was the CEO of one of the major mobile vendors, I would have set aside a team of the most experienced engineers and the best designers and basically give them free hands to do magic. Preferably, they would be in a separate building from the other company. Their mission: to go to the soul of the company, the roots, and make the phone everyone in the company wants to make if they weren’t prevented by legacy requirements and old code. Start from a blank slate and work upwards.

Of course, such an endeavor would hit the bottom line pretty hard, which is why most CEOs don’t do it. A classic innovators dilemma which an outsider can take advantage of in exactly the way Apple has done.

Nokia is trying to do something along those lines with their open source and web tablet team headed by Ari Jaaksi. While the Nokia web tablets have been far from as successful as the iPhone (don’t know the sales figures for the web tablets, but I’m guessing they’re far below 500’000) I think in the long term it will pay off. (For Nokia, this is quite a courageous move. Their customers are the operators and I’m pretty sure no operator asked for a linux based wifi web tablet!)

This is also how Motorola came up with the RAZR, by the way:

They kept the project top-secret, even from their colleagues. They used materials and techniques Motorola had never tried before. After contentious internal battles, they threw out accepted models of what a mobile telephone should look and feel like. In short, the team that created the RAZR broke the mold, and in the process rejuvenated the company.

Seems like companies are only capable of pulling this through during hard times. Motorola was in a pretty bad shape when RAZR was born.

Exciting things are happening in the world of mobile and the established players better watch out – especially the ones with wind in the sails. The iPhone is not the last wanting to go for knockout and it’s so darn difficult to be innovative when times are good.

Unless you’re Apple, it seems.

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?