One of the things they highlight is that cross platform development is that cross platform development is on the rise with developers targeting more than one platform. Should be good news for companies and tools such as PhoneGap and MoSync. The latter recently announced plans for a cross platform app store.

The race is on.

That would make Sony Ericsson number three after Samsung and Nokia. A goal I know they have been trying to reach for a long time. Congratulations!

Mobile phones vs fixed landline phones
Change from voice to SMS
Move from enterprise to consumer centric
Smartphone customers
Postpaid vs prepaid
Subsidised handsets vs unsubsidised
Operator (carrier) designed phones
The expansion of the mobile phone’s capabilities from one to eight
Networks and their coverage
Want to see the antenna of the phone
Multiple subscriptions and phones
Replacement cycles
The mobile phone as an aspirational thing
Phone and fashion
CDMA vs GSM
The SIM card and unlocked phones
The Receiving Party Pays model shifting to Calling Party Pays
Clamshell form factor vs candybar
Emergence of childrens phones
Youth need to text blindly

It’s a long post, full of insights, including this one:

Ten years ago the primary service on cellphones was voice; and many American top telecoms experts in wireless still today will repeat this faulty mantra “but in the end, we must remember that the cellphone is primarily a voice communciation device”. TOTALLY WRONG. And don’t buy into the iPhone hoopla (so, eh, its a.. media device?). No! Don’t buy into the RIM propaganda (oh, I get it, you mean wireless email?). No, as all mobile telecoms execs in all leading markets – from Scandinavia to Italy and Spain to Ireland and the UK to Israel to Singapore to South Korea – know: the only addictive service on cellphones is SMS text messaging. The killer app – the only killer app – is SMS.

(Emphasis added.)

• 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.

Sounds like news to me. At least I’ve missed it.

I wonder what the deal is between Yahoo! and the manufacturers. A not too wild guess would be revenue sharing of ads shown in the application. Consequence: your next phone might be subsidized not only by the operator but also by Yahoo!. In other words, mobile advertising is coming and it will take the shape of value added applications in your phone.

Another example of this: Yahoo! is also the search engine that pays for you to use Opera Mini (you didn’t think it was really free, did you?). Together with Yahoo! Go Mobile in 200 devices, Yahoo! can take a significant chunk out of that mobile revenue that Google wants with their as-of-yet-non-existing GPhone.

Microsoft has been trying to break in to the telecom market for years with Windows Mobile but they will most likely join the advertising war. They’re just a little late for the game.

Microsoft, Google Phone, Yahoo! Go Mobile… looks like the future of the web really is in mobile.

Pictures from the event here.

Updated: Lotta Holmstr??m at Citizen Watch also wrote about the Yahoo! presentation:

Yahoo! Go is a small java applet which lets the user access email, flickr, search and more. It will be in 200 cellphone models at the end of the year.

What does “in” mean? Preinstalled or available for?

One of them is flash memory replacing the hard drive. Another one is new form factor motherboards, small enough to put in a box of matches. A third one is WiMAX, promising broadband speed (well, sort of) wireless internet access (problem for WiMAX is, it’s been promising it for so long that good old 3G UMTS is catching up). Yet another is the Linux OS.

What do you get when putting all of them together?

Something like this.

The device is called MUnit and runs a 1GHz VIA CPU which is x86 compatible. You should be able to run Windows Vista on this one, if you want to. What the web tablet market needs is not Vista, though, but a Linux version that’s stable and has a developer ecosystem fertile enough to produce killer applications. The problem (some would call it a strength) with Linux is its many flavors.

Many flavors is great when eating ice cream but not so great when you want to build a commercial software application that must run on as many devices as possible for as little cost as possible. Linux is not there yet and maybe it never will get there. Why? Because Linux is a fertile environment for operating systems – not for applications.

That’s why I think Linux and Java is such a good combination – and I’m not the only one.

Touch screen, nice GUI and a slick design: those are not the true innovations in the iPhone. The fact that it’s the manufacturer picking what operator will be allowed to sell their products. Now, that’s new.

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.

The UI library in MIDP2 is basically designed for the lowest common denominator of devices that can run MIDP2. They are very simple (with the possible exception of the powerful CustomItem) and there’s not that many GUI components available for a developer. Add to that the fact that different manufacturers have implemented the library in different ways making it almost impossible to create a MIDP2 application based on the UI libraries in MIDP with a consistent behavior between the devices on the market.

No wonder all of the most successful java applications are written using an empty canvas with home made GUI components on top. That’s also the reason we see great new SDKs and UI libraries such as TWUIK to save developers the effort of writing their own UI classes.

There are a few initiatives on the way to remedy the situation. The successor to MIDP2 is MIDP3 (duh), there’s the Advanced Graphics and UI Optional Package (AGUI, though any API with the word “Advanced” in them should be avoided, the same goes for “Optional”) and there’s the open sourced, Eclipse-based eSWT, one of the components of ERCP.

Now, one should be aware of the fact that the MIDP3 API and the AGUI API are both defined by the Java Community Process (JCP). eSWT, on the other hand, is not. It is an open sourced community effort including IBM and Nokia. Sony Ericsson has always been committed to the JCP, so the silent announcement on the eSWT mailing list is noteworthy for more reasons than one. Gorkem Ercan writes:

Yesterday, we have received the first welcome mail to dsdp-ercp-dev list from SonyEricsson. They are now working to get eSWT to their mobile phones. Moreover, they have started to participate in the project as well.

The path mobile Java takes will have huge consequences for how the mobile web will look in a few years. Remember, this is an application platform that’s already in over a billion mobile devices. Unfortunately it’s a far from optimal ecosystem, making it difficult to distribute applications. There’s just so much creativity waiting to be unleashed the moment this ecosystem becomes more fertile. We will see an explosion of innovation that will mirror how the PC industry boomed during the 80s and the internet during the 90s.

The big difference is that, even though the PC became popular in the 80s, the mobile phone count is approaching 3 billion. This number will make the PC boom of the 80s look like a firecracker next to an atomic bomb. (There were ~48 million IMB/PCs sold during the 80s – the entire decade. That many phones are sold in about 2.5 weeks world wide, assuming a number of ~1 billion/year.)

So, watch history unfold and keep your eyes on where mobile Java is going. MIDP2/CLDC is sort of like MS-DOS was for the IBM/PC. We’re still waiting for Windows to come along. When that happens, the telecom market will be changed forever. The announcement by Sony Ericsson is a small but significant piece of the puzzle in what will become the mobile web framework of the future.

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?