The Mobile Web Tablet

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?

Popularity: 5% [?]

…the internet!

Yes, that’s right. Not S60, UIQ, Linux, iPhone OS, PalmOS, Brew or Windows Mobile. No, the net is what will provide the core of any mobile service of the future.

I know I’m contradicting myself somewhat compared to what I wrote the other day about Java and JSR248, Mobile Service Architecture becoming the framework for mobile applications. I still believe this to be the case.

However, the functionality a generic “mobile 2.0″ application requires from the native phone OS is rather limited. The bulk of most services will be on a web server. Google Maps Mobile, Widsets, Opera Mini or Gmail are all good examples of extremely capable mobile applications supported by a strong web service. These are all java applications, but as web browsers in mobile phones grow more capable we will see XHTML or Flash Lite-based applications. Widgets, if you like that term.

Even hardware intense applications such as video players or camera-integrated applications can be written with a simple API such as JSR234 (advanced multimedia) and/or JSR211 (content handler API) in Java.

It’s really only a thin slice of the mobile application market that requires full access to the native OS. If you absolutely feel you have to have this access, considering how full blown PCs are available the size of PDAs, I’d almost like to say: do it in Windows Vista in stead!

The majority of mobile applications will be web, web, web (by that I mean it will run on a web server) and then maybe some Java, XHTML or Flash Lite on top. Developers used to developing for the PC web browser might think of them as thin clients. Mobile phones on the other hand are ultrathin clients. This means the server has to do more work and there has to be two different GUIs to the same service: one thin and one ultrathin.

The problem with todays phones is not about access to the native OS, but rather how the web or downloaded applications are second grade citizens within the phone GUI. This, however, will change.

Nokias recent move to integrate a widget platform in S60 is a sign of exactly what I’m talking about. Sony Ericssons multitasking java and standby midlets are some other and so is the Apple iPhone. Good and useful widgets are really just a small window to a much larger web service.

So forget the mobile OS-war. Any phone that has a mature java environment and/or a good web browser or a widget environment can be used to build great mobile services. The underlying OS really doesn’t matter.

To paraphrase Clinton: it’s the web, stupid!

Popularity: 9% [?]

Just got back home after visiting the first Nustart Hej!-conference about entrepreneurship and web 2.0. It was a pretty good conference with the same feel and content as Reboot or LIFT. A typical “conference 2.0″ where everyone is blogging, photographing or filming the event. Nice.

Amongst the speaker were a few entrepreneurs talking about their services or giving advice on how to succeed. So, anything about the mobile web?

Well, yes, to a certain degree (for example, Andy Smith from Jaiku mentioned the mobile phone but it seemed like it was the Twitter-like chatting that was the thing about Jaiku – and I don’t think that was Jyris original intention) but it is still assumed that by “web” we mean access to the internet using a web browser on a PC. All the innovation happens on this platform. This somewhat limits the true potential of the web.

One example is Polar Rose who has a platform for recognising faces in photos. Now this could be a truly groundbreaking feature and I’m sure it will be a huge success, but it assumes that people are uploading the pictures to online albums like Flickr or Picasa. Of course the algorithm should be integrated directly in to the cameras so that whenever I take a picture I can see the name of the persons whos faces are in the picture.

For this to happen today, Polar Rose would have to cooperate with the camera manufacturers and license their software to them. The cameras would also require an internet connection which most digital cameras don’t have. Of course, the mobile phones are almost there, but the rest of our devices also need to open up for innovation with platforms such as Mobile Service Architecture.

Web 3.0 was mentioned as the “next big thing” but no one really knows what it is. I’m guessing that the “internet of things” comes close. When you can write a midlet that uses the Polar Rose web service API and install it in, say your fridge so that it can greet you personally each morning, then we’re close.

This might seem farfetched but as the price of hardware and software goes down, quickly a point is reached when the benefit of having a generic and open platform is higher than the cost of adding it. My guess is that linux, java and the web technologies will play a major part in this. Or, maybe Joe Armstrong is right and it’s Erlang that will be the platform of choice. The evolution of consumer robotics might be the path that leads us there.

Whatever will happen I’m sure next year in Hej08 we will know more.

Popularity: 4% [?]