At the Future of Mobile conference today the most revealing, and at the same time boring moment, was when a panel of representatives from Google, Microsoft, Symbian, LiMo and Purple Labs were discussing the future of smartphones.
Five panelists from five companies representing five different operating systems with five sets of competing interests – and one goal: Dominate the mobile market.
The result for the end-user?
Ewen Macleod, from The Mobile Industry Review summed it up nicely at the bloggers’ panel talk:
All this “isn’t the future of mobile great” talk – let’s take a reality check: It’s an absolutely shit experience. The mobile industry right now? Piece of shit.
People are frustrated with the fragmentation of the mobile industry. Multiple operators, operating systems and handset manufacturers, none of them cooperating properly, make starting or running a business that is based on mobile applications a royal pain.
So what is the future of mobile? How can this be fixed? Dare Obasanjo put it nicely in a recent post:
Which makes more sense, that every Web site in the world should create duplicate versions of their pages for mobile phones and regular browsers or that software + hardware would eventually evolve to the point where I can run a full fledged browser on the device in my pocket?
Just as it did for the personal computer, the web will bring the fragmented mobile phone markets together. The mobile web is dead, long live the web!
heyr heyr
Hi Geir. Thanks for the write up. Sounds like you took a lot away from the event. Hope to see you next year.