The next two years are likely to see an avalanche of
mobile-friendly applications as enterprises, network operators and
handset makers struggle to beef up their margins.
Just how important the application market is becoming can be
judged from
Vodafone's
tie-up this week with Israel-based
Nexperience. The
world's biggest mobile carrier will use Nexperience's system to
provide its business partners with a secure online environment to
pre-load applications onto Vodafone handsets and test them prior to
distribution.
The Mobile World Congress, the mobile industry showcase that
opens next week in Barcelona, is expected to reveal a battle for
developers' minds and money. The protagonists are
Symbian
(ex-Nokia/Ericsson),
Android (Google),
iPhone (Apple),
Microsoft and
Blackberry (Research in Motion).
Symbian is using MWC to announce that 78 industry partners have
now pledged their support. These include Atelier, Bank of America,
Gemalto, Hewlett-Packard, Imagination Technologies, Mobica,
MySpace, Nanoradio, Omron Software, Qualcomm, SanDisk, SESCA, SiRF
Technology and VirtualLogix.
They have an attractive market to aim at. Symbian runs on more
than 250 million mobile phones in use on more than 250 networks. It
already has "tens of thousands" of third-party applications
written, says Symbian.
Most of the applications developed to date have been
consumer-oriented. However, the number of business applications
available or in development is rising quickly. This is expected to
accelerate as the security and speed offered by handsets and mobile
networks improves.
Driving the development is the need to increase the average
revenue per user (ARPU). This lies behind Nokia's shift into
selling services and content, and its donation of the Symbian and
S60 operating systems to the Symbian Foundation, with the
instruction to make it an open source platform by 2010.
This was in response to Google's Android, an open system
development platform that currently runs on T-Mobile's G1 phone.
Google was answering the phenomenal commercial success of Apple's
iPhone, which was itself a reaction to the proprietary Blackberry,
still the mobile of choice for many executives, including US
president Barak Obama.
Android is highlighting the ease with which developers can
string together each others' applications. Writing on the Android
developers' blog, Jason Chen says once Shazam identifies a song,
the user can search for the artist's official MySpace profile page
or buy it via an Amazon MP3 app.
Meanwhile, Ericsson will unveil its Connected Home Gateway
software at MWC. This lets users interact with their home computer,
TV or media player, services and media, wherever they are. The
gateway also enables one single entry point for IPTV and multimedia
telephony services into the home.
As business apps migrate onto mobile phones, enterprises will
start to use them as the primary corporate interface device.
Already most network operators will offer to switch internal
corporate calls between company mobiles. This allows firms to ditch
their pbxes, desk phones, and cabling.
And if workers will let the company communicate with them via
their personal mobiles, which are likely to be a higher
specification than the corporate ones, firms might even save the
cost of the phones.