Comments on: Androids, iPhones and WiMAX http://blog.telecoms.com/2007/11/09/androids-iphones-and-wimax/ Telecoms industry news and opinion Thu, 08 Jan 2009 21:04:14 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0.12-alpha by: TK http://blog.telecoms.com/2007/11/09/androids-iphones-and-wimax/#comment-339 Sat, 24 Nov 2007 16:28:04 +0000 http://blog.telecoms.com/2007/11/09/androids-iphones-and-wimax/#comment-339 The Operating System on a cellphone is the one piece of the mobile ecosystem that most consumers don't really care about (and that's a good thing IMHO). Should developers care? Only in as much as device specific capabilities need to be integrated and exposed. If mobile services are based on native apps on the handset then yes, developers care. However, at this time mobile data services that are wap based (and not text/voice communication) is one area where for the most part, developers don't care. However as more server side application services get developed (with minimal or no device footprint) again developers wouldn't care much for the device OS. I think the best case scenarios where device OS becomes interesting are when device capabilities get exposed on mobile services (eg if i can use my device contacts in a mobile service then the ability to integrate with contacts would be of value. The market currently is ripe for server side mobile services to be developed. The challenges however are that such services are based on data (wap?) access and not as widespread as are voice or text. Furthermore, these services have to be built from scratch, and so the availability of a server side platform that exposes the communicational capabilities of a mobile device (such as voice calling and text messaging) and integrated with the device specific user data such as contacts etc would be of great value. FoneMine (http://www.fonemine.com) has built one such platform that provides mobile app developers to rapidly build services using the platform abstractions. The Operating System on a cellphone is the one piece of the mobile ecosystem that most consumers don’t really care about (and that’s a good thing IMHO). Should developers care? Only in as much as device specific capabilities need to be integrated and exposed. If mobile services are based on native apps on the handset then yes, developers care. However, at this time mobile data services that are wap based (and not text/voice communication) is one area where for the most part, developers don’t care. However as more server side application services get developed (with minimal or no device footprint) again developers wouldn’t care much for the device OS. I think the best case scenarios where device OS becomes interesting are when device capabilities get exposed on mobile services (eg if i can use my device contacts in a mobile service then the ability to integrate with contacts would be of value.

The market currently is ripe for server side mobile services to be developed. The challenges however are that such services are based on data (wap?) access and not as widespread as are voice or text. Furthermore, these services have to be built from scratch, and so the availability of a server side platform that exposes the communicational capabilities of a mobile device (such as voice calling and text messaging) and integrated with the device specific user data such as contacts etc would be of great value. FoneMine (http://www.fonemine.com) has built one such platform that provides mobile app developers to rapidly build services using the platform abstractions.

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