Mobile Internet Watch

Despite activation problems that were described as a "fiasco" in the US, Apple managed to ship over a million 3G iPhones on launch day Friday and over the weekend. Also, the new App Store is estimated to have enjoyed over 10m downloads in the same three-day period. Handset makers love to trade headline shipments figures of course, but the most interesting aspect of the iPhone is the wider impact its massive publicity machine has - by throwing a spotlight on new mobile trends. One of these is hyper-local mobile services, especially social networking - not unique to the 3G iPhone for sure, but gaining a new profile from iPhone applications.

Most smartphone makers know that the hot buttons in the mobile internet are location-based services and social networking, and if you put GPS in the handset and mix the two features together, this drives significant increases in mobile web usage. Even greater uptake - and greater differentiation from PC-based services - could be stimulated by going hyper-local, and there will be a race between the big names like Facebook, and the mobile specialists, to get there first.

The PC players, like Adobe and Microsoft, talk up their large base of developers and promise to make it increasingly easy for them to port their applications to mobile systems too. But until the mobile internet becomes really open, and more users have powerful web-enabled handsets, the mobile-oriented developer communities drive the agenda, and the largest of those is Forum Nokia. In the wake of Nokia putting its key development frameworks, along with the Symbian operating system, into the open source Symbian Foundation, it hopes to attract a far wider base of programmers, before it even has to worry about PC crossover (something that it hopes will largely be addressed on its behalf by its focus on cross-platform Java). Now it is spreading the Forum's wings even wider, bringing WidSets - its widget-based mobile content creation and sharing platform - into the fold.

This will open up the tools, technical information, support and distribution channels open to its global developer channel, to creators of WidSets mini-applications. These widgets will also now be available for download to the Nokia Forum's whole user base, not just through WidSets' own engine and partner portals. This indicates a coming of age for the widgets activity and for Nokia's mobile internet play as a whole. When it set up WidSets in October 2006, the initiative was one of its first web software units and was run as a separate business, but now it is being placed firmly at the heart of the company's overall strategy, where it can better enhance the developer program, and try to fend off the threat from other majors like Apple, Yahoo and Microsoft, and potential majors like Google Android. All of these are racing to create developer tools and support/distribution programs to attract the widest range of applications, and to set up apps stores to lure end users.

As mobile software platforms shrink in number, so will browsers, and nowhere is the change in this sector highlighted so strongly as by the news that Openwave, the father of the mobile browser, is getting out of the market. The company is to sell its software business to Purple Labs for $30m, including its browsers, and will now focus only on network products.

The move is probably timely - embedded WAP browsers supported the first, shaky generation of the mobile internet, but now high end and midrange phones are moving quickly towards fully fledged browsers. This leaves little space for Openwave, which had not made the leap into the full browser, and would stand slim chance of doing so now, as the number of mobile browsers looks set to narrow down to five majors, or even fewer over time (one each for Symbian, Android  and LiMO, plus mobile Internet Explorer and Apple Safari). 

Even before Nokia delivered what may well prove a killer blow to Google's ambition of setting universal handset software standards, the search giant's Android plan was hitting roadblocks - highlighting that the company, for all its internet strengths, is a novice in understanding the structures and processes of the mobile handset and developer communities. Just before the Symbian Foundation was unveiled, Google had been forced to admit that Android would be delayed, even though it had shown the first prototype just a week earlier. When Google and its 30-strong band of supporters, the Open Handset Alliance, was formed last November, it promised the mobile software platform - Linux-based and extending all the way up to the user interface and applications layer - would be commercially ready by mid-year, with the first handsets to appear soon after. In fact, Android and its initial devices are now slated for year end, with many industry insiders predicting they will be quite a bit later.

Opinions on the multimedia capabilities of the iPhone vary widely. On one side, some users desperately lament the absence of support for Adobe Flash. On the other, there is the view that Apple's Steve Jobs is right, and that Flash is not up to the job of supporting such a sophisticated handset, and therefore subscribers get a better all-round experience from the iPhone, even if some content is off-limits. Now it seems Apple is developing its own platform to bypass Flash, using a technology called SproutCore, while Adobe is working on Flash emulation for the new iPhone.

Whichever line you take, this is becoming an epic stand-off that is as much to do with industry politics as user functionality - both Apple and Adobe are in the front row of vendors that aim to drive the agenda for mobile internet standards, along with Microsoft, Nokia and Yahoo. Adobe, which has recently upgraded Flash Lite and announced a plan for a unified platform for developers that bridges the PC and phone, has also founded the Open Screen Initiative to increase backing for Flash to become a standard on all advanced handsets.

In the battle to dominate the high speed wireless media network, technologies based on Wi-Fi and others based on UltraWideBand (UWB) are key contenders. With the best supported UWB-based platform, WiMedia, looking unready to deliver high definition data rates in the near future, fast Wi-Fi variants are gaining ground, even with WiMedia supporters like Intel, and threaten to squeeze UWB out of the market. One deciding factor will be the fate of two standards efforts within the IEEE, where the Wi-Fi and UWB camps are both targeting the 60GHz spectrum, increasingly the area of the unlicensed spectrum where the hopes for multi-gigabit networks are converging.

Qualcomm is unusual among chip companies in the depth of its collaborations with operators, and it intends to leverage these to gain a strong position in the mobile internet services market, once again raising the challenge to Nokia and Google. At the eighth annual developer conference for Qualcomm's BREW content and software delivery system, it announced a widgets-based web services initiative called Plaza, as well as a deal with Adobe to integrate Flash in the new BREW Mobile Platform.

Nokia has been demonstrating a certain schizophrenia over mobile Linux, which following Motorola's decision to focus almost exclusively on the Symbian OS on handsets, is casting some doubts over the readiness of Linux for the cellphone market. CFO Rick Simonson played up the importance of Nokia's Linux-based internet tablets at an investor conference recently, and hinted at broader use of the OS in handsets, but the company's official spokespeople then hastened to limit the impact of the remarks, saying they had been specific to the tablets--despite a well reported comment by Simonson that Nokia was "well on the way" to having Linux on a mainstream handset.

The Mobile Internet World Europe Summit this week in Munich saw Intel making bold claims for the role of the PC architecture in underpinning the next generation of mobile devices. Intel strongly upheld its view that the x86 platform and the PC design concept have both evolved to the point that, implicitly, designs from the cell phone heritage will be excluded from the high end of the device market, where success is driven by mobile internet services, brand and key applications like music, with the actual phone being secondary.

One of the key debates in the mobile world is whether the mobile internet should be 'just the internet' or should be an entirely different experience, based on specific development and applications technologies optimized for the handset and the limitations of wireless bandwidth. With companies like Google and Nokia representing the two camps, the real power lies with the firms whose software tools are being evolved to bridge the divide, and among these Java remains one of the most important.