What Will Mobile Phones Become?

Mobile phones already have every possible technology crammed into them. Cameras, GPS devices, Bluetooth networking, WiFi networking, slots for extra memory cards, touch screens, headphone jacks, even mini projectors. It has become a game of what can you do with it rather than what does it have inside. More and more of these things are getting built into more and more phones, but what isn't following is the software. The software has mostly remained organised in the same, old-fashioned way, which is unsuitable for integrating all of these advanced possibilities with one another. Many phones still have a closed software system, with additional programs being hard to install and limited in interoperability. Even iPhone's operating system is unable to transfer clipboard data between applications until version 3.0 which is due to get published soon. Other mobile producers don't make it so easy to control the OS, and upgrade it, most don't make it easy even to load in new programs.

What good are all the gadgets then, if they can only be used with the limited software that came with the device by most users? This is the field in which the next mobile phone market battle will be fought. The contestants are iPhone's OS, Nokia's Symbian, Palm's new OS, Blackberry OS, the Windows Mobile OS and the new Google Android platform. Other mobile producers will have to choose from one of these products, as the market demands a software platform on non entry level mobiles more and more. Leading in achieving the goals of application power and interoperability are Google with their revolutionary Android OS, and Apple with their iPhone OS. Both companies developed their own solutions for browsing the Internet which are fast and highly useful, with Apple having already highly developed hardware with 3D possibilities, a touch screen and the software to use it, and Google leading with their operating system architecture, but still having a small choice of hardware in offer. Nokia still has an operating system providing the most low level programming possibilities, enabling programmers to write emulators of other computing systems. Other producers will use their market positions to hide all the shortcomings of their systems and hope for the best, while those leading in innovation and offering new possibilities will lead the mobile phone into a new era of cheap devices which can do much more than before. And service providers will race to get exclusives with the new leaders in technology, as O2 has done with Apple iPhone. Mobile phones will become more than phones, computers and cameras, they will become an integrative centre for providing solutions to everything you think of.

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