Google, Symbian, Microsoft and Research In Motion go head-to-head.
ME is reporting live from Heroes Of The Small Screen, a one-day conference in London devoted to all things mobile.
Let's start – and sorry if you're weeping at this – with fragmentation. “Fragmentation is a challenge,” says Symbian's Oliver Gunasekara. “At least on the Symbian devices going forward it's completely one platform. If you've got Google Maps for the Nokia 5th edition device, they will run on my Samsung with no difference.”
And he starts the smack talk, pointing out that Symbian has more handsets out there than iPhone, Android and BlackBerry combined.
Next up is Hugo Barra from Google's mobile team. “We're hugely excited about the web becoming a standard for mobile,” he says. “HTML 5 has to be in the same sentence as 'mobile web', and standard... When devices that have the unit share that Symbian has today have the usage share or usage trends that you see from iPhone, then we see the web taking off in mobile.”
In other words, don't boast about how many users you've got until the experience they're getting is driving actual usage of the mobile web.
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So we're getting into the apps v mobile web debate, if you hadn't twigged. Symbian's Gunasekera brings up battery life, saying that a rich AJAX mobile web app will drain the battery much more than a native application. “If everything went to the browser, suddenly battery life is going to get a lot worse,” he says.
Back to Barra, who points out that even 3D-accelerated games will be possible in the browser in the not-too-distant future, thanks to technologies like WebGL.
Now Mike Kirkup from Research In Motion, who talks about how RIM is working on both sides of the equation. “We see it more as there's going to be use cases for both,” he says, while pointing out that RIM is focused on rolling out new services for developers, from push and geolocation to mobile advertising – see our recent coverage from the BlackBerry Developer Conference for full details on this.
“We want to give developers choice,” he says. “A lot fall into the spell of the one-time download payment, and a lot are being crushed by it... We want to give people the opportunity to experiment within their own applications, whether you offer it for free and it's advertising-supported, or if you want to upgrade for a freemium type model, we wanna put that experimentation back into the hands of the developers rather than owning that at an ecosystem level.”
Back to Gunasekara from Symbian, who's asked about the evolution of the Symbian OS. “A brand new, completely touch-based UI,” he says. “We believe we've got a better solution than the iPhone! I've used the iPhone for quite a bit, but it's almost too simple sometimes. It's very very good the first time you pick it up, but sometimes you have to go down too many clicks to find what you want. There isn't the idea of a context-sensitive menu, system-wide.”
That's fighting talk!
Now to Microsoft's Oded Ran, who sees a role for both web apps and native apps. “I don't think it's going to change much in the next year when it comes to fragmentation,” he says, citing music and games as examples that still require the latter. “We have quite capable devices and mobile operating systems, but we're still quite far away from where the developer ecosystem can build something and make money from it.”
Wait, what? That's quite pessimistic. But his point is that a lot of developers still aren't making money, for all the excitement around new smartphone platforms. “I think in the next 12 months, we will still not have a single standard emerging for developers out there,” he says.
Ran says that Microsoft has 18 million people using Hotmail on their phones in the UK alone, and 2.4 million people using Windows Live Messenger, so there are some bright spots. “Services that can span across multiple platforms – PC and phone – are the ones making money at the moment,” he says, citing Facebook as an example. “How many content services out there are able to survive on mobile alone?”
Controversial.
Moderator Matthaus Krzykowski from VentureBeat asks the panel how much innovation they see in mobile. “There's little doubt that the pace is increasing in terms of the level of innovation,” says Kirkup, but he comes back to fragmentation, saying that the thrust of the handset makers is to entrench the fragmentation by differentiating their platforms. “There's no economic incentive right now to solve that fragmentation problem for developers,” he says.
Barra chimes in on innovation. “One of the things I haven't heard about here today is innovation around some of the things that are unique about mobile,” he says. Camera, compass, accelerometer, microphone and other sensors coming up. He thinks we're starting to see innovation around that. Barra also talks about music firms like Shazam, Pandora and Spotify.
And he gets back to the browser, and improvements that will give developers access to all those sensors and native capabilities from within mobile browsers. That, according to Barra, is when fragmentation issues will be solved.
So who's making money? “Very few developers are making money,” says Gunasekara. “It depends on your definition of making money,” says Kirkup, getting a laugh. He goes on to say that “a lot of people are forgoing basic business rules” in the goldrush mentality of the app store era, citing the example of developers who haven't even trademarked their app names.
Barra points out that a lot more mobile publishers are making money than were making money two or three years ago.
What's it going to take for the big entertainment brands to look beyond their iPhone tunnel-vision? Film studios, record labels, TV companies – why aren't they getting more into Android, Windows Mobile, Blackberry and the other platforms?
“Eyeballs,” says Berra. The panel smirks, and nobody else answers. Ah well. I asked that question, and was hoping they'd have a bit more to say about the merits of their own platforms. Maybe they're not that fussed after all.
