Fighting for Mobile Mindshare

The more I look into what’s happening in the mobile scene, the more excited I get. The smartphone platforms really are the computers of tomorrow. They all have big (enough) screens with touch, most of them have keyboards, connectivity is excellent with both wifi and high speed 3G (Rogers in Canada says it has 3.5G, even better). Heck, they’re way more powerful than the PCs we fell in love with in the 80s.

I’m looking at this from an application developer’s point of view. If you’re a mobile app developer and you have a great idea, what platform do you target? And it’s a pretty significant choice, just like it was in the 80’s. All of the platforms have not only different APIs, but different programming languages. iPhone with Objective-C, Android with it’s own version of Java, Palm Pre with JavaScript, RIM with J2ME, and Nokia with almost everything including Flash and C++. And then you have the Linux-based MIDs such as Moblin (need to mention my upcoming new bosses :)) and Maemo which are also starting to blur the line as they start acquiring 3G functionality. In theory, you’d love to get your idea on all these platforms.

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