A Boost to Mobility

Waleed Al-Shobakky (Published on IslamOnline.net, Jan 23, 08)

The mobile phone industry may be in for a paradigm shift in 2008.

Writing about information technology in the year ahead is as much about looking back as about looking forward. With rarely any exceptions, a new year's big stories in IT are about advances to products or services of the previous year.

One such area is the mobile phone. Two of the buzzwords of last year had had the "phone" suffix: GPhone and iPhone. The first — denoting Google Phone — turned out to be just a rumor. And Google ended up unveiling a new mobile phone platform, Android. The iPhone, Apple's device that sports an advanced touch-based interface, made its debut late last June, to long queues of mesmerized users.

iPhone

We are bound to see the deeper impact of the Android and the iPhone this year. In one respect, both are attempts to loosen the grip of mobile carriers on the applications and content users can have access to on their devices.

Competition among different manufacturers and platforms .. will mostly lead to a spurt of innovation in mobile phone applications.

But that does not mean mobile networks will be on the losing side. For instance, Apple is reported to have squeezed a lucrative deal in making the iPhone exclusive to AT&T. The biggest American mobile carrier conceded to Apple's terms for two good reasons. First, there is the almost guaranteed excitement about anything Apple, even at higher-than-average price tags. Second, AT&T saw opportunity in a device with an advanced Web browser to enliven demand for their data plans. Price wars over voice plans have made them the least profitable of what mobile carriers offer.

The iPhone could stimulate big changes in the year ahead because it runs on a platform that can accommodate third-party applications. The iPhone's brilliant interface runs on top of a customized Mac OS X, the operating system that gives life to Apple's desktop and laptop machines. Though the first edition of the iPhone did not, officially, accept third-party applications, Apple had announced toward the end of last year that this would change.

Wrestling control over applications from carriers back to manufacturers is a major shift in the mobile phone industry. Over the past five years, handsets have been reduced to commodities, most often offered free, that serve only as conduits for mobile-carrier services. This has resulted in innovation stagnation (recall that the camera-mounted phone was first offered in 2000 by Sharp). Manufacturers, it could be argued, lacked the incentive.

Then came Apple's iPhone, shattering the old paradigm. Competition among different manufacturers and platforms (Microsoft Mobile 7 and Symbian supported by Nokia) will mostly lead to a spurt of innovation in mobile phone applications over the coming months. That includes, besides advancing multi-touch interface, native support for local languages and content, including Arabic.

Android

Fast in the heels of the iPhone came the Android. Last November, Google announced the Android, and the industry alliance that formed around it. Android is a new open-source platform that runs on top of a distribution of the Linux operating system. More than 30 networks and phone manufacturers have signed up so far, including Motorola, Sprint, T-Mobile, Skype, LG, chip-maker Qualcomm, and Taiwanese manufacturer HTC. The Android will be available free for manufacturers under an open-source license, which could bring the prices of modern phones under USD200. And in keeping with the Google tradition, the Android services will be supported by Google-served ads.

The fact that two of Microsoft's biggest allies in the phone business have joined the Android bandwagon is telling.

The premise of the Android is that "all applications are created equal." That is a polite way of saying that the new phone platform will allow developers to freely add and customize applications on Android-mounted phones — a marked departure from the current business model where only the networks call the shots.

And in fact the eminent search engine does not make a secret of its intentions. Eric Schmidt, Google's chief, said on various occasions that his company sees mobile phones as the next big growth opportunity. Clearly, they did not want a network telling them which of their products could be slipped into a mobile phone or how. The first Android phones are slated for the second half of 2008.

When the Android was first announced, many raised questions on whether Google's ad-supported business model that worked so well on the PC could be as successful on the mobile phone. In theory, there is no reason why it should not work. For a platform geared for ad-supported Web services, expect to see Web-friendly interface and screen, and a lot of third-party applications to do all kinds of little tasks (the incredibly plentiful add-ons for the Firefox browser seem to be a prediction of things to come for the all-open Android).

And the fact that two of Microsoft's biggest allies in the phone business — Motorola and HTC — have joined the Android bandwagon is telling. Both companies will of course continue to offer Windows Mobile-supported phones. But they also did not want to miss on what could be a major shift in the industry.

For the mobile-phone industry, therefore, the stakes are high in 2008. In addition to the three usual incumbent platforms (Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Blackberry), the market will suddenly be crowded with two more powerful competitors: the Mac OS X and the Linux-based Android. How each will seek to differentiate itself will certainly be interesting to watch in the months ahead.