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If you've been living under a rock this week, you may not have heard that the first phone using Google's Android platform was released to the public. This is supposedly the first significant competitor to the iPhone. However, neither the iPhone nor Android is the first mobile computing, communications and entertainment appliance; this is a growing space, and undoubtedly the choice of technology and platform will be a hot button topic in the years to come.
The "mobile wars" have been raging for a while with Apple's iPhone, RIM's Blackberry, Microsoft Windows Mobile, among others. Each attempting to outdo the others for market dominance has created a wave of innovation. Google's addition to this space marks the first "open" nature platform for development. Many see this as a good thing, which will make development much easier for mobile phones. I'm eagerly watching to see what happens next (and i've only seen online demos).
The RIA space, desktop space, and mobile space are already converging. This is something we, as technology developers must be aware of. A key differentiator in your product or project could be it's availability as a platform. The current wave of RIA applciations are rendering the operating system as a commodity. You can write applications that are extremely feature-rich and run on nearly all operating systems; Windows, OSX, Linux. RIA platforms and technologies are evolving to target mobile platforms, in addition to the web and desktop.
The experience of a software solution is no longer just how it appears in the browser or on the desktop. You can extend it to have multiple presences (web, desktop, mobile) which augment each other and work together to efficiently solve problems and meet your needs.
To me, this sounds like a big change in how we develop software.... We're not just building applications anymore; we're building platforms. You have to look at the bigger picture of how people use their devices, what service your software provides, what tasks it can accomplish, how different paradigms (mobile, desktop, web) can be utilized to achieve various tasks, and how you can exploit the benefits of that paradigm while keeping in mind its limitations.
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Andrew Trice
Principal Architect
Cynergy Systems
http://www.cynergysystems.com
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The G1 looks rubbish. There may be a few hard core tech-heads that want to get their hands on some real hardware who pick it up, but I very much doubt it'll make any kind of waves amongst the iPhone or Blackberry market.
As for Apple... their platform is obviously very popular with developers, but they are about to shoot themselves in the foot and potentially risk legal intervention:
http://www.phonenews.com/apple-blocks-developers-from-bypassing-app-store-4695/
People are going to become weary about being innovative with a platform when the control of their app's distribution is not only out of their hands, but even if the app does make it out there, it can quickly and easily have the rug pulled from under it.