As it increasingly becomes clear that smart phones are going to be the dominant device that people use to interact with applications many of the issue that developers wrestle with are going to become a lot more complex.
For a long time developers could pretty much ignore the whole issue of mobility by relying on Web browsers to let people interact with applications. Apple has significantly improved that experience by coming up with better browser interfaces for the iPhone, but for the most part people still feel that there are significant compromises being made between what they experience on a smart phone versus what they experience on a PC.
The reason this divide exists between the computing experience on a smart phone and a traditional PC is because the smart phone today is still pretty much dependent on the ability of the mobile computing device to pull data down using a browser. This not only creates significant performance limitations and requires the device to use a lot more power, which helps to explain why everybody experiences the need to constantly recharge their smart phone.
But as smart phones become more robust and an intrinsic part of our social and working lives, there is going to be a bigger requirement to put more intelligence on the client to provide not only a richer client experience. And that requirement is coming at a faster rate than most people realize.
A recent survey of 265 IT executives conducted by Ziff-Davis Enterprise, the parent company of e-Week, found that 43 percent of them work in organizations that buy and load additional applications on mobile devices while 20 percent of them said they develop applications for these devices.
Of those who said they were developing mobile applications, 58 percent of said that the target platform was the Blackberry smart phone from Research in Motion (RIM). But 52 percent of those developers also said they were targeting Windows Mobile as platform. Of course, a lot of those intentions may change as the iPhone and Google's new Android platform pick up momentum but no matter which platform is targeted developers still face some significant challenges.
The first of which is that developing rich applications for mobile devices will probably mean that some sort of database, probably from Sybase, Oracle or Microsoft, is going to need to be in place. Secondarily, developing applications that will run natively on smart phones represent significant challenges in terms of how much horsepower is available on the device, how much power is available and the size of the actual screen. With multiple generations of developers use to writing applications for Windows that could take advantage of comparatively unlimited resources provided by Intel PC processors, the development requirements for mobile applications may prove to be a little too daunting.
What all this means is that is may take awhile to get to the next generation of mobile computing using smart phones. Where we are today is clearly little more than a way station on the way to next generation of mobile computing.
The only real question is which software developers are going to gain a substantial competitive edge over their rivals by unlocking the real potential smart phone applications to forever change the way we think about personal computing.