April 4th, 2008Is the future in browsers or apps?
Congrats to the boys and girls at RIM for another monster quarter. Canada’s favorite smartphone contines to shift shed-loads of pearls and curves to new markets across the world. The iPhone has completely changed how people use data and webservices on their phone. Smartphones have been all the rage lately with expensive little slivers of glass and plastic from RIM, Apple, Nokia, HTC etc. galvanising geek-lust and hoarding media attention. Does anyone want to be seen with a RASR any more?
Though they sometimes get less attention, your “regular” phones are getting better too especially with browers like Opera mini starting to appear. A friend of mine showed me the other day a fine looking SonyEricsson you can get today in Canada that features a full HTML brower and Ajax. Even by 2012, smartphones are predicted to still occupy less than half the market.
As fast as the PC world is moving away from desktop apps to cloud and browser computing, the mobile world is getting just as excited about open OS’s and application platforms. Is the mobile world just behind, or are they getting it backwards.
How s-m-r-t does your phone need to be? do we need apps any more? Surely, a sufficiently decent set of browsers (once they exsist) stands a better chance of uniting the painfully fragmented world of handset plaforms, both “smart” and “unsmart”.
Is the future ultimately in mobile apps or mobile browsers?
If you have thoughts, put them in the comments
