the iPhones’s inability to support Flash—a perennial criticism of the device.
He took his far share of flak, though. So did our keynoter, Windows Phone evangelist Anthony Kinney, when he gave us a look into the company’s plans for its 7 Series phone, due out in “holiday 2010” (vague, we know).
And it turns out that Windows’ problem isn’t just one of design or construction, but of marketing (a point brought up earlier in the event by Kinney). “A lot of people out there have Windows Mobile devices and don’t even know it,” said Hofer-Shall, who works for Forrester Research but spoke on the Windows platform from his personal, not professional standpoint, as he has a tech blog outside of work.
William Sulinski, co-founder and CEO of mCaddie, makers of the golf analytics AccelGolf app, represented the BlackBerry platform with the logic and composure that often categorizes this smartphone, or at least its users. He also has iPhone and Android versions of his app, but said he likes the older demographic he can target with BlackBerry (made by Research in Motion), and the huge user base of the phone.
But he had no pretenses about the challenge in developing for RIM’s device. “What it does is separate the men from the boys,” Sulinski said, with a nod to the fact that the varying screen sizes among BlackBerry devices require different coding.
In the end, it seems, no platform is perfect. But each one seems to have developers who love it.
Other highlights from Mobile Madness — The New Future of Computing included:
—Nuance Communications’ vice president of product management, Matt Revis, walked us through the company’s plans for gesture recognition technology for mobile phones. The speech recognition software company already has a big hit with its iPhone app for translating voice to text.
—Andrew Capener, director of service provider marketing for mobility at Cisco Systems, explained how Cisco, which recently acquired local wireless broadband leader Starent Networks, has a stake in the mobile world, due to the exponential growth in data trafficked through mobile networks.
—The 150,000+ mobile apps that Apple boasts of isn’t a lot, or at least not compared with the number of websites that exist on the Internet, Greg Raiz, founder and CEO of app development company Raizlabs, said during our executive panel. Meaning, there’s still plenty more apps to come. He also said he thinks this year will be the year his mom gets a smartphone.
—We concluded the afternoon by inviting about 10 mobile companies (most of which can be seen in our online mobile showcase) to give 90-second lightning presentations of their mission and products. They even stuck to that time constraint. And so did we! (The event ended on time to the minute.)
The take-home message of the day? Things are only beginning for the mobile industry. We’re excited to see which mobile platform, if any, ends up winning the real-life smackdown in development, and all the new moves the industry innovators make in the process.
