.Dust

I think that 2009 is going to be a very inter­est­ing year for mobile phones.

Actu­ally there are five things that are gain­ing momen­tum in most mobile phone man­u­fac­tur­ers programs:

1. Touch User Inter­faces. It is no doubt that Apple with iPhone has set a trend. Every sin­gle ven­dor is going to offer a vari­ety of touch mobile phones in 2009. Imple­men­ta­tions will vary from pro­pri­etary RTOS to Win­dows Mobile and Android. This will some­how change the rule of the game. In past years every­body was try­ing to reach the small­est form fac­tor for a 3G phone while now, touch User Inter­faces will require much more real estate to pro­vide the cus­tomer with a great User Expe­ri­ence. From a tech­ni­cal stand­point touch mobile phones will be faster than they pre­de­ces­sors since they will (usu­ally) require more pro­cess­ing power. The chal­lenge will be on bat­tery life and User Expe­ri­ence. Unfor­tu­nately devel­op­ers will have to deal with a greater level of frag­men­ta­tion since no stan­dard exists today for touch management.
2. Appli­ca­tion Store. This will be one of the great­est trend. A lot of man­u­fac­turer are work­ing on this and some of them have already announced their will­ing to imple­ment this for their mobiles. Unfor­tu­nately I do not think they will be able to have the same suc­cess Apple had with their Appli­ca­tion Store. The main rea­son is that pay­ment is already highly inte­grated in the iPhone expe­ri­ence while all the other will have to find a way to bill the cus­tomer. Whichever method they will chose it will be less friendly than the one Apple uses today. As of today I think that the clos­est expe­ri­ence is the one com­ing from Android.
3. Android. It is def­i­nitely emerg­ing as an alter­na­tive to high end oper­at­ing sys­tems like Sym­bian and Win­dows Mobile.
4. Social appli­ca­tions. From the launch of the INQ1 mobile phone every ven­dor is going to imple­ment some sort of strat­egy to address this area. This requires a par­a­digm shift in both mobile phone man­u­fac­tur­ers and oper­a­tors. We will see how well they will execute.
5. Appli­ca­tions and Ser­vices. Every­body seems to be inter­ested in launch­ing their inde­pen­dent set of appli­ca­tions and ser­vices. Still to be ver­i­fied how oper­a­tors will han­dle this. The risk is that the cus­tomer is going to pay.

[Photo credit: fore]

Related posts:

1. Why Do Not We Stop Stuff­ing Mobile Phones?
2. Is It Time To Waste Tran­sis­tors In Mobile Phones?
3. Your Mobile Phone Is Talk­ing To A White Cube
4. My fat mobile phone
5. The iPhone Effect