Things will be quiet here for a little while. I'm now on 2 weeks holiday. Week 1 will be spent in Chester at the BAF Summer School, as is my wont. Week 2 I'm in Brighton recovering...

Nokia Conversations on location services:

"Fact is, location-based services (LBS) aren't a hollow promise anymore, with the proliferation of GPS, advanced mapping and fast mobile Internet connection speeds."

To my mind, it's the loosening of the operators grip on location data which has led to a growth in LBS applications over the last year. This has happened in a few ways:

1. GPS is commoditising, just like cameras did. It moves control over location data from the operator to the customer (not a bad thing in itself), and removes the pricing structures (10p per-lookup here in the UK) which operators levied before;
2. Lots of organisations (most visibly Google and Apple) are doing just-good-enough LBS using cell IDs, building their own cell-ID-to-location databases. Again - the operator is routed around in this world; they might have access to more accurate location of their customers, but the price for this incremental accuracy is evidently not worth the price being charged for it;

After a few months using an iPhone or an N82, the idea of a static map which can't tell you where you are already seems oddly quaint.

Fraser Spiers on slow responses from the iPhone App Store: "If Apple can’t guarantee a maximum 24 hour review process, they should drop it."

I completely agree that this is a really important issue. One of the things I loved about even a jailbroken iPhone is the installer app, which is the best experience I've ever had of downloading and upgrading applications on a mobile device. No settings, no WAP Push, no security prompts, no portals to wade through: lovely.

But you don't have to be faster than the tiger, you just have to be faster than the other guy... and it would be difficult for Apple to be slower than incumbent mobile telcos. We've done a lot of work with them over the years.

One of our clients has a very profitable mobile service. They've been in the process of getting on-portal with one large UK operator for *four years*. That's not "trying to find the right person to talk to" or "pitching the idea in", but rather "yes, we love your content, let's get it on there"... and then the wading through molasses of departments, reorgs, and so on.

Rui on mobile apps:

"It may be early days, but I would expect developers to be a bit smarter than this by now. Yes, the iPhone and iPod Touch are ways to access the Internet, but every mobile device has two states: online and offline. And you either take offline into account, or you’re forgetting 50% of the possible use cases."

+1, +1, +1

Post-iPhone, mobile has gained a lot of credibility and we're seeing all sorts of folks get involved. This is a really good thing - but taking preconceptions of what's appropriate from the world of the fixed internet and applying them to mobile is not going to lead to viable mobile services... any more than taking brochures and putting them online was a good use of the web.

Battery life, intermittent connectivity, input constraints, context of use... all different, all unavoidable, all vital to consider when going mobile.

Panel discussion

Mr Mozilla
Paul Golding, Consultant
Dean Bubley, Disruptive Analysis

DB: I don't think Google Android will important. Symbian will remain valuable. Fragmentation is here to stay.

MM: On next-generation handsets the browser will be the overshadowing application.

DB: More people use the alarm clock than the browser.

MM: The alarm clock could be a widget :)

PG: Discovery is still a big problem on mobile devices.

DB: 28% of Apples cost of manufacturing the iPhone goes into the screen. So "bumping into content" becomes easier, when there's more screen real estate. One of the themes that came out of our earlier discussion: for services which are critical or valuable, a dedicated client is worthwhile - as with Youtube on the iPhone.

Bena: What about Mozilla on mobile?

MM: We started late last year, we're finalising and releasing later this month. We think there are things that can be improved on the UI, even over iPhone.

Q: What platforms?

MM: We can't do it on the iphone thanks to the license terms - you can't write any application which runs code. So we're targeting Windows mobile, Symbian S60. We already have offline capabilities. We have another project called Prism which does offline web-based applications.

DB: There'll be opportunities and problems in giving applications access to device capabilities.

Q: What about distribution? How can we develop for something which doesn't exist in the field? Will it be preinstalled onto phones in the future?

MM: Our first releases come out in partnership with (didn't hear). We're working with operators.

PG: Firefox on the desktop always asks to download new versions of itself...

MM: Yes, the mobile one will too. (This is a really good thing IMHO - faster software updates for mobile would be a very good thing indeed).

Q: Will you support all access points the phone offers? How do you intend to explain to users why they can't be recognised or authenticated when using certain access points.

MM: We don't do anything about this, all of this is platform-specific. We don't know whether they're using Bluetooth, wi-fi or GPRS.