I liked this quote:

"Startups should “intelligently hedge their bets across multiple platforms,” advised Richard Wong of Accel Partners. His firm has invested in mobile games and application site GetJar, “the store for the other 3 billion phones that aren’t iPhones,” as Mr. Wong put it."

+1 +1 +1

iPhone's doing a great job of getting the internet industry interested in mobile - particularly the US internet folks who've lagged behind slightly. And with the iPod Apple have a track record of entering a consumer electronics industry already carved up by incumbents (Sony Walkman anyone) and dominating, so Nokia et al can't exactly rest on their laurels.

But the idea that reaching the iPhone today gets you more than a visible, vocal, yet miniscule audience is a bit off-base. There are definitely places where it's worth putting the effort in to support it (just as there are places where it makes sense to do Symbian/Series 60 native apps), but not everywhere, not yet.

And as for the Loopt idea of using iPhone as a proving ground: it'll definitely make a fantastic demonstration (if you do it right). That said, iPhone native apps aren't cheap and simple to produce (and you can't even talk about why that is), and going straight in to support a device with large screen and fantastic UI means you're left with solving all those nasty little mobile problems when you do decide to go mass market and move beyond that single, lovely device...

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.