Subscribe to Optaros RSS feed2007 has been an interesting year, to say the least, for those interested in developing and deploying applications on phones.
The launch of the Apple iPhone, the biggest mobile story of the year, was critical not so much because of the number of devices sold (iPhones will remain a small fraction of the phone market for a long time) as for the amount of press generated, the excitement created, and the interest cultivated for mobile applications. The number of folks exposed to the iPhone experience, even if only looking over the shoulder, wil extend the impact well beyond the owners.
The iPhone set the expectation, in essence, that phones should provide easy to use, attractive, connected and personalized mobile applications, and if they did, consumers would respond. The iPhone wasn't perfect, of course (try copying and pasting between applications) but it popularized the notion that mobile applications didn't have to be second-rate versions of their desktop cousins. (Arguably Nokia had been demonstrating this for some time but without the massive press storm).
Although the iPhone isn't open in the traditional sense - users had to violate their terms of service to "unlock" the phone for use in other networks and to install applications - it's reliance on a mobile version of Safari (and the creation of toolkits like iui) and HTML/Ajax allowed for rapid creation of applications.
This year also saw the launch of Android, a project of the Open Handset Alliance and Google. Android is described as "the first complete, open, and free mobile platform," and provides an operating system, middleware, and key applications necessary to run a phone. Developers can download early versions of the SDK today, and much of the project will be released as an open source (Apache license) project.
Last but not least, OpenMoko released developer versions of the Neo1973, a phone running their open source, GNU / Linux based operating system. Although consumer versions remain to be seen (the OpenMoko site still promises "around year's end") this device could also have significant impact, as a platform for developers to create innovation that then finds its way into other platforms.