Surveying the mobile landscape

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	Surveying the mobile landscape	By Philip Berne, Saturday 22 December 2007

We begin our multi-part series, an in-depth look at the major players in the mobile industry. What are the trends we expect to see into 2008?

At infoSync World, we have tried and tested almost every phone to hit the American market in the last year. We have followed the trends in hardware, interface design and carrier business throughout the last 12 months, and through New Year's we’ll be offering our unique perspective on the mobile landscape.

It would be easy, and perhaps lazy, to simpy call 2007 the year of the iPhone and be done with it. Certainly, every announcement in the mobile industry can be seen through the lens that Apple has thrown over it, but it would be a mistake to think that every release had the iPhone in its sights, or that the coming year will be about competing with Apple’s iconic phone.

The lead times on development of a new phone bear this out. Phones have about an 18 month development time, so a phone that was begun the day the iPhone was announced won’t come to market until the middle of 2009. For the next year, what we will see will not be iPhone competitors, but rather a response to other driving factors in the mobile market.

In phones, we’ll see an emphasis on messaging and connectivity. Smartphones and specialized media phones will be key, along with a few special features. Touch will obviously become more popular, but we see this as more of a fad, until the major smartphone operating systems can adapt to a touchscreen world.

In the carrier market, we’ve seen shake-ups in the MVNO model, but we’re not ready to write them off just yet. Recent announcements from Google and Verizon Wireless have proven that network operators need to think differently about their pricing models and open access, and we think that the next year will see more changes in how people are charged for wireless service than in the actual devices they will use to access the mobile network.

We’re going to look at a new company every day to remember what we’ve seen from them in the past year, and what we expect to see in the year to come. We’ll make predictions, hint at rumors and secret information, and recollect promises that were made and broken. Enjoy the series, and stick with us in the coming year, as infoSync continues our expansion and ongoing, in-depth coverage of the mobile industry and beyond.