A week or two ago I was chatting with one of the hot-shots at Apple Israel, and we got to discussing the future of the mobile web.
The following is an outline of my thoughts, concluding with what it means to us CMS developers.  It definitely is a bit off topic.

The iPhone is unquestionably the hot kid on the block, and stands to dominate the entire industry.
But unlike their entry and dominance of the mp3/mp4 player market, the other cell phone vendors plan on giving Apple a run for their money.

What we call a “smart phone” is more accurately a handheld computer with phone capabilities.  In the case of the iPhone, it runs a variant of Unix (similar to Apple’s OSX).   Dell has a similar phone that runs Windows, and there are no shortage of Linux and other vendors.  [Despite BeOS's recent change of ownership though, there are no BeOS smartphones yet.  Have faith.]

In order
In a post on Techgear, Scott Merrill refers to the “smartphone triumvirate” of the iPhone, Palm Pre, and Android.  He’s wrong.  While those two definitely require a closer look, the other players will outsell the iPhone alone.  Lets look at them all.

(In the bid for success, a phone needs users to buy the phones, and developers to make the applications that make the phone worthy of being bought.  A sign for how seriously Apple takes the competition is that it now allows for apps to be written in multiple programming languages.  At launch, they required Cocoa – the Apple scripting language.)

Palm has bet their company on the Pre, and it shows – it bests the iPhone on every front in all reviews I’ve read.  Palm still has a strong brand, and in its history has twice been the “must have” device for years on end (The original and the Treo).  They now have Apple designers on board as well [which has engendered a lawsuit from Apple], and are owned in large part by media outlets that will promote the brand. It runs a version of Linux dubbed WebOS, and allows app programming in the languages most used around the world (HTML/JS/PHP).

Android is not a phone – it is an operating system funded by Google and dozenss of partners.  It is VERY feature complete, and will be hawked by vendors from Sony to Motorola.  At least one of them [read: Samsung] is going to produce a device that will blow everyone away in style, price, battery, etc.  And being a branch of Linux, the developers for the apps already exist, and the barrier of entry are low.

Nokia makes up almost 50% of all cell phones sold worldwide.  They develop a operating system called Symbian, which is now open source and finding other uses besides cellphones.  While we haven’t seen any killer phones yet this year, they definitely have something up their sleeve.  And even older offerings like the E71 are prefered by people as  popular as Joel.

Blackberry is weak outside of the US, but to ignore manufacturer Research In Motion is plain dumb.  Verizon has sold over 1 million Blackberrys since November, and they claim over 50% of all phones sold in the US.  Their App store is larger and more accessible than Apple’s, and the furor the fuhror has made over keeping his has provided some very positive press.

Windows is still around, and they have indicated that they are not about to throw in the towel.  While we do not expect any real value from a Dell/Windows phone, Microsoft is not know for competing in the value department.  But compete it does, and very well at that.

And who knows what to expect from left field?!

All but the last two use the web browser by default – the Apple Safari.  [Actually, they use "Webkit", of which Safari is just one branch.  Other branches are the Nokia S61, Google Chrome, and Linux Konquerer.]  The new Opera browser is available for all phones except the iPhone which doesn’t support it.  But it requires a separate download that most users will not do.

S. Caron points out that it is important that mobile browsers speak the same css as desktop browsers.  More importantly, it cannot be underestimated the importance of minimizing variables with new technologies.  There is so much for us to stomache about the mobile web and about cloud computing, let us at least have one constant.

Even Microsoft’s monopoly was good for a time – had there not been one standard then, we never would have had the world of computing that now exists – I remember the days of the Commodore and Atari.

A few last points.

1. The concept of cloud computing will take some strain off of the devices that connect, and add others, we have to see how that will play out.

2. There is a chance all of these devices will paly into the hands of Adobe, Sun, and Google who create runtime environments that are meant to be platform agnostic (Air, Java, and Gears, respectively.  There are others, but not for this post.)

3. Every computer has a chip [called a CPU] to do its regular processing, and another [called a GPU] to do its graphic work.  The graphic chip is exponentially more powerful, but that power is generally not useful for everyday tasks.
A few weeks ago NVidia announced a milestone in its initiative to make an architecture for using the GPU for everyday use.  These changes are already being rolled out in “Snow Leopard”, the latest version of Apple’s OSX.  AMD claims to be not far behind on their own initative.
As this plays out, we will see incredibly powerful supercomputers (such as one by NVIDIA that is 100x faster than anything else its size), and we will see much more power in little devices.  The ones who will be affected are the netbooks, and the cellphones.  Expect the advances in cellphones to outpace Moore’s law.

So what does this mean for us?  It means that we will have to add support for mobile devices, but only for Safari for the time being.  If a CMS is able to automate this task, it is another reason to use on and not just build from scratch.