Mobile Survey 2008

In January 2008, we conducted a survey of more than 400 members of the international Mobile and Wireless industry in order to delve deeper into the technical environment of mobile devices, the policies and behaviours around them, and the impact that this has on the further development of the industry as a whole.

It is clear that a greater degree of control and clarity is required for both mobile device owners (the users) and developers of products and services for mobile. Many respondents indicated that they wished to have a greater amount of information available to them with regards to the performance factors of the mobile phone – such as memory, battery, network connectivity, screen size, CPU and software support. This includes a much wider and deeper range of detection capabilities, as well as a much greater degree of transparency and control with regards to the applications on the mobile phone.

Fragmented device APIs are seen to be a significant difficulty which hinders application development and deployment. Proprietary APIs are also seen to be a threat to the wider acceptance of the browser as the main application execution environment.

With regards to the browser, there is still a large divide in the industry as to whether it is currently the main application execution environment on the mobile phone, but most do see it heading that way in the next two or three years. However, those involved in Open Source development disagree that the browser will dominate now or in the near future.

In order for the browser environment to be a success, the respondents to the survey strongly agreed that a standards-based interface will be required, that hyperlink access must be supported (along with a range of mark-up languages and scripting standards), and that the browser must be able to receive asynchronous ‘push’ data.

A complete set of slides on the questions and results can be found here.

http://www.slideshare.net/tonyfish/amf-ventures-survey-results