Windows Phone 7 may not be available yet, but it is a great talking point. Following the collapsing market share of Window Mobile and the Kin debacle, will Microsoft be able to claw its way back into the SmartPhone market? With mobile apps increasingly important in both the consumer and business world, what would be the consequences of failure?

The strategic importance of the platform makes it interesting even if you think that there is little room for Microsoft's phone in a market dominated at the high end by the two As: Apple and Android.

There is even fierce competition among the also-rans, with Nokia pitching Symbian 3 and Maemo/Meego, and HP presumably about to do something with Palm WebOS. And what about Samsung's bada? There will be blood on the carpet; not all these operating systems will survive - and while that will be a shame from the point of view of diversity, it will be a relief to developers attempting to support the broadest number of devices.

So why even bother with Windows Phone 7? Well, there are a couple of obvious reasons. One is the possibility that Microsoft will deliver an excellent and delightful device. Likely? Past form says no; but the company knows what it is up against so you never know; early reviews of preview devices have been generally favourable.

The second reason is less speculative, which is the way Windows Phone 7 fits in with the rest of Microsoft's platform. If you are used to coding in Visual Studio with C#, then creating apps for Microsoft's new phone will be less challenging than doing so for iPhone or Android. A Windows Phone 7 app is essentially a .NET and Silverlight app, or for games XNA, and from what I have seen so far Microsoft has done a good job with the emulator and developer tools.

The disconnect here is that Microsoft's primary target for Windows Phone 7 is the consumer, whereas those armies of Visual Studio developers are largely building corporate apps. Some of them are also annoyed that Microsoft is not providing compatibility with existing Windows Mobile applications.

There are also significant limitations in Windows Phone 7 in its first release. There's no multi-tasking, which means you have to write code to handle your application being shut down and re-activated while giving the appearance of resuming where the user left off. There's no native code, which runs contrary to the instinct of experienced mobile developers, some of whome tried and failed to wrest acceptable performance from the Compact Framework, the mobile .NET Framework from pre-Silverlight days. There's no copy and paste - which does not seem a big deal to me, but some people seem to care a lot about this. Another annoyance is that all apps must be deployed throught Microsoft's Apple-style Marketplace, though I hope and expect that Microsoft will come up with a way round this for corporate roll-outs.

Future iterations of Windows Phone could remove these limitations, but in this instance Microsoft does not have time to release something not very good and get it right three versions later.

I'm keen to hear from developers who have tried the preview devices or the SDK. Like what you see? Intend to support it? I look forward to comments, because the success or failure of this product is going to be significant.

When an industry gets big enough to spawn other sectors that grow parasitically on top of it, then you can tell it has some decent critical mass. And in many cases, that's where to look for jobs, or even start your own small venture.

Take mobile applications, for example. We all know that the iPhone has done exceedingly well as an application platform. So well, in fact, that start-ups are now forming with the sole purpose of measuring just how well. One such startup, Distimo, focuses on analysing trends in the mobile application space. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it found that Apple leads the field by an order of magnitude. At the recent World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, Distimo said that there are 150,000 applications in the iPhone app store, compared with just 20,000 in that of its nearest competitor, Android.

Let's face it, iPhone apps are so accessible that someone might download one for 99 cents sitting on the toilet, instead of leafing through a back copy of National Geographic. Their accessibility can convert into serious amounts of money for developers. Tapulous, a 20-strong development company that makes games and social software for Apple's Jesus-phone, is now making $1 million each month from them. Not everyone can be that successful, but most of us would take just a small slice of that particular pie.

What makes it so bizarre is that Apple is such a fascistic company. People can write any application they want for Android, and upload it to the app store without any third-party arbitration. Apple, on the other hand, has a notoriously draconian app approval policy. For example, it took an arbitrary decision to remove almost all sexual applications from the app store this month -- but chose to leave in apps from organisations such as Sports Illustrated and Playboy. This is unlikely to make developers happy -- but with such a lot of money at stake, who's going to complain very loudly?

The unknown quantity in mobile applications is Microsoft. It chose Barcelona as the venue to announce the mobile edition of Windows 7, which is a marked improvement on all previous versions of Windows Mobile. It's a beautiful looking system, with a sleek user interface, and promised links into services such as Xbox Live, which will be like flypaper for consumers. But not everyone is convinced that developers will support the platform. Beejive CEO Kai Yu is quoted here as saying that the company has simply ruined its reputation with mobile developers too much in the past. There's also the fact that we won't see the first of these phones until the fourth quarter, which puts Microsoft way behind the curve compared to the competition.

But whether you choose the iPhone, Android, Microsoft, or another competitor such as the recently open-sourced Symbian, there are worse ways to make money than by developing a mobile application -- even if you do it on the side, rather than taking it up was your day job. If you can avoid the hundreds of me-too applications out there and do something truly original, perhaps you could even be the next Tapulous.

Not the imaginative type? Worry not, my developer friend. Such is the momentum behind this industry that you can even get away without having an original thought in your head. Organisations such as iPhoneAppQuotes are springing up to connect creative thinkers with the software developers who can make their ideas an reality. But my advice: if anyone comes to you suggesting the ultimate iCleavage app for the iPhone, you might want to think twice.

Few assumptions are safe in the IT industry. A few years back, it was obvious that that PCs running Windows were beating the Apple Mac into a tiny niche. Things look different now. If you planned your IT strategy on the earlier assumption and have not changed, you are now getting it wrong.

Another not entirely unrelated area is the significance of the mobile web. Mobile phones have had web browsers for as long as anyone can remember; but for most of that time actually using them has been frustrating and slow. Remember trying to scroll a tiny window around some web page broken by non-functioning Javascript or CSS, looking for a critical piece of information such as an address or schedule?

In consequence, the extent of mobile browsing was small and mainly focused on niche areas like travel.

It all changed with the iPhone. Those contracts are expensive, but once you buy in you generally get an unlimited data connection, and more important, a decent browser which is a version of Safari, built with WebKit. That same engine is now used in many other devices, not least those running Google Android. Suddenly, users do want to use their mobiles to browse the web; and they will be hitting your web site or application and trying to use it.

Check your stats. I run another blog at itwriting.com, and when a reader complained about its appearance on a mobile, I added a wordpress plugin which both fixes the layout and reports the traffic. According to the plugin, 5% of the traffic was from mobile users. Once the site was fixed, the figure grew dramatically, to over 15%.

A tech news blog is just the sort of thing that appeals to mobile users, so those figures will not apply in every case. The point though is this: all those assumptions about limited mobile usage which once seemed safe now no longer apply.

Here's another line I often hear. There's no need to optimise your site for mobile, since the more advanced mobile browsers work fine with normal web sites.

Unfortunately that is not the case. They work much better than older ones, true. However, the displays are very much smaller and the connection speed often much slower than on the desktop. If you want your site to be a pleasant experience for mobile users, you will likely have to deliver customised content for them.

Does everyone get this anyway? If you have a few spare minutes, head over to mobiReady and try out a few sites; or download the Android emulator; or of course use a real device to test sites that you are involved in or interested in. I did so before writing this piece, discovering that the web still looks very broken once you go beyond the top sites.

The positive spin on this is that optimising for mobile can be a relatively easy way to gain commercial advantage.

Talking of safe assumptions, one that seems good right now is that the number of web-connected mobile devices is going to grow rapidly in the coming years. Optimising for mobile was always the right thing to do. Now it is essential.

 

Mobile devices are today's development battleground. Timing is everything: I recall Borland's 2003 conference when it introduced an extensive mobile development strategy based on the ill-fated C++ BuilderX, with SDKs from Nokia and Symbian. The sessions drew sparse attendance and Borland later abandoned the product, returning to the Windows-oriented C++ Builder.

So what changed? In part, devices have become more powerful and mobile internet access faster and more pervasive, making the platform more attractive. A bigger factor though is Apple's iPhone. In hindsight, the mobile vendors and operators made mobile development too difficult, with fragmented platforms and locked-down devices. Microsoft has had some success extending Windows to mobile devices, for enterprise development in either C++ or .NET, but its market share is too small, the devices insufficiently well liked, and the deployment obstacles too great. Java had some success too, but write-once, run anywhere never really worked for mobile.

Enter iPhone, with a single platform and easy deployment through the App Store. The "easy deployment" part has to be qualified, since developers have been confronted with limited access to the device, restrictions on what they can develop, and an opaque approval process; but it has worked, and the potential of the mobile platform - about which we have known for years - is now being unlocked.

Other vendors are belatedly rising to the challenge. I'm just back from Nokia's Qt Developer Days, and saw the energy the company is putting into creating a cross-platform, open source mobile development framework. Windows Mobile, Maemo and Symbian are on the immediate roadmap. On the deployment side, Nokia has the Ovi store. I've also been at Adobe's MAX in Los Angeles, where broad mobile support for the Flash runtime was the big story. The Flash runtime is not coming to iPhone yet, but Adobe has a native compiler for Flash applications which targets iPhone. Adobe also has app store plans. Google Android is another platform where all the pieces are in place, and Palm Web OS a new hopeful on the scene.

This means developers now have numerous choices for mobile development, as well as more pressure to create or extend applications to embrace mobile clients. It is not an easy choice. An AJAX application will work on the iPhone and elsewhere, but there is no offline support or access to device features, and the capabilities of mobile browsers vary greatly - though Webkit is becoming a standard on non-Windows devices. Native iPhone works great on Apple's device, but nowhere else. Flash is becoming interesting, but devices with 10.1 will not be around until next year and it is an unproven platform in a mobile context. Windows Mobile will trudge on, though Microsoft's mobile story seems particularly incoherent at present and I expect declining market share. Java on mobile has not gone away either; and Google Android is pretty much a Java platform. C++ will always be attractive for lean, fast applications.

It is fun to pick winners and losers, but impossible to tell how all this will shake out. Here's two safe bets. The first is that mobile, internet-connected applications are in many ways the future of the client. The second is that focusing on a strong web services API (of whatever flavour) is the right place to start. What's your mobile strategy?