Apple

We're about to see what full-blown competition for the future of the computing industry looks like when multiple players get a shot to make an impact.

The next great operating systems wars are about to be fought, as traditional computing companies collide with teams representing the mobile phone industry. Nokia's decision Tuesday to unify, then open-source, the Symbian operating system for smartphones clarifies how today's most-widely used handset operating system will evolve to match the open-source initiatives headed by Google and the LiMo Foundation and competition from companies like Microsoft, Research in Motion, and Apple.

Forget RIM and Apple for a moment, since those companies are taking a different tack than the rest of the industry by building the entire widget themselves: both hardware and software. The Symbian Foundation's goal is by 2010 to develop a royalty-free open-source operating system based on Symbian's existing software that phone makers will license to use on their phones.

Unless RIM and Apple change their strategy to start licensing their operating systems, Nokia and Symbian will be competing for the affections of phone makers and carriers with Microsoft's Windows Mobile, Google's Android, and Linux-based mobile operating systems from the likes of the LiMo Foundation and others.

"(Symbian) is transitioning from a profit making licensor of the leading mobile device operating system, to an open source provider of a mobile OS that anyone can use on a royalty free basis," wrote Jack Gold, principal analyst at J.Gold Associates in a research note distributed Tuesday. "This is a direct challenge to Google's Android initiative, although somewhat belated."

The opportunity is clear: the smartphone market is growing by leaps and bounds as people start to realize what is possible with an Internet connection and a powerful operating system in the palm of their hand. But despite the fact that Symbian's operating system is used by 60 percent of the world's smartphones--most of which were sold by Nokia--upstarts like Apple and Google have pushed the established smartphone industry to evolve their software with the times.

As Om Malik puts it, and as I've written before, phone makers can't get by on flashy hardware anymore. "Indeed, the mobile industry's old guard is experiencing the business equivalent of heartburn as players like Apple prove that software platforms, and the innovation they foster, are the only way to withstand the whiplash-inducing forces of commoditization," Malik wrote Tuesday.

Prior to Tuesday's announcement, Nokia owned 47.9 percent of Symbian. That close relationship with Nokia--the world's largest handset vendor--ensured its software would appear on a large number of devices sold throughout the world. But application development for Symbian phones was somewhat confusing in that there were several different user interfaces in use, depending on the phone vendor. Nokia's phones used the S60 interface. Motorola's Symbian-based phones used the UIQ interface. Symbian phones that ran on NTT DoCoMo's network used the MOAP interface.

The Symbian Foundation will unify those user interfaces, which will likely make application development easier and more consistent across a wide range of phones. This is exactly what Google wants to do with Android: unify the mobile Linux community behind a consistent interface that's compatible across a wide variety of phones and available under an open-source license.

Nokia, Symbian, and their main partners--Sony-Ericsson, Motorola, and DoCoMo--have all agreed to contribute their user-interface technology under the open-source Eclipse license to any company that wishes to join the Symbian Foundation. Those components will start to become available in 2009, when the Symbian Foundation is formally established, and will be available as open-source projects up until the point when the first formal Symbian Foundation operating system is released in the first half of 2010, the companies said Tuesday.

The Symbian Foundation will also match Android and the LiMo Foundation in a key way: the operating system and its components will be available to phone makers royalty-free. One of the main attractions of mobile Linux was the low cost of getting a mobile Linux operating system up and running, as opposed to paying Symbian or Microsoft royalties or licensing fees for the software. This could cause major problems for Microsoft, who is expected to continue its pay-for-play mobile operating system business, Gold wrote in his report.

Scott Rockfeld, group product manager for mobile communications at Microsoft, said that putting together a modern mobile phone represents a significant investment of time and money even if you choose a royalty-free path, and that Windows Mobile demonstrates enough value in getting that system up and running quickly that certain phone makers will continue to pay for it.

Gold wasn't so sure. "It may be difficult for Microsoft to continue to justify its relatively high license fees for an OS that competes with a fully featured one that is offered for free. While I do not expect Windows Mobile to simply fade away, I do expect that ultimately Microsoft will have to be more competitive (i.e., free or close to free) if it wants to remain a major factor in the wider mobile device platform marketplace. It will have to make its revenues on applications and services instead," he wrote.

It's not immediately clear how the Symbian Foundation will affect the LiMo Foundation, which actually has phones out in the market using a Linux-based operating system developed by a consortium of industry players. Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMo Foundation, called Nokia's move a "strong endorsement of the philosophical underpinnings" of the LiMo Foundation, although the LiMo Foundation focuses more on the plumbing of the operating system rather than the user interface.

But is LiMo now caught between two giants, Nokia and Google? Motorola and DoCoMo were founding members of the LiMo Foundation, but have chosen to hedge their bets by participating in both the Symbian Foundation and the Open Handset Alliance.

Gillis recognizes that by the time the Symbian Foundation releases an operating system in 2010, some of today's current players may have fallen by the wayside. "The question is really what is the right number of platforms from the industry. Major players say there has to be rationalizations down to some number, but the right number is not bigger than four. ...It's much more efficient to have a small number," he said.

Right now, with Symbian, Microsoft, LiMo, Android, Apple, RIM, Palm, and other Linux consortia all fighting for a place at the table, somebody's going to have to lose. Malik thinks that LiMo, Symbian, and Apple have the best chance of "winning big," with Android and Microsoft fighting for that remaining spot at the table.

The next two years will be fascinating ones for the smartphone industry as processing power increases, software grows more sophisticated, and wireless networks become faster and more prevalent. This evolution of computing will not follow the PC industry's lead and coalesce around a dominant player anytime soon, and there's no better spur for innovation than competition.

The evolution of the mobile operating system is being defined by traditional players like Microsoft and Apple, the younger establishment represented by RIM, Nokia/Symbian, and the Linux consortia, and the 800-pound gorilla of the 21st century: Google. They are raising the bar with features and design while attempting to make sure developers have a chance to participate, and the results of this competition should delight the smartphone buyers of the next decade.

More details about Nokia's upcoming Tube phone have surfaced, days after its existence leaked out at a developer conference.

Nokia's apparent answer to the iPhone will arrive in the second half of this year, according to Symbian Freak. A Nokia spokesman confirmed the timing to Computerworld but didn't offer any further details other than the obvious notion that the "Tube" will use Symbian's S60 operating system. Nokia owns a large stake in Symbian.

According to Symbian Freak, the Tube (real name TBD) will come with 3G, Wi-Fi, and GPS chips and use a screen sized between 3 inches and 3.5 inches. The site's report compared the size of the Tube to a Nokia N73, but perhaps a bit wider. There's a built-in camera that can also support geotagging of photos taken with the camera, the report says.

The iPhone will probably be available in a 3G version by the time the Tube makes an appearance. It's not totally clear what type of touch-screen interface Nokia will be using for this phone. The report says that the Tube won't use "multitouch," but will have "tactility feedback."

Q&A For a man staring down Microsoft, Google, and Apple, Symbian's Nigel Clifford doesn't have the deer-in-the-headlights look as much as you might expect.

Perhaps because, at the moment, those three juggernauts are staring up at Symbian. Clifford, CEO of the company since 2005, has a dominant share of the market for smartphone operating systems and a strong backer in Nokia, the world's largest handset maker.

Still, Symbian is sitting on top of the market at a time when it appears destined for change. Apple's entry into the market has galvanized the American consumer, who is barely aware of Symbian's dominant presence in Europe and Asia. Google threatens to come at Symbian from underneath, hoping to unify mobile Linux and teasing carriers with the promise of mobile advertising revenue. Research In Motion shows signs it might be able to add consumers to its legion of CrackBerry addicts. And Microsoft is Microsoft; it hasn't replicated its PC success in mobile phones but it continues to steadily improve Windows Mobile and is sitting on a load of cash.

Just before CTIA 2008 kicks off, Symbian hosted the Smartphone Summit in Las Vegas to discuss many of these topics and the broader market at large. I sat down with Clifford for a few minutes during the show, and here's a sampling of what we discussed.

In your view, should smartphones be like computers?
I think it is a very different world. You've got the smartphone, a device which has no access to main power, constrained memory, constrained screen size, and so the necessity of doing things very elegantly is an imperative.

But aren't you making little computers?
If you think back to the origins of Symbian, it came out of Psion, and those palmtops, the Psion 5 and Psion 3, were fully featured mini-computers. They had Word effects, Excel, equivalent data sheets, touch-screen QWERTY keyboard. What they didn't have was telephony.

One of the things our CTO is very clear about is that the multitasking capability on a phone is the most elegant thing on the planet. Because it has to deal with all this stuff going on, and then a call coming in, an SMS coming in, in the future, a video call coming in, maybe a location-based ping coming in from the side.

Why do you think you've gained such traction in Europe and around the world, and what do you have to do to get traction inside the U.S.?
For sure, the work with the top five handsets, including Nokia, has been important in creating attractive handsets that operators like to put on display, and put out at an attractive price because they know they're going to get data services revenue out of that.

In the U.S., there's perhaps been a different avenue for operators in terms of revenue growth for the last five or six years which has been pure subscriber growth. So, the order of the day has been subscribers at the lowest possible acquisition cost, which means the cheapest possible phone.

What we're now seeing is the end of the subscriber land grab--the saturation--so I think in the U.S. we're seeing some of the patterns in the rest of the world coming to bear. Where all of a sudden it becomes: how do I attract people from other people's networks, and how do I attract people to use their handsets on these more lucrative data services, to offset any slowing of the subscriber acquisition.

How does your relationship with Nokia affect your dealings with other handset makers? (Nokia owns 47.9 percent of the company.)
It doesn't. I mean, I guess you'd regard it as a proof point, the fact we can assist Nokia in making compelling devices and making compelling profits is a good thing to be able to put in front of others. But in terms of the business relationship and the ownership relationship, it's kept very, very separate.

We have a supervisory board. Around our governance table, we have Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Samsung, Ericsson, Siemens, Panasonic--they came together to create an agnostic independent operating system. And that composition has broadly held together for 10 years.

One of the secrets is that we have a really good shareholders' agreement and a really good chairman who makes sure there's no tipping of any decision based on who you are, whether you're big or little, important or not important, shipping or not shipping.

We've had this notion of the mobile Internet for a long time, but now we're hearing more and more about the full Internet, getting the real thing onto your phone. Given the constraints that you face with these phones, how will that play out over time?
In terms of the experience, it's not inferior. If I've got the choice of booting up a laptop and going to the Internet or using the Internet that's resident on my phone, I wouldn't have any qualms about just reaching for my phone.

The intriguing thing to just think about is that there's maybe 3 billion subscribers in the world at the moment, and there's maybe 3 billion who are yet to have the privilege of having a mobile connection.

When you think about the Internet, I can see a whole generation--and maybe half of humanity--experiencing the Internet first through a mobile device.

I think the prospects of everyone in the world having power, and having a PC delivered, and having broadband delivered just isn't going to happen. It's going to happen over these mobile devices.

What do you think about the iPhone? And what do you think of Apple's participation in this market?
I think it validates what we've just been talking about, which is no fixed Internet brand--hardware, software, applications--can afford to ignore the mobile marketplace. Because ultimately the PC is going to be capped in terms of its marketplace.

It's not surprising you're seeing these legacy Internet and hardware brands coming into this mobile world and bringing their smarts with them.

One of the things that Apple is bringing with it is the walled garden, the closed system. What is the role for application development on these devices?
We have a different view. This is about innovations, letting a thousand flowers bloom, letting people experiment, providing SDKs (software development kits) and easy to use APIs (application programming interfaces), and working with a variety of different languages. A vibrant developer network is very important to us and our licensees.

Do you have to make tradeoffs then, with reliability, security, a different experience across these devices?
I think that not so much trade-offs as just different architectural decisions. Things like platform security, we've implemented because that was part of the assurance that operators wanted to have that these mobile computers weren't going to be used in a way that could be detrimental to their overall network security.

We're saying that our checks and balances are as deep and as light as possible in the operating system. Whereas maybe other people are saying, "You're playing in our territory," what we're saying is, "Have as much territory as you like and we'll make sure you're not near the cliff edge"--rather than as soon you get through the front gate, you're in my turf.

On the flip side, you've got Google and what they're trying to do with Android.
The experience we've got of the developer world is there's a curiosity market, which is "we'll go and play and see how interesting it is." But then there's a hard-core, "we actually want to make money out of this."

The advantage we can offer is 200 million devices shipped, 77 million last year. There's a platform for you to go and play with, and it's with a savvy audience, a really lucrative audience who's going to come and pay you if you can provide them a great application.

What do you think of Intel's interest in this market, with its Atom and Moorestown projects?
Maybe something that has gotten lost in the history is that we've cooperated and had projects with Intel. When I arrived (in 2005) we were talking putting Symbian on x86 architecture.

It's increasingly relative; the only SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) that's around right now is devices like the PC. It's increasingly beneficial to see what that SMP is going to be like when we play there.

Intel are certainly people that we talk to, but that (a Moorestown discussion) hasn't happened.

LAS VEGAS--Nigel Clifford, CEO of smartphone OS provider Symbian, is well aware that everyone's looking at this industry with hungry eyes.

"No fixed Internet brand can afford to ignore the mobile marketplace," he said in a wide-ranging interview on the sidelines of CTIA 2008, where Symbian is hosting the Smartphone Summit a day before things officially get started.

As Google and Apple have shown over the last year, everybody wants a part of the mobile world. Symbian dominates this world at present, with well over 60 percent market share in the smartphone industry. But it's facing challenges from all sides, as Apple goes after its consumers, Google goes after its developers, and Microsoft and Research In Motion continue to court businesspeople.

In a way, however, Clifford sees the competition as wider than just the phone market. "There's 3 billion (mobile phone) subscribers in the world, and 3 billion who are not. I can see a whole generation experiencing the Internet for the first time on the mobile device," he said.

Of course, the PC industry wants to get those people inside its big tent as well. This means that mobile phones are going to have to get smarter, and embrace the Internet that's already in place for PC users around the world.

"There just has to be one Internet that you access, and we as hardware and software suppliers have to find a way to do that," Clifford said. The era of the mobile Internet seems to be officially dead as smartphone companies go after bringing the full Internet experience to their customers.

Apple has certainly made that a centerpiece of its pitch for the iPhone. Clifford recognizes that the PC industry is going to have to start doing iPhone-like things into the future. "No fixed Internet brand can afford to ignore the mobile marketplace. The PC is going to be capped in the marketplace. They're coming, and they're bringing some of their smarts with them."

I'll post much more of the interview with Clifford after I have a chance to transcribe it later in the day.

LAS VEGAS - There's almost as many people buying smartphones as there are people buying laptops, and that trend is about to turn the computing industry on its head.

"We do see that gravitational pull of the single-use device being played out in the market," said Nigel Clifford, CEO of Symbian, during the opening presentations of Smartphone Summit here at CTIA 2008. "This is not just about multiple devices, it's about knocking aside some other forms of communication."

At CTIA, smartphones are still a niche product. The Smartphone Summit was held in two generic meeting rooms deep inside the maze of twisty passages that is the Las Vegas Convention Center, while hundreds of cranes and forklifts careened around the show floor, setting up for tomorrow's main event. The math is simple: smartphones like Nokia's N95, LG's Voyager, and Apple's iPhone make up around 10 percent of the global market for mobile phones

But that's already a serious number. With the mobile phone market crossing 1 billion units in 2007, that's 115 million smartphones that were purchased worldwide last year. In the PC world, notebook shipments are gaining on desktop shipments, but on a worldwide basis still make up less than half of the 271 million PCs shipped last year.

The PC isn't going anywhere, but it's increasingly competing for attention with the smartphone. This is an old story in Europe, where teenagers searching for flashy phones and Web access have been served by carriers hawking inexpensive phones, said Pete Cunningham, a senior analyst with Canalys.

But in the U.S., people are just waking up to the possibilities presented by having the Internet in your pocket. Credit Apple and the iPhone for the surge in interest on the part of Americans, said Jonathan Goldberg, senior analyst with Deustche Bank.

The title of a slide used in Clifford's presentation was "Brands are Transitioning From the Desk to the Hand." The slide contained a who's-who list of Internet properties, including Google, Yahoo, eBay, and the usual suspects, and was making the point that the PC is not the only avenue to the Internet.

Three things in particular are driving smartphone growth and interest among regular people: the increasing amount of time they spend online on things like social-networking sites, the impatience of having to wait until they get back to their home or coffee shop to get online to check messages or update their status, and the desire to look good while doing all that, he said.

For all the hubbub over the iPhone's software development kit, it seems most people are content to spend their time in their browsers. Bill Hughes, principal analyst at In-Stat, surveyed U.S. smartphone users and found that they only downloaded 1.83 applications on average, and that many of those were games. The number of iPhone users in the survey was too small to be relevant, Hughes said, meaning that smartphone users with more open operating systems aren't really taking advantage of them.

Obviously, you're not going to find too many smartphone naysayers at an event called the Smartphone Summit sponsored by Symbian, the world's largest smartphone operating system provider. But when you consider the trend more broadly, it's hard to deny.

At some point, we'll be able to retire the term smartphone, Goldberg said, in a development that will delight the editorial copy desk at News.com. Intel and ARM are pushing on each other to develop more and more powerful chips for mobile devices. Apple and Google are raising the bar for operating systems in terms of performance, user interface, and openness. And carriers are starting to recognize that in the future, they might be no different than a wireless ISP.

That means all our phones will be smart. In other parts of the world, where PC adoption is still just getting underway, a lot of people might just skip over the PC and start using a powerful phone that costs around $200 to $300, gets them online at broadband speeds, lasts all day, and fits in their pocket.

That's a smart idea.

If CNET News.com's readers are any indication, Microsoft's Windows Mobile has a better base of support than one might think, but all the winds are blowing toward Apple.

The results of our first annual (maybe) smartphone survey are in, and thanks to everyone who left comments here on One More Thing or over on Crave, and those who flooded my inbox with responses. Yes, I know we should have a survey tool, but we're working on other stuff right now that's more important. (You'll have to trust me on that one.)

Between the comments and the e-mails, we received 159 responses. I must note that this is not a scientific study; we're not going to be putting market research firms out of business anytime soon. But I thought it was time for a look at what some of our readers are using, and I was surprised at some of the results.

Windows Mobile-based smartphones were by far the choice of survey respondents. Of the 130 people who said they owned a smartphone, 42.3 percent said they were using a Windows Mobile-based smartphone. That category includes the carrier-branded models, mostly from HTC, as well as the Motorola Q and the Samsung BlackJack, the two most-popular "tier 1" brands cited in the responses using Windows Mobile.

"This past weekend I traded in my BlackBerry Pearl for the HTC Tilt on AT&T's service," said a Crave reader with the screen name Yieeman. "So far it has been great. I like the fact that it works more like a computer for the organization of e-mails and documents, but also has amazing call clarity."

With 19.2 percent of the responses, the BlackBerry was the second most popular device among readers when the data was sorted by operating system. Apple's iPhone came in third, with 17.7 percent. Palm and Symbian tied for fourth place with 10 percent each.

Most of News.com's readers come from the United States (Thursday, 70.7 percent of our readers were in the U.S.), and most of the Windows Mobile phones claimed by respondents were carrier-branded models, with the AT&T/Cingular 8525 and 8515 popping up the most often. Symbian is by far the leading smartphone operating system provider in the world, but its phones are generally harder to find in the U.S., where RIM dominates the smartphone market.

Sorted by manufacturer, RIM and the HTC models were tied, with 19.2 percent of the survey respondents. I counted most of the carrier branded models as HTC models, in the cases where the carrier-branded model was a carbon copy of the HTC-branded model. Most people referred to their HTC designs with the carrier brand, AT&T, T-Mobile, or Sprint.

Apple was just behind RIM and HTC, sorted by manufacturer, with 17.7 percent of the survey responses. Apple was followed by Motorola, Palm, and Samsung, in that order, each with around 10 percent of the responses. Surprisingly, Nokia, the worldwide leader in smartphone shipments, was used by only 4.6 percent of respondents. Sony Ericsson was used by 5.4 percent.

And it's clear that while Apple's iPhone isn't the smartphone of choice just yet among survey respondents, it hasn't escaped their notice. When asked which smartphone might be their next model, survey respondents cited the iPhone most often by far.

Of the 159 total responses, 66 people said they would consider an iPhone as their next (or first) smartphone. That was three times as many mentions as the second most desired smartphone, the BlackBerry.

"If I were in the market for a phone today, especially in light of the coming apps and integration with Exchange servers, I would likely get an iPhone," Ryan Hendley said over e-mail. "My current phone, Samsung Sync, does not integrate well with my MacBook calendar and contacts. In fact, it doesn't sync at all."

All those Windows Mobile users appear to be considering a switch, as HTC's models were cited by 10 respondents, but no other major manufacturer, including Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, or Palm, received more than 5 mentions. Several people cited multiple phones on their potential wish lists, so I just counted everything that was mentioned.

Most of the people looking at the iPhone were waiting for either a 3G version or a version that worked with their carrier, citing a desire to avoid AT&T. They were also intrigued by the business features slated to roll out in June, which gives them the option of using their iPhone at work.

The statistics were interesting, but I had also asked people to share the reasons they bought a smartphone in the first place, and whether they liked their current model. Most people did in fact like their current phone. The Windows Mobile users probably grumbled the most about their devices, but still, more than half of them were happy with their experience.

Most people bought their smartphones because they wanted to access e-mail, Web browsing, and telephone calls on a single device, as might be expected. I had thought going in to this survey that most respondents would mostly be using their phones for business, but an overwhelming number of people said they used their devices both for business and pleasure.

The BlackBerry users might have obtained their phone to check their corporate e-mail, but that doesn't mean they don't check sports scores in between meetings, or plot directions to the campground on the weekend. This will be the next big source of growth for smartphones, devices that can balance multimedia consumer desires with business needs. People aren't going to want to carry multiple devices for fun and work: that's why they got a smartphone in the first place.

So, again, thanks to all who participated. Stay tuned for the big CTIA Wireless conference at the beginning of April, which should bring new smartphones, new operating system news, and tons of coverage from both News.com and our colleagues at CNET Reviews.

Can Google's application development prowess be transformed into a next-generation mobile operating system?

It seems increasingly likely that Google, the ubiquitous tech company, is about to throw its hat into the race to develop the next big mobile device. Google's no gadget-maker, but it does develop quite a bit of software, and reports have been building that the company is relatively close to releasing the Gphone. (Our style department says we have to spell it that way.)

Most people who have wandered onto the Internet in the past couple of years are familiar with Google. The company's various applications from Gmail and Google Docs to Google Desktop and the Google Toolbar are likewise familiar to lots of PC users. When it comes to smart phones, Google Maps is almost a must-have application, and it comes standard with the iPhone.

So Google's got experience in taking applications built for a PC and moving them over to a smart phone, which will be a key part of transforming smart phones into true mobile computers. A mobile operating system, however, is an entirely different undertaking.

It's very much a wide-open race to develop the next advanced mobile operating system. Symbian has the lead worldwide thanks to its close partnership with Nokia, the largest shareholder in the company. Windows Mobile is the second most widely used smart-phone operating system, according to Forward Concepts, and Linux is the third.

According to reports, Google wants to expand on that last category with its rumored mobile OS. The Gphone would be based on Linux and supported by advertising, which to many techies probably sounds like the ultimate Silicon Valley marriage made in hell. Try to forget, for a moment, about using a smart phone inundated with advertising messages and think about the implications of a Google-developed smart phone operating system.

It's still the very early days for this type of computing. Symbian and Microsoft have staked out opposing positions, but no company with the size and clout of Google has thrown its support behind the Linux development efforts for mobile computing.

Mobile phone makers are intrigued by Linux because of the constrained memory and power requirements of mobile computers and the ability to customize a Linux base for their products. Lots of work has already been done to make Linux modular, or to create building blocks that can be mixed and matched depending on what is desired. Tomihisa Kamada of Access told me earlier in the year that carriers and phone makers also like the idea of having their own branded interface on the phone, rather than relying on Microsoft and Symbian's branded operating system. If you go that route, that means you have to differentiate your products mostly on hardware, and that can be tricky.

But established phone makers and carriers looking for an answer to the iPhone are finding it hard to bet on a single Linux provider. Palm is floundering, with the recent news that the Linux-based version of Palm OS has been delayed again. Access, the company that acquired former Palm OS developer Palmsource, isn't faring much better. The folks at OpenMoko have gotten some buzz, but when First International Computer is your only hardware partner, you've got an uphill fight ahead of you. MontaVista has had some success with Motorola, and Wind River has been doing some interesting work, but are they in the best position to persuade the world to take a chance on their products?

Google, on the other hand, is Google. They've got open-source credibility, they've got mobile phone pioneers on board with their acquisition of Android in 2005, and some of the best and brightest engineers that Silicon Valley has to offer (not to mention enough cash to fund four or five internal projects that might have produced the eventual winner). As mobile phones start to deliver the same Internet experience as a PC, mobile search will be a vital application.

The part that trips me up is the notion of an advertising-supported Gphone, something also reported by BusinessWeek as a key part of Google's aims for this market, along with its intention to go after the 700MHz spectrum auction. You're going to have to offer people something pretty special to have ads--even targeted ads--be an integral part of the phone experience, which has thus far been mostly ad free. BusinessWeek thinks Google could be trying to do a television model on your phone, where voice and data minutes are free when the phone user agrees to accept advertising. While that might work to a certain extent, I think people have shown themselves quite willing to pay for things that get around the increasing reach of advertising. The New York Times reported Monday, however, that Google may be forgoing a licensing fee for its software in favor of the advertising model, which could make the software that much more attractive to phone makers.

Despite a lack of smart-phone experience, Google has to be taken seriously in this market. It has the talent and the assets to worm its way into mobile phones, a consumer-friendly brand, and the industry heft to stick around through a few development cycles. The look and feel of any Gphone will be crucial to its chances, and without any solid information to that effect, it's hard to say whether this thing will be a success or a flop. But it's not hard to imagine that Google is making mobile development executives at Symbian, Microsoft, and Palm think long and hard about the current projects they have under development.

UPDATED, 10/9 5:40 p.m: Corrects spelling of Tomihisa Kamada's name.

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--If you're not exactly sure what you want in a mobile computer, don't worry: the folks who are building them aren't entirely sure themselves.

The consensus among five panelists gathered here at the ARM Developers Conference was that this is a very interesting and confusing time to be thinking about the future of mobile computing, because the playing field is so wide open and because consumers haven't decided exactly what they want.

"It's sort of like Darwin," said Tony Milbourn, director of mobile devices at Motorola. "We don't know what people want, we put them out there and see what people will buy."

This is about the quest for the next big mobile computer, something more attractive than a UMPC but more powerful than a Treo. It's been a very common topic of late, with the craziness attached to anything related to Apple's iPhone and Intel's clear goal of throwing its hat into the mobile computer race.

The iPhone is very much on everyone's mind (at ARM's press conference earlier in the day, executives from about six different companies had a picture of the iPhone in their presentations), but more will be needed if regular people are going to embrace true handheld mobile computing.

There's three technologies that must evolve for this to happen. Motorola's Milbourn thinks that bandwidth speeds have to improve to allow mobile applications to flourish. Other panelists, such as Jorgen Behrens of Symbian and John Lilly of the Mozilla Foundation thought it was all about applications and the user interface. And obviously, the hardware is going to have to deliver sufficient performance at battery-friendly power levels.

"The operating system is very important, but it's mostly important for the people making the devices," said Behrens, executive vice president of marketing for Symbian. The combination of the browser and the user interface dictate whether or not people will enjoy their experience, he said.

That suited Lilly just fine. The chief operating officer of the Firefox development organization thinks that the browsing experience is going to be extremely important for mobile computers, especially as people rely more and more on Web-based applications, like Facebook, Google and countless others. The problem is that right now, the memory footprint needed for an advanced browser to support those Web applications is way too large. Mozilla is working on a solution to that problem, and this reliance on Web applications could make the debate over third-party applications on the iPhone moot, he said.

Web applications also bypass the problem of operating system fragmentation in this world, according to several panelists. One reason (among others) that Microsoft came to dominate the market for PC operating system was the need to have a common platform for applications in a non-networked world, Milbourn said. But this industry is evolving in a very different way.

"There's an extraordinary awareness of not handing Microsoft the keys to another kingdom," said Jim Ready, CEO of MontaVista, which earlier in the day signed a collaboration deal with five other ARM licensees to work on Linux products for this category. "(The fragmentation) may indirectly benefit Microsoft if you think you need a real common platform with a lot of applications. But if you're on the Internet, the local platform isn't as common."

Despite Intel and Microsoft's interest in future mobile computers, don't expect the scenario that played out more than 20 years ago to happen again. "This is not going to be the PC market," said Mike Muller, CTO of ARM. "There is going to be diversity and I don't think there's going to be one product or one winner."