Open standards – the future of mobile

CALIFORNIA, USA – Nokia’s tech chief Bob Iannucci talked at SOFCON 2008 about how the future of mobiles rest firmly in the past of computers. No, we’re not going backwards, but Bob reckons if we look backwards, we’ll see what’s going to happen next with mobile devices.

In short, the future of mobiles is a single platform for all mobile devices which enables applications to run on any device, and devices from different manufacturers to be inter-operable.

The Register does a good job of highlighting Bob’s choice cuts including:

“I feel like I’m been watching a movie I’ve seen three times before….
Today, in the world of mobility, there’s a huge diversity of hardware,
the devices are largely incompatible, the notion of someone writing a
piece of software that runs across all devices does not exist yet,” he
said. “The rest of the story hasn’t been written yet. We’re really only
at the beginning, waiting for a standard platform.”

Iannucci sees the future not as a single hardware solution, but a
“combination of software on devices – enablers and programming tools -
and something in the cloud.”

The Register highlights Bob’s thoughts on sensors on devices (GPS,
accelerometers and other technologies) and the example he gave during
his talk

“As an example, he pointed to Nokia’s fledgling TrafficWorks project,
an application that reads GPS data from countless phones as they drive
down the road and then uses that data to predict traffic congestion.
These predictions can then be pushed back down to phones to help people
avoid congestion.”

Open standards certainly seem the right way forward. What do you think?