Has mobile innovation come to an end?

In June 2007, the iPhone instantly obsoleted all previous smartphones (the BlackBerry and Palm families), finally approaching the promise that carriers and device makers had been making about the mobile future for a decade: Real Web access. A touch UI — that rotates. Accelerometer and location detection. E-mail and instant messaging. Photos and music. A year later came the App Store and the tens of thousands of apps — from games to time-wasters to serious business tools — that also made the iPhone into a computing device.

Since then, there’s been an ever-increasing number of competitors, but nothing fundamentally game-changing. Apple continues to refine the iPhone and iPod Touch, adding capabilities such as a compass, Exchange e-mail support, and video capture — but the last round of devices didn’t pioneer anything significant. Both Palm and Google delivered their own iPhone-inspired OSes (WebOS and Android, respectively), but did nothing significant beyond adding (very welcome) support for multiple simultaneous apps to what the iPhone had already brought to the table.

But there’s been not much else.

RIM’s BlackBerry OS has graduated from being DOS-like to Windows 2.0-like, while the iPhone, Android, and WebOS are in Windows 95-equivalent territory. Microsoft’s Windows Mobile has been moribund, with no significant innovations in years and stuck in the mobile equivalent of Windows 3.0 territory. Nokia’s Symbian OS has been even more static in a Windows 2.0-like world like the BlackBerry, and now the company says it will phase out Symbian in favor of a Linux-derived OS called Maemo — but only over the next several years. It’s an aging tortoise choosing to race in the mud.

Is there no more innovation to be had in mobile? Has mobile matched the PC in becoming a stable platform where innovation happens slowly and mainly around the edges? After all, what does a PC in 2009 do that a PC in 2000 couldn’t do — even if not as fast — beyond using different ports?

Refinements: lots more would be welcome

Sure, there’s plenty more to be done in terms of refinements. Faster processors, better battery life, and better 3G networks — especially from AT&T — are all needed, but these always need improvement. Enterprise-class security should be standard in all of these platforms, as should over-the-air management using standard management tools. (Making these capabilities standard would also enable mobile banking, not just satisfy security-conscious IT people.) Many could use sharper, larger screens, as well as better physical or virtual keyboards.

All should support more wireless capabilities, such as use with Bluetooth keyboards and file syncing and support for wireless-enabled projectors and printers. Voice commands should be integrated across the device’s OS and the carrier’s phone capabilities; right now, the voice control for dialing can’t deal with the smartphone’s other apps, making it very hard to use these devices hands-free while driving.

And I suggest that Palm and Android-based smartphone makers consider their own equivalents of the iPod Touch, a wonderful phone-less device with Wi-Fi capability — hey, how about a 3G (or eventually WiMax or LTE) version for those of us who don’t want our phone and our PDA on the same device or carrier?

New capabilities: Not so easy to identify

But those are fixes and improvements to what is. What about what’s not there already?

Biometrics-based security could be useful (a finger swipe verifies you are the rightful user). My colleague Doug Dineley suggests that support for virtualization à la Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion would be great for users and developers, letting apps run on mobile platforms they weren’t specifically designed for. (I know, the platform vendors and app stores will never allow it.)

Is that it? I’ve wracked my brain for new ideas, and that’s all I’ve got. (Let me know your thoughts in the comments section to this blog.)

Has mobile gotten as boring as PCs?

If you know the history of the PC, you know that there were several incompatible types in the beginning — the IBM PC, the Apple IIe, the Apple Macintosh, the Tandy TRS-80 — that did essentially the same thing but with different hardware and software standards. The Mac was the exception: It did something different, thanks to its graphical UI. That’s where we are today, with the iPhone taking the role of the Mac.

Pretty soon, the PC hardware architectures became standardized and shortly after that, the operating systems also came down to one (Windows on DOS). The Mac and the Mac OS remained the “other” platform. That standardization on the PC platform greatly reduced the speed of “new” innovation, as the focus was on improving the standard components, such as processor, memory, system bus, video, storage, ports, and so on. And today, PCs are pretty much interchangeable. When there is innovation, it usually comes from the “other” platform, the Mac — examples are the mouse, user-friendly networking, the use of Bluetooth, most UI advances, and most recently touch-based hardware.

In many regards, it appears that mobile platform makers have standardized the capabilities of their platforms even faster than the PC makers did — and even before they’ve standardized the hardware across the devices. Those platform differences, supported by being tied to specific OSes, could allow real innovation to come in any platform, where each could play the role of the Mac.

Or they could be ignored, treated by the carriers and major device makers (Motorola, HTC, Samsung) as equivalent platforms that run equivalent OSes for sale to the same small set of carriers who offer just superically different products to their customers. That approach allows the standardization of the PC market to occur in mobile in a virtual way (so handsets can still be tied to specific carriers yet everyone offers essentially the same set of capabilities). This last scenario could easily prevent significant innovation from occurring, unless a powerhouse platform developer (Apple or Google) can force their carriers to think different. History tells us the carriers and hardware makers don’t think different that easily.

This article, “Has mobile innovation come to an end?,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com.