Mobile wish list 2010: iPhone 4G, no more AT&T, mobile money, and …

2009 was a pretty good year for mobile: The first generation of plausible iPhone competitors finally arrived, in the guise of the Palm Pre and HTC Droid Eris. Apple solidified the iPhone with improved under-the-hood hardware and business security. And IT’s resistance to anything but the BlackBerry within corporations seemed to crumble, thanks to user pressure, better security handling on some devices, and the sudden support for iPhone and Android on a bunch of enterprise-class mobile management tools.

Of course, all of these advances were of the “two steps forward, one step back” nature. The Pre, Droid Eris, and Motorola Droid all stopped maddeningly short of offering the whole enchilada, with dumb compromises that only made the iPhone look more unbeatable. Apple revealed that its previous iPhones were lying about their security capabilities, creating new doubt about them within IT. And the mobile management tools‘ support for iPhone and Android (and sometimes WebOS) is still very much limited.

So what could 2010 bring to both accelerate those positive half-steps and to move the mobile environment significantly forward? Here are five ideas that go beyond the usual “more battery life and faster processing” wishes we all have:

1. A smarter iPhone 4G. The iPhone is a great device, but it’s far from perfect.

We all know it needs to support multiple simultaneous apps, like the WebOS and Android devices do, and it needs to support Flash natively. There are also good ideas in HTC’s Sense UI, found in its Droid Eris, that Apple should investigate to make it easier to get context about running apps (such as e-mail previews).

And, of course, the iPhone needs to have full security capabilities built-in, so there’s no excuse for IT to disallow its use in business. Plus, Apple really needs to figure out how to allow IT to manage iPhones over the air — it has the right capabilities in its iPhone Configuration Utility, but it needs to enable them through the cellular network and through standard IT management tools, such as Exchange Server or any of the various device management platforms. Sounds like an opportunity to offer a simple Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server-based box that can connect to any of the commonly used servers, much like what RIM’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) does.

But these wishes are about filling in holes in the current product. I’d like to see Apple do something new with the iPhone in the version likely to ship in summer 2010 — I’d like to see it provide personal area network capabilities, whether through Bluetooth or ad hoc Wi-Fi networking, so the iPhone is a hub for interaction with other devices. That would allow the use of wireless keyboards and printers, for example, but that’s just the beginning. Imagine the “companion” devices that could connect to each other and to cloud services through the iPhone: medical and other sensors, near-field multiuser gaming, say, with Xbox and PSP owners, auto GPS nav systems, and much much more.

2. A better BlackBerry. Regular readers know I’m not a fan of the BlackBerry outside its messaging capabilities, but I respect the BlackBerry’s innovation over the past decade in making real-time messaging easy over that era’s slow paging networks. Research in Motion highly optimized its device for those low-bandwidth networks, and unfortunately today that has led to a mindset that avoids data-consuming capabilities such as rich Web browsers. RIM recently bought a company that has a WebKit-based browser (like the iPhone, WebOS, and Android OS), which may signal an acceptance that wireless broadband is real and should be used.

So far, RIM’s iPhone-like product, the Storm, has been a failure composed of an awkward touchscreen and old-fashioned UI not suited to the modern mobile world. But if RIM can reinvent the BlackBerry — or come up with a separate platform for the iPhone/Android crowd — that would be good for the industry and for users. Imagine an iPhone-like device with the security, the manageability, and even the keyboard of the BlackBerry Bold 9700 — wow! Palm was able to reinvent its platform this year, so here’s hoping RIM can do so as well.

3. Mobile money becomes real. The idea may scare some people, but I love the idea of a smartphone also being an e-wallet. The idea is not new; SMS messages have been used to transfer funds in Africa for years, for example. But my vision is a bit more sophisticated. I’d like to link my smartphone to a checking account or credit card, or at least to a stored-value account such as those used in gift cards and in many tollway and rail ticketing systems, and have it work with point-of-sales terminals.

Already, RFID-equipped contactless debit and credit cards are becoming standard issue, so you just can wave the card near a terminal to pay. That’s fine, but it’s a marginal improvement over swiping. But give that capability to a smartphone, and you get real value. For example, the device you use to pay can also check your bank or credit accounts to see your balances, and you could have apps that monitor your spending and send you alerts. It’s a combination of the smarts of the smartphone, the fact you carry it around all the time, and the fact it’s wirelessly connected that would let mobile money transcend how we spend today.

4. AT&T’s pullout from wireless data. As my colleague Robert X. Cringely points out, AT&T hates the iPhone and is mad that its customers dared actually use it frequently on the AT&T cellular network. AT&T is mad that its iPhone customers, who comprise 4 percent of its user base, account for about 40 percent of its wireless data usage. (I’m shocked that AT&T is shocked: What other devices does AT&T sell that actually use much data? Just the BlackBerry, which is rarely used for Web or rich data access.)

AT&T is flabbergasted that people actually use the iPhone for what it was designed to do, so it is proposing to limit data access through as-yet-determined pricing bands or usage caps. AT&T claims that its 3G network is not as bad as we all know it is, arguing that the problem is mainly in San Francisco and New York, where iPhone users are concentrated — if only iPhone users went elsewhere, they’d get a better experience.

Clearly, AT&T isn’t the right company to provide smartphones that are actually good, since it can’t furnish the network for them to use. So the answer is obvious: A&T should stop selling iPhones or any smartphones, given its repeated claims that it can’t handle their usage on its network. By being a voice-only provider, AT&T would no longer have all those annoying iPhone users mad at it, and all its network problems would go away. I’m sure several other carriers would be happy to relieve AT&T of its iPhone burden.

AT&T should man up and exit the smartphone business in general and the iPhone business in particular so that a competent carrier can take over. Trust me: All those bothersome problems AT&T has in supporting a successful product will disappear. To paraphrase former President Richard Nixon, you won’t have AT&T to kick around any more.

5. IBM and Novell put up or shut up on iPhone support. Although Microsoft Exchange is the most widely used corporate e-mail server, significant numbers of companies use Lotus Notes or Novell GroupWise. Both companies have promised iPhone support for more than a year, but have delivered little more than betas. I’m hearing increased rumblings in large, regulated organizations that their lack of support for the iPhone and now Android platforms are becoming a liability as more of their employees benefit from mobility — and they’re looking for alternatives to these platforms as they consider their upgrade-cycle plans.

For years, IBM and Novell could rely on BES to do the work for them, but they can no longer do so in the emerging multidevice world. Microsoft and Google have already figured this out, and now enterprise IT is beginning to. For their own benefit as well as their customers’, IBM and Novell need to resolve this issue.

I know that last wish is not sexy or controversial, but it’s the kind of basic block-and tackle effort that turns a relatively new technology such as mobile from an interesting idea to a fundamental part of the technology fabric.

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