Mobile 2012: More coming than just the ‘iPad 3’

Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way: Yes, Virginia, Apple will offer a new iPad model (the so-called iPad 3 that gets so many rumor reports) this year — likely in March or April, as it has for the last two years. What will be in it? Only Apple knows for sure, but probable enhancements include support for LTE 4G networks, perhaps multicarrier models, perhaps NFC (near-field communications) support, and perhaps a higher-resolution screen. Odds are a new iPhone will debut in the summer or fall, again as it has every year since 2007, and have LTE support, now that the carriers have serious deployments in place of this faster cellular technology, plus NFC support if the so-called iPad 3 gets it. Less likely is support for the new 802.11ac faster Wi-Fi standard, though you can bet it’ll appear at some point as market presence increases.

But there’s going to be a lot more action this year in mobile than just what Apple does. In fact, I expect 2012 to be an even more exciting year for mobile than even the wild 2011, where we saw Apple’s iPhone outsell Research in Motion’s BlackBerry in the enterprise, where former mobile superstars RIM, Microsoft, and Nokia all made Hail Mary moves to stay relevant in the mobile market, where Hewlett-Packard promised big and delivered little, and businesses moved past their fear of user-driven mobile technology and began to take it seriously as a new tool for employees.

Google finally gets its Android act together

There’s no question in my mind that Android smartphones will continue to grow in adoption, becoming the new cellphone for everyday users. I believe, however, that Android’s reach into corporate environments will lag, as the chaos of the Android marketplace — its multiple Android OS versions, the various skins from the device makers, and the inconsistent use of security and management capabilities — simply makes the cost too high for IT and users alike to let Android devices gain more than basic access to enterprise resources.

Android 4 “Ice Cream Sandwich” will help; it’s a much smoother, better-integrated OS than its predecessors, but its slow start in terms of product availability does not bode well. Nor does the fact that Google favors a couple device makers (Samsung, mainly, and perhaps Motorola Mobility once it’s completed that acquisition) and then let the others work off the open source release of Android. That encourages the second-class Android makers to cut corners or add unhelpful “differentiators” such as their own UI skins. Perhaps that’s why HTC and other Android device makers have faded in terms of sales.

By 2013, I believe the situation will be untenable. Samsung has hedged its bets with Windows Phone 7 and its own Bada OS, but Motorola, LG, Acer, and the rest are largely dependent on Android and, thus, need to come together with Google to stabilize and rationalize the Android OS and core apps. Given that under Larry Page’s leadership Google has already started to rationalize its whole portfolio, I’m betting the same will happen with Android. I suspect (hope) that the 3LM security technology Google picked up when it bought Motorola Mobility will become standard on all Android devices, ending the current guessing game as to which devices can be secured and to what degree.

I also suspect we’ll see Samsung and Motorola own the lion’s share of the smart Android market — the devices used in businesses — which will give IT a manageable, definable set of devices to vet and oversee. The other Android device makers will churn out models that replace today’s regular cellphones, with the same lack of cohesion and concern of such devices. It will be very much like the so-called feature phone market of today, where 1 billion devices all are powered by Java, but have nothing else in common. (Feature phones are cellphones that have limited messaging, gaming, and social neworking capabilities.) No one worries about managing feature phones because they are to smartphones what Xboxes are to PCs.

Tablets remain an iPad stronghold

That’s my prediction for Android smartphones. But I believe that Android tablets will continue to struggle, even with nicely designed models such as the Asus Transformer Prime and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. Android apps are rare when it comes to business usage, and on the whole Android apps are inferior to iOS ones. The Android OS still isn’t as good as iOS, even with the very welcome “Ice Cream Sandwich” update. Plus, Google has nothing as compelling as iTunes and iCloud to provide a digital ecosystem akin to Apple’s.

These differences matter more for tablet users than for smartphone users, as tablets are judged more like computers and less like phones, for which expectations of sophisticated app capabilities are lower. iPads provide a helluva lot more for the same dollars as Android devices, and the low-end tablet market will gravitate to underpowered media-oriented devices such as the Amazon Kindle Fire, whose prices no one else can match because no one else can get the media revenues from them that Amazon.com can.

As far as the tablet market goes, it’ll remain an iPad world — especially in business.

NFC gets real traction — but not for payments

Near-field communications (NFC) has been a buzz technology off and on since 2003, especially in 2011, when it became the foundation of the Google Wallet mobile payments system. Few devices actually support NFC, a short-range two-way wireless technology, so NFC has been more talk than action.

I believe 2012 will see significant adoption of NFC, at least in devices. And I think as that adoption spreads, NFC will get used as a quick exchange technology, not for mobile payments, at least while debit and credit cards remain much easier and simpler to use than NFC-enabled smartphones, where you have to run an app to confirm the transaction. Bluetooth is too awkward and complex for information sharing, but NFC could make it as simple as bumping devices to exchange contacts, URLs, and other bursty information. The defunct HP TouchPad’s WebOS 3 showed how this could work via its Touch-to-Share capability.

I realize this is yet another radio to power and position, but unless the industry figures out how to make Bluetooth as automatic, the user benefit will be worth device developers’ time. And if anyone makes Bluetooth as simple as it needs to be, it’ll be Apple, which was the first to adopt the new low-power Bluetooth spec in the iPhone 4S.

A mobile shakeout is coming

There are lots of companies vying to be the equivalents of Microsoft, Apple, HP, and Dell in the mobile space — too many. And 2012 is the year that much of the shakeout will happen. HP’s grandiose fall last year was a taste of what is to come. Apple and Google for sure will be survivors — Apple is the Microsoft of the mobile market, and Google is doing its damnedest to occupy the same position.

Three stalwarts — RIM, Microsoft, and Nokia — will break through or fail this year. All three have been failing for several years, and they’re all at the make-or-break point.

RIM’s relying on its BlackBerry reboot — a complete replacement of the hardware platform and OS, while keeping the famed BES management tool under the new Fusion name — to regain its glory. But already, the new BlackBerry 10 OS and the new smartphones running it have been delayed until late 2012, ostensibly to use faster chips coming out in mid-2012. That seems a silly reason to let Apple’s next iPhone and Intel-based Android smartphones, both of which should debut in the sumer-fall 2012 timeframe, and absorb the lion’s share of the new and upgrade purchases in 2012.

I suspect RIM is having real trouble with QNX, but whatever the cause, I believe the only real question now is when — not whether — RIM will give up the ghost. I believe RIM will fail before the year is out, remaining at most a provider of BES and specialized-security devices for military and spy agency use.

Microsoft is betting on Windows 7.5 “Mango,” the relatively minor update to its Windows Phone 7 OS that crashed and burned in late 2009. Windows Phone can’t seriously compete against the iPhone, but its simple message-oriented design could appeal to those who don’t want full-on smartphones, and thus eat away at the low-end Android market. Still, Windows Phone’s minuscule market share has not been helped by the “Mango” release; if Microsoft is to be relevant in mobile, it’ll need Windows 8 to be a hit on tablets.

There’s a real chance Windows 8 could strongly challenge the iPad — assuming Microsoft doesn’t pull defeat from the jaws of victory as it did in smartphones. My bet is that Windows 8 will be good enough to become the No. 2 tablet within a year of its debut and bring enough Windows Phone smartphones along with it to be a distant No. 3 in the smartphone market after Android and iPhone. If Windows 8 is good in its own right and delivers on the promised integration with desktop PCs, users will have a second source for the kind of ecosystem advantage that so far only Apple provides.

Then there’s Nokia, which has bet its future in Europe, North America, and East Asia on Windows Phone. There, it competes with Samsung and, to a lesser extent, HTC and LG, as well as the ascendant Android ecosystem. I just don’t see Windows Phone gaining enough market share for Nokia to take back its lost Symbian glory in Europe, much less register elsewhere. A recent Ipsos survey shows Europeans have little interest in Nokia’s new Windows Phone-based Lumia; like everyone else, they strongly prefer the iPhone and Android devices. Nokia, I suspect, will retreat to the developing world, where it’s also betting big, and/or switch to Android in hopes of having a slice of a pie that matters. This drama will likely continue into 2013, but the vector will be clear in 2012.

Make that two mobile shakeouts

Also to be shaken out is the mobile device management (MDM) industry, which has dozens of vendors chasing the same businesses. Some were bought up in 2010, and I believe we’ll see both buyouts and failures in 2012. The buyouts will come from IT management firms (Accenture? CA? HP? IBM? Microsoft?) that realize it makes little sense for mobile management to be separate from PC and application management, especially as the enterprise gets more heterogeneous and the assumption of a Windows monoculture underlying the traditional IT management tools starts to fall apart.

There are already more than a half-dozen strong MDM providers: AirWatch, Boxtone, Fiberlink, Good Technology, MobileIron, SAP Sybase (Afaria), Wyse (Trellia), Zenprise, and probably a couple others I’m neglecting. Meanwhile, most of the wannabes have only basic technology little better than what Microsoft Exchange natively offers. The smart buyouts will be of the strong providers, leaving the wannabes to fall by the wayside. As acquired companies are as likely to be ruined by their new owner as to be made stronger, the effective list will get even shorter.

At the same time, we’ll see attempts to introduce the concept of mobile application management (MAM), which conceptually plays nicely into IT’s fears and control desires. Right now, the MAM offerings are all over the map, so there’s little there there, but that could change in 2012.

Technology advancements will also arise

In addition to the market changes and product enhancements, we’ll no doubt see advances in mobile technologies themelves. My crystal ball is fuzziest here. Sure we’ll see faster, lighter, cheaper. And I’ve mentioned 4G and NFC, as well as higher-resolution displays. And technologies such as Apple’s Siri will improve and find themselves cloned by others. But there’s no doubt other technologies bubbling in some labs somewhere — in Mountain View, Santa Clara, Cupertino, Redmond, White Plains, Austin, Seattle, or elsewhere — waiting to be sprung on us, unexpected but instanty compelling. I certainly hope so!

This article, “Mobile 2012: More coming than just the ‘iPad 3’,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com.