Take the smarts out of smartphones

Last week’s IBM-Sprint Nextel announcement left me dazed and confused.

According to the announcement, the Lotus Expeditor software platform will be adopted by Sprint Nextel, which in turn will provide mobile application developers with a beta version of a “new” software platform named Titan, which can be downloaded on most Windows Mobile 6 smartphones from Sprint.

But I’m sure that is all perfectly clear to readers more technically savvy than I.

Not to pick on IBM or Sprint, but I’m just about up to here (edge of hand tapping Adam’s apple) with yet another, as Bob Egan, principal analyst at Mobile Competency puts it, “discrete choice” in the mobile platform industry.

The mobile platform industry is already confusing enough.

Making sense of the mobile runaround

Parsing the IBM-Sprint Nextel release in hopes of finding clarity, we get IBM calling Expeditor a software platform for “extending desktop computing and Web 2.0 capabilities to mobile phones” and Sprint announcing a new platform, Titan, based on Lotus Expeditor, a platform unto itself.

According to a Sprint representative, this is only the beginning of what is being called the Titan client framework, which includes the IBM Java Virtual Machine, a configuration of IBM Lotus Expeditor, and the Prosyst OSGI Framework.

On the enterprise side, Titan is integrated with both IBM Lotus Expeditor and Prosyst mPRM (mPower Remote Manager).

I also spoke with Bharti Patel, director of Lotus Client Platforms, and she stressed that all of this is built on Eclipse.

“The key point here is that you are building this on top of something that is open,” Patel told me.

So open that, at present, it only runs on Windows Mobile 5 or 6 smartphones and “some Symbian” devices, according to Patel.

Oh, but not according to the Sprint representative, who said it works only on Windows Mobile 6 platforms, at least on the Sprint Nextel network.

Well, my key point is that the mobile industry is trying to force IT to become mobile technical evaluators, a role that they are unlikely to be qualified for or do not have the mindset to be involved with, considering all of the other priorities IT faces today, Mobile Competency’s Egan says.

Strip down your mobile strategy

If IT does detect some kind of business benefit from mobility, my advice is to wait until we see who wins out among all the providers of these discrete, siloed mobile technologies.

The three big players are, of course, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and Symbian. Oh, how could I leave out the up-and-coming iPhone?

One way to approach untangling this industry, from an IT perspective, would be to declare a companywide edict deciding on one of the above and establishing a policy that supports nothing else.

Of course, this scenario is unlikely. All the company needs is one executive to stroll into the office with the latest trendy gadget, and there goes your homogeneous environment. The best approach is instead to recognize that we live in a heterogeneous world, and stop messing around with employees’ cell phones of choice.

I’m not saying there won’t be great new cell phone technologies coming down the pike. But as a business tool — one that needs to be integrated into the company network, requires support and training, not to mention the sourcing and refreshing of models — perhaps the phone should be used only for voice and e-mail, end of story.

Yes, I know all about vertical solutions like the winery that has a custom app for growers who distribute handsets to field workers who send back reports on the quality of the vines and the grapes. That’s not what I’m talking about.

Yes, it is fine if you can identify a specific group of users with a specific communications problem that needs to be addressed, as Brian Riggs, research director of Current Analysis, suggests as an interim solution.

Is there any light whatsoever at the end of this mobile tunnel?

Riggs, speaking of the IBM Sprint Nextel announcement, offered this spark:

“The difference here is there are a lot of Eclipse developers, and it just is a first step. Sprint is not the only one looking at this. Other mobile carriers are as well,” Riggs says. “The key point is that people can begin to have a platform that third parties can develop interesting applications on that might work with multiple carriers and multiple devices.”

I’m not so optimistic.

For me, Expeditor on Sprint as a way to create mashups on your cell phone needs to go to the back of the next-big-thing-in-mobility line behind PBX extensions to cell phones, dual-mode cell phones, WiMax cell phones, VoIP cell phones, UC (unified communications) and presence on cell phones, ERP on your cell phone, and — did I leave anything out?

I’m sure if I did, someone will text me from their MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) video cell phone to show me what I might have omitted.