News that AT&T plans to establish at least three "innovation centers" during 2010 highlights how the  incumbent telcos now realize their world is changing fast and they need to change with it. AT&T said that the centers will be designed to enable AT&T's scientists and engineers to work directly with device makers, network equipment providers and application developers, who will have access to "a full range of AT&T services and network capabilities" to help them develop new applications.  read more »

Scouring the halls of the Mobile World Congress this week, it was crystal clear that the long-promised revolution in display technology is now under way, transforming the mobile experience of watching video, playing games and reading text. A new generation of high-resolution handset displays is paving the way for the development of graphically-rich and highly-immersive applications that really draw the user in, rather than just killing their time.  read more »

Google’s charm offensive towards mobile developers seems to be intensifying. Today, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the Internet giant handed out free Nexus One handsets, which retail for more than $500, to several hundred developers attending presentations at the Android Development Lab.  read more »

Dinesh Moorjani, Senior Vice President, Mobile, at IAC/InterActiveCorp, discusses key trends in the mobile apps market 

Fragmentation  read more »

Like a once scruffy teenager smartening himself up to take on a professional job, mobile apps have matured from rough and ready Java games, coded in bedrooms or Starbucks, to professional software applications increasingly polished to perfection. Big business has moved in big time.

"The expansion in mobile apps is a lot like the growth 10 years ago of web sites," says Louis Gump, vice president of mobile at CNN, in an interview. "It is easy enough to create mobile apps, but they are still new enough to routinely have notable impact for consumers and publishers when they launch."  read more »

For any software developers bemoaning the pain of having to rewrite apps for each of the many smartphone platforms, there was good news in the fourth quarter of 2009. A developer could reach 75% of the smartphones sold in that quarter by supporting just three platforms, Nokia/Symbian, RIM OS and Apple iPhone OS, according to figures from research firm Strategy Analytics.  read more »

Mobile apps routinely make use of the GPS chips, accelerometers, cameras, compasses and other high-tech widgets embedded in a smartphone, but they mostly fail to exploit the bells and whistles in the mobile networks.  The network could tell the app where the handset is, the speed of the connection and sometimes the age and gender of the user. Moreover, the network operator can authenticate the user's identity, send them a text or picture message and enable them to easily pay for a service.   read more »

Mobile operators from across the world are beating a path to Silicon Valley to hook up with start-ups as they seek to better compete with Apple, Google and Nokia, according to Greg Tarr, founding partner of Cross Pacific Capital and an advisor to several operators.  read more »

After months of speculation and rumor, the Apple iPad has been finally been unveiled, but how should developers react? In a word: Cautiously. First of all, it is not clear who will pay $500 plus for a device that isn't suitable for use as a mobile phone or as a lightweight laptop (the lack of a keyboard is going to put off people looking for a business tool).  read more »

Would you rather spend $60,000 adding an app to the 100,000 plus in the Apple App Store or would you rather spend a more modest sum creating a branded "augmented reality world" on Nokia Point & Find?  read more »

If you see want to see what a new sofa and armchairs would look like in your lounge, an iPhone app from metaio enables you to do exactly that, by integrating 3D images of furniture into a picture of your home. The iLiving app let's you move the furniture around, change its size or rotate it, while shaking the iPhone will randomly shuffle the sofa and chairs within the picture.  read more »

Want to start browsing the world, as well as the web?  read more »

Amid all the hype and excitement about Google "super phones" and iTablets at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO of Nokia, tried to divert everyone's attention to the opportunities in developing countries where smartphones are barely used.  read more »

In the mobile industry, augmented reality has been a hot concept for less than a year, but some software start ups have been working for more than a decade on the thorny technical problems involved in combining animated 3D digital images with live video streams of the real world.  read more »

What happens in Vegas, doesn't always stay in Vegas.

The two largest U.S. mobile operators, AT&T and Verizon Wireless, have used the Consumer Electronics Show in Sin City this week to stress that they aren't betrothed to any one smart phone platform. Far from it, both operators seem keen to portray themselves as promiscuous.  read more »

The Nexus One, Google's first mobile phone, raises the bar for high-end handsets, while undercutting its main rivals on price.  With its large, high-resolution screen, 1GHz processor and a second microphone for cancelling out background noise, it should be a potent platform for apps, particularly those with a voice-enabled interface.  read more »

by Richard Kramer, Arete Research

We see room for only three to four major handset software platforms by 2012.  The pace of innovation, R&D costs, and need for customisation (for hardware, operators and languages) invites consolidation.  Supporting original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and reaching out to developers is costly and labour-intensive; only over time might HTML5 browsers supplant device-specific applications. No platform is so productised as to simply hand over to licensees, either OEMs or operators.  read more »

With mobile operators' revenues flat-lining or declining in many developed countries, it is easy to be pessimistic about the prospects for start-ups in this sector. But at least one accomplished entrepreneur believes the climate in the mobile industry for young companies with innovative ideas is actually improving.  read more »

A commercial launch of the so-called Nexus One, a prototype phone that will likely be branded and distributed solely by Google, could ultimately be bad for the long-term health of the mobile industry and its ability to innovate. Here's why:  read more »

In 2010, there is going to be a big debate about whether services and content are better delivered to mobile users via downloadable applications or browser-based web services hosted in the cloud. As mobile phones begin to support full-blown Flash and other sophisticated web runtime environments, Google and other cloud-based computing advocates will increasingly evangelise about the advantages of web services, such as flexibility and immediacy. Apple, in particular, will continue to promote apps as the easiest way to access mobile Internet services.  read more »