Working on the seams

As soon as one delves into the world of mobile a little deeper than national press articles, one word will soon start creeping in: fragmentation.  It speaks of the complexities in getting a mobile service to market, including dealing with different screen sizes, multiple operating systems and device capabilities.

That can however mislead one to believe that mobile just needs a little more time to mature.

In reality, mobile is made up of several layers:

·      Voice works for everyone

·      SMS is pretty much understood by everyone and every device

·      Most mobile devices have a WAP or Html browser – fragmentation here becomes more relevant, but can be handled

·      For some devices, the browser can also access device functionality – so more fragmentation here

·      Applications are more device specific – again, a good Java developer can now handle most of the fragmentation issues, but then you have iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile

 

 

 

What I find really interesting and exciting is the idea of working around the seams between those different layers. They can all be stitched together: and SMS can link to a mobile site, a mobile site can trigger the download of an application, an application can send an SMS.  We combined SMS and WAP very elegantly for Glasses. One could also rethink applications to be largely browser-based, with small downloadable apps getting triggered when necessary (e.g. to extract data from the phonebook).