Friday, November 13, 2009

New kids on the block -November 13th

By Andrew Till
What a short time a week is in the mobile world. This week saw not one but two new announcements in area of mobile platforms and development. Firstly Samsung announced its new Bada mobile platform (http://www.bada.com/samsung-launches-open-mobile-platform/) designed for smartphones. Judging from the dedicated website and developer focused activities, development days, developer challenges and a new application store are all planned, this is a platform that Samsung is serious about pushing. While not all details are as yet fully clear, for example it does not state if the platform is Linux based or using some other kernel, it is clear that Samsung will be pushing Bada as a key platform to delivery both compelling user experiences and also perhaps more notability an integrated service experience.

Meanwhile on the other side of the world Google was busy making interesting noises about Google “Go”. A new mobile development language designed for the 21st century. While details remain scare it does seem to be a move by Google to improve the overall efficiency of application development and to leverage perhaps two of the most popular languages in Python and JavaScript along with promising enhanced support for key features such as garbage collection and SMP. While Go is relatively new in town given the effort Google is putting in to all things mobile it has to be taken seriously as a key future environment for application development. For more details on Go visit http://golang.org/

So another week and once again assumptions we may take for granted are being challenged. Will these initiative be successful only time will tell but once again as we approach the end of the week I look at the past 5 days and wonder what other industry possess such high levels dynamic change or opportunity.

2 comments:

  1. I couldn't agree with you more Andrew. And given the recent Nokia news about phasing out N-Gage mobile games and the positioning of Ovi at AT&T, that only adds to the dynamic mix.

    I have to admit that I am becoming a believer of one of the 2010 predictions that one of the App Stores will fail due to market saturation.

    Kevin Ching

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  2. Hi Kevin,

    The app store space is very interesting. I think it is probably much less a question of will one fail than which one. I think the traditional independent App store providers are in a difficulty position now that many device vendors have embedded stores and hence they could be the first casualties.

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