Under Starters Orders

James Lichtenberg yet again hits the nail on the head when he says that ,’the iPhone is not a "phone", it is a computer, a very compact computer, and telephony is a convenient but rather small percentage of its value.’

We have to wake up and realise that what we refer to as mobiles, cellphones, smartphones are computers that are permenantly connected and have signigificantly more to offer than text, calls and even email.

The real game is starting to manifest as the players all start to unlock their technology in a play to capture the potentially huge applications market. It like the Yukon gold rush as all the major players scramble for that killer application that will make theirs the must have device.

Nokia hopes giving away the Symbian technology. "Collaboration is the key. Creating a bigger pie together creates a bigger share for all of us," Nokia's Executive Vice President for Devices Kai Oistamo told a conference of Symbian partners and developers in London. Only last June Nokia bought out its partners in Sybian for $410 million. They have sold over 180 million Symbian smartphones.

Blackberry owners RIM have announced the new BlackBerry store front, planned for March next year but plan to begin accepting applications in December and and are working with PayPal to build a payment system for the store. Developers will set their own application fees and retain 80% of revenue.

Next comes the Gorilla Google who in announcing Android, its software platform for mobile devices, released a kit for developers to work with, and now with its partners in the Open Handset Alliance have release open source code for developers. The source code has been released under the Apache 2.0 license and consists of the complete codebase of Android, including all the libraries and applications. The License allows developers to distribute and modify the source code in any way they want, and developers are not required to distribute the new code under the same license and can opt to develop their own, proprietary platforms on the basis of Android.

Then we have Apple and the huge take up of their iPhone application development platform.

So the race is on an what is certain is that there will be winners and the future of the ebook reader probably emerge from somewhere in this battle.