"Mobiles now the target for developers"

<http://www.theregister.com/2006/05/26/java_mobile_moto/>

For 'nomadic' think cellular, not tents and camels

When it comes to targeting the highest of high volume applications
markets, developers have now only one place to look, according to Rob
Shaddock, corporate vice president and chief technology officer of
Motorola. That place is the mobile phone and its growing range of
expanded derivatives.

Just one throw-away line during his presentation at last week's
JavaOne conference in San Francisco gave an indication of the
potential these beasts now display for soaking up an ever-growing
range of applications. "The largest (highest volume) camera makers in
the world are now Motorola and Nokia."

According to market researchers such as Pyramid, there are now well
over two billion mobile phone subscribers, which itself represents a
huge marketplace. Perhaps more important is the fact that the churn
rate is extremely high.

Shaddock suggested that some 900m client units will be sold this
year, which suggests that the rate of development of new services and
features is giving a large percentage of those units a lifecycle of
less than 12 months. Motorola itself expects to sell, this year, more
mobile phones than the entire world PC industry put together.

The next big kick in the market, he suggested, will come from real
exploitation of the mobile internet, with always-on connection and IP
everywhere. This has real advantages in the mobile market because
many new applications will then be built on the ability this offers
to just move content between IP addresses.

The coming of HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) will offer
similar connection speeds to broadband and will be able to create a
world, Shaddock said, where content is available anytime, anywhere
and anyhow. This latter is a reference to seamless roaming, where
individual devices will not only be equipped with both cellular and
Wi-Fi capabilities, but will be able to switch between them
seamlessly, if required.

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