If mobile websites don’t provide the required performance for the mobile Internet, what are the other options?

Well. theoretically you can build a series of platform specific applications that the users would download to their individual mobile devices. The only problem is the large number of mobile platforms that should be supported. The minimum number seems to be around 8 to 10 platforms depending on how you count them. If you have ever tried to maintain 8 to 10 copies of something, you will realize why this solution will not really work over the long run. Multiply these platforms with the number of different wireless carriers with their own individual quirks to get into hundreds of different combos. Then mix in the variation of phones used by each carrier and the phone’s specific combination of preloaded software and application selected by the carriers for their devices. You are now talking about thousands or more different combinations.

This is a no-win situation for everyone. Carriers focus their ad campaigns on minutes of use vs. what users can do with their devices since that is what they best understand and can best explain to the customer. As a result, customers hear that they can surf the net from an iPhone and believe that it is the only mobile device that can do this because it is the only one that has been advertised to them that does. After all, it is not in Nokia’s interests to educate regular people on this because regular people are not their customers; AT&T and Verizon are. In the meanwhile, mobile app developers are wasting their time creating apps that the end customer will never find and never use.

What is needed is a clear couple of winners. For example, the computer OS wars were won by Microsoft and Apple. The mobile music wars was won by Apple iTunes and the iPod. It is tough on competing companies but easy on customers and, in turn, developers.  

Since a clear winner is unlikely to come from such a fragmented space, the only solution is for the browsers on mobile devices to evolve to the point where they are just as good as those a full-blown computer. It will take a long while for that, but it is coming, thanks to the game-changing iPhone and its browser that can surf the real Internet.

Technorati tags: iPhone, mobile applications, mobile platforms