Geogad hosts two local Silicon Valley meetup called the Informal Android Developer Meetup and the Informal iPhone Developer Meetup. New mobile developers at these meetings often ask which mobile platforms are worth their time to learn. Sometimes it’s a matter of money and the perception of which app stores have the best sales. Other times, it depends on a developer’s previous programming background.

TheFierceDeveloper newsletter actually addressed this question with more substantial info provided by a marketing report from VisionMobile. The most interesting part of the report to me was the estimates of the length of time required to learn a new mobile platform. To quite FierceDeveloper quoting VisionMobile,

…according to the report, coders require 15 months or more to figure out Symbian, compared to an average of 7.5 months across rival platforms. Android is considered the easiest platform to learn, with 22 percent of respondents claiming they absorbed its intricacies in under a month.

It is nice to see that some of the platform are relatively easy for new programmers to pick up. It should make for an exciting experience for mobile apps.

The mobile industry has never been so hot. Forst, Apple announces quietly that users have downloaded 300 million apps among the 10,000 apps available on the iPhone Apps store. Apple is also pushing the iPhone in new sales channels, specifically WalMart, which may be the only retailer on the planet to have increased sales during the downturn.

Their competitor, Google’s Android, is getting more allies in their fight. Sony Ericson will be building Android phones after initially refusing to join Google’s mobile push. Sony is still part of the community that will be working on Nokia’s Symbian platform, which is in the process of being open sourced. But there has been little good news from Nokia lately. We will see if the revamped Symbian can compete with the brand new iPhone and Android platforms.

If you follow the mobile market, then you know that there are essentially 4 operating systems that are really making wavies. The two oldest are the Blackberry, which is closed source and private, and Symbian, which was recently purchased by Nokia and made open source and free. Both of these systems are rather old school. Their basic code was written before the days of social networking and user generated content. The last two are the newest, the Apple iPhone, which is closed and private, and Google’s Android, which is open source and free. Both of these two systems were freshly created with the newest Internet applications in mind.

There are lots of other programming languages for mobile devices that you just don’t hear much about anymore. Sometimes you hear about the open source effort of Linmo, a kind of open source Linux for smartphones, mentioned in the same sentence as the Google Android, which borrowed heavily from it. But without a big company and an even bigger marketing effort, it is unlikely that it will be able to compete with other free, solid operating systems. The other big loser is Java for mobile phones, also called J2ME. It has dropped in importance so much that Handango, a top distributor of mobile applications, will not even distribute free J2ME applications anymore. Ouch!

Sometimes it is just amazing to hear the things that come out of the mouths of Microsoft marketers. It seems that the spotlight on the new iPhone is making Microsoft cranky. Since Microsoft Windows Mobile is already on so many phones (no mention of how hard these phones and their special features are for people to use), Microsoft does not see any need to try to create their own phone.

For just one minute, let’s try to forget all about Microsoft’s effort in the MP3 market with Zune and how that has turned out.

So officially, Microsoft is not creating a phone because they are focused on making quality proprietary software since the money in mobile is in software. Meanwhile, Nokia has just paid a fortune to open source Symbian - because the money in mobile is in software. And Google is creating their own open source mobile OS called Android - because the money in mobile is in software. And J2ME is already open sourced by Sun ages ago - because the money in mobile is in software. And Apple has just broken its usual rules by providing a free SDK for the iPhone - because the money in mobile is in software.

OK. Whatever.

Does anyone get the feeling that Microsoft is a little confused? The best line from the entire story which really shows how confused Microsoft seems to be is the quote from Microsoft’s Mobile Communications Business senior vice president Andrew Lees:

We want to give our customers choice.

Microsoft….giving the customer choices….

OK. Whatever.

I think what he really means is that Microsoft has no choice but to let the customer chose.

Nokia has purchased the last part of Symbian that they did not own and are going to make it open source. I guess it just shows that many big companies are realizing that they just can’t put together a really good piece of software on their own. Or maybe they realize that it really does take a village. But maybe what they are really realizing is that they will make more money if they focused on the part of the business chain that they excel in and that brings them the most revenues, not the most headaches like maintaining a complex OS.

So … Microsoft, is it time to open source Windows yet? If you have finally seen the light, please open Windows XP. Then let’s really think long and hard if we want anything from Vista bolted on.