Apple and Google pulling away in mobile market

A series of keynote speakers at the Open Mobile Summit in London took to the stage today to trade blows over Apple, Google and the future of the mobile internet for telcos.

Setting the tone early on, Hank Skorny from Real Networks said he thought that Apple and Google were "running away with the mobile internet".

He said that Apple had turned AT&T into a "dump pipe" for its device and that its PR had managed to generate a lot of unease with Adobe's Flash product. A show of hands at the event found that hardly any audience member found Flash a problem.

Skorny also said that its application environment was highly controlled and that Apple is creating a walled garden into which operators can't penetrate.

Olaf Swantee, head of France Telecom's personal communications service agreed somewhat, saying that regulators needed to be concerned with the mobile manufacturers as well as the operators, although he conceded that Apple and Google's success was mostly due to the compelling products they created for consumers.

Deutsche Telekom CTO Oliver Baujard argued that operators should be thankful to the likes of Apple for creating a whole new revenue stream for operators and a breed of customers that spend plenty of money and can be kept loyal with incentives.

However, several audience members argued strongly that operators do not do enough for their customers, treating them poorly despite their loyalty and charging far too much for mobile data rates.

While the representatives from France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom admitted more could be done to keep customers happy, they defended the stance on mobile data.

They argued that operators had to set levels of usage to stop users using too much data, by downloading movies for example, and therefore affecting the quality of coverage for other users that use a fair amount of data.

The rise in data that applications were causing was also touched on with Andrew Gilbert from Qualcomm arguing that more needed to be done to encourage developers to create efficient applications that wouldn't use up a lot of data.

This received broad agreement, as well as Gilbert's assertion that the iPad, and devices like it that other manufacturers will create, would prove highly popular.

"A million sales already of the iPad prove it's not a flash in the pan," he said, punning unintentionally in the process.

The contents of the debate were in keeping with the quality of the event, which saw a range of authoritative speakers from a good mix of different companies offering interesting, intriguing and often polemic thoughts on issues in the mobile space.

26 May 2010