Is this how Europe is losing mobile leadership to the USA?

In the 2000 movie The Matrix, a mobile phone model made by Europe’s Nokia, even then called the ‘banana phone‘, is used as an icon of exotic modernity.
In the 2006 movie Stranger Than Fiction, actor Will Ferrell’s character is prompted by the narrating voice to make a phone call, and he starts to frantically search for a payphone on the street.

It might or might not have been a necessary decision by the director of this second movie, but the general feeling is that in the six-seven years that separate the two, the situation of the mobile phone industry hasn’t very much changed in the US.

While in many parts of Europe it is now taken for granted that literally everybody has a mobile phone, so much so that deeply ingrained social conventions like the detailed instructions previously needed to set up an appointment in a city center have started to change, still the US seemed to be more concerned with issues of coverage, signal strength, and voice quality, more characteristic of emerging, leading edge technologies’ teething problems. Europe very clearly had the leadership not only in the types of phones available in the market, or the 3G technologies deployed, but in the hearts and minds of the people.


But something has changed in the last year, and a half. The widely used form of unmetered data plan that has always been associated with the mobile phone contracts in the US finally started to meet phones that were worth using to surf the web, and to use with applications that assumed you could and would access the Internet, chiefly among them the iPhone. According to Nielsen’s Mobile report as quoted in AlwaysOn, more then 40 million Americans accessed the web in a 30 day period in 2008, almost doubling from 2006. So many mobile data plans in Europe are either metered, or very tightly capped, that such increase for the moment in Europe is unlikely. Not only that, but the developer framework that Apple now makes available for the iPhone, will be able and attract a large number of US web, and pc software developers who will adopt the iPhone as the new development platform of choice.


A long time ago, when the GSM protocol was agreed on, Europe gave a nascent industry a huge opportunity, and its consumers great value, by creating a unified standard, and with its quick deployment of fast 3G networks boosted these into the next generation. Carriers will squander that if their data plans will discourage European consumers from adopting, and European programmers from developing for the new Internet oriented mobile phones!

Open Source conquers a new adept as Nokia decides on Symbian’s future

How can you maximize the probability of excelling with your idea? How likely is that, in the long run, you will be the only one to always make the best decisions, execute them to perfection, and realize the way the future is going to shape up? Because that is what closed source is about: jealously guarding your program’s code, stopping your best employees from ever getting help or discussing the inner workings of what they are writing with anybody. That likelihood is close to zero, and that approach is not the best way to succeed.

There is an area that has long realized this, and it is that of computer security. The ‘security through obscurity‘ approach has been long abandoned: there is nobody who would trust today an algorithm that wasn’t tried out a tested by others. Only by opening up the algorithms to close scrutiny it is possible to trust it, as it will be universally recognized as uncracked, if not uncrackable.

A similar approach is being adopted in the field of operating systems, where Linux was one of the first to make this popular for personal computers. Mobile phones have long appeared to resist this tendency towards openness, given also their vertically integrated approach from spectrum licensing to handset sales. But recently, with the efforts of Google on both spectrum allocation, and of operating system development, things have changed dramatically.

Yesterday Nokia, the worlds largest mobile phone handset manufacturer, announced that they are buying the entirety of Symbian, the company controlling the operating system that runs on Nokia phones, and putting it in open source. This is a great move, one that enables Nokia to embrace a community oriented approach that is necessary today.

So it seems that there are two main camps in the mobile phone operating system markets, who will be fighting it out in the future for the chance of becoming the engine for the next few billion devices. On one hand the proprietary approaches of Microsoft, and Apple. On the other hand the open approaches of Google, and Nokia. It can’t but benefit us all, as these compete to make ever more powerful, and easier to use mobile phones we will all live with!