The LeWeb Conference in Paris is one of the longest running social media conferences in existence and, although this is my first one, is said to be one of the leaders in discussing the future and where technology is going. This year, the talk is all real-time, geolocations and…mobile.
I can’t disagree with the trends, but I would like to raise a point about mobile and mobile platforms. As many of you know, I am an Android user. The reasons for me not adopting the iPhone were pretty simple – in the UK, the only mobile carrier offering the iPhone was O2. I am an ex-customer of O2 and nothing in the world could make me shift back to them. Their customer service was truly awful, they were expensive, and as soon as you were no longer a ‘new customer’, they didn’t actually care one iota about you until the time you said you were going to leave. I actually did leave (despite their protests and promises of gold plated handsets and millions of free minutes) and won’t go back.
But – back to the subject – the iPhone. At that point I decided to try one of the early Google phones and I really love it. I am now an Android fan and although I have had the opportunity to see, use and experiment with the iPhone, and although there are other carriers in the UK which have the iPhone now, I am not shifting for the forseeable future.
However, when the question was asked here at the conference, approximately 75% of the audience held up their hands to affirm that they had an iPhone. I certainly knew I wasn’t part of the ‘in-crowd’ then!! But I wondered – with the popularity, hype, number of applications and developers (of the sessions this morning, almost all of them were iPhone-centric) will the iPhone become the VHS of the mobile world and will everything else be the Betamax?
I would hope not. Mobile technology gives so much scope for innovation and difference. From a pure fashion point of view, your mobile phone says a lot about you (I have a black HTC Android phone – suggesting I am a geek who is super-uncool?), but more importantly, not all platforms are equal. I think the only way that things can continue to develop and grow is for the competition to keep competing and for the out-crowd to continue to make a noise. That will keep the iPhone on its toes and it will continue to improve, along with all of its competition. Once VHS won the war, did it constantly strive to better itself? Not really. It took DVDs to do that.
I get the sense that it will only be a few years before everyone will have shifted from desktop computing to portable computing and much of that will be via mobile. And I hope I will still be happy with my Android based phone because they will still be a major player in the market. Even if I am the final out-crowder left…
Thanks to Ninja M for the image
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