NY Times Picks up on Mobile in Retail

Want to make your local department store nervous. Just pull out your phone while in the shopping isle. Using cell phones to do price comparison is not new but it is notable that the NY Times has added their ink to the other media channels. http://bit.ly/7UuwTw

Saving money shopping is a compelling mobile use case. Mobile applications like ShopSavvy are allowing consumers to dis-intermediate retailers right in their own stores. Shoppers are going to increasingly seek information via their mobile. The only question is, what sources are they going to use to get the information? Retailers should be looking for ways to better support shoppers than letting them turn to pure price comparison tool. Thus, it is critical for retailers to provide the mobile tools to support consumers so that they can gain control within their own stores.

We are starting to see retailers adopt their online stores to mobile phones. While a step in the right direction, there are more innovative ways to leverage the capabilities of the phone and consumers' shopping behavior. Case in point check out Sears new mobile application. http://promomagazine.com/news/sears-products-search-app-1217/

Android Fragmentation, Android was supposed to solve this!

When Android was ceremoniously announced in 2007 it was presented as a solution to the fragmentation of mobile operating systems that plagues developers, drives up deployment costs and seriously reduces potential reach of applications. At the time I viewed this claim with some skepticism. After all, who was going to leave the game? Would for example, Microsoft, Symbian, or Java bow out due to Android. We are seeing some shift in this direction, for example vendors such as Motorola are embracing Android in lieu of other O/S they used to push. Thank god in the case of Motorola, given that in my experience they had done an exceedingly poor job with Symbian UIQ on the ROKR, and had a weak J2ME implementation. Their phones always looked cool but often at the expense of a platform that could support good applications. The Droid seems to show a direction that will hopefully turn the company's handset futures around.

On the other hand, the launch of Android did not stop Palm from introducing their new phone with a proprietary O/S or Samsung's recent announcement of Bada. What is a developer to do?
In many cases the approach is to retreat to the smart phones and focus just on iPhone and Adroid. Apple has done a great job of not fragmenting their own O/S efforts thus keeping the market easy for developers to reach.

Look at this news from Android about the current fragmentation of the Android O/S, http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/12/knowing-is-half-battle.html . On the surface it might seem hypocritical given that Google claimed that they would solve this problem across the market with Android, and they are having some trouble keeping their own house in order. However, Google is taking a far more open and developer friendly approach than would be experienced developing across multiple revs of Symbian, or J2ME. As more devices come to the market, it will be telling to see how the open source approach of Android, and the inherent ability for handset manufacturers to customize the O/S serves developers. Will Android, Google's self described savior of mobile developers prove to be that or will we see additional fragmentation that brings even more headaches.