Symbian's David Wood has published his latest Insight article. Number 11 develops a theme that's close to Rafe's heart: the killer app in the smartphone world is choice. I'm not too sure about the 'Generation S' pronouncement though...
Read on in the full article.
I agree to a point - but it's more about making everything easy and transparent.
mobile access is not just the domain of the techie - it's for real people to access the information they need easily and losslessly. That means getting as close to the experience they have on their home device (usually a PC) without having to do anything clever or download specific applications and have to set them up.
I think that middleware is the future - things like portals that take the wealth of content around from the media, office back-end systems, your mail account, use cell-based positioning (not GPS - it's unnecessary) for context and push it to you wherever you are.
This was always the goal but the mobile operators always made it too expensive to move data around. Now, we're seeing wireless hotspots all around us and the phone manufacturers have seen this, too. We can now get access to good, rich, fast and cheap content. We now just need the portals to provide it on our phones.
So maybe we have the killer app already. It could be our phone-browser...