If I had a crystal ball in the shape of a phone I would look into it every so often and try to gauge what the next great ‘thing’ in mobile will be. For a while now it feels like there’s been a lack of exciting new developments on the scene but is that all about to change?

Sure we had the iPhone launch, and S-series phones have taken the use of GPS and web-browsing to the (sort of) mainstream, but being honest a lot of those developments seemed kinda logical and mainly involved taking tech which already existed on larger scales, such as touch-screen and navigation, and bringing it to the 4th screen medium. The wow factors were there but shortly subsided.

Then we got the buzz of the G-phone ringing in our ears. Surely not? Really? Google are going to bring out a phone to rival the mighty power of the iPhone??? Well…no…what they did in fact do was challenge the world and their accompanying developing skills to come up with the future themselves. Namely through Google Android.

Skeptics hinted it would never work (I may have been one of them) and that Apple would continue to rule the space. And how wrong we were. For it is now when we are actually seeing applications and technology being exploited in a way which was evidently only meant for hand held devices.

If we are to take the words of Moore’s Law that technology doubles every 18 months then let’s take this as an example of Andoid:

November 2007 -

Android is launched and the challenges are set.

Early 2008 -

Developer start displaying their ware such as these dudes who have developed some real time interactive navigation - http://www.enkin.net/ (kind of half on-phone half off)

Early May 2008 -

Google picks its Top 50 - link

Late May 2008 -

The android community show show off some proper on-phone action: link

(watch the second vid which uses Google’s Street View)

…That’s 6 months from launch….can’t wait to see what’s on our phone in May 09.

These are all examples of applications which would never work on a PC or a laptop and are finally hints that the power of the mobile is about to be truly delivered. The word on the street is that mobile is the next big thing … and I’m finally beginning to believe it.

Tags: Android, google, mobile, mobile phones