Mobile Panel – From iPhone to HTML 5 to Windows Phone 7 to Android at DDD9
TweetChris Hardy played David Dimbleby in the first ever DDD panel which was made up by Mike Oramod, Chris Hay, Matt Lacey and Dave Evans (left to right in the picture below).
The panel agreed that Windows Phone 7 was the developers’ platform of choice.
I don’t think that’s because we were in a Microsoft building but more to do with the fact the panel were predominately Visual Studio users who had more familiar developing apps using Silverlight than Objective C and Java.
There’s nothing wrong with this as I’m sure the same thing would happen if you were at an event sponsored by and hosted by Apple or Google.
But even Steve Jobs would have done a better job in sticking up for Android than this lot
The old chestnut of native apps vs those developed using PhoneGap was discussed next.
I’ve been involved in many of these discussions over the past few months and they have always reached the same conclusion that as long as companies like Apple allow apps developed using Phonegap into their store you should pick the best tool to achieve your goal. This was no different.
I love Phonegap because it does what the majority of clients want from apps and thats to display data in lists without using any of the phones native functionality. It’s as close to the ‘write once deploy too many’ utopia we have right now.
There was a question about Nokias’ future and Chris Hay pointed out to the differences in market share Nokia have in places like India, China and Africa compared to the western world. I’m always really surprised that people don’t realise how many Nokia phones are being used out there, and instead focus on stats for smart phones in the US and Europe.
For me the iPhone is like a German car in the mobile phone market. It’s a desirable product and although they can be purchased in places like India they will never be that popular because of the price.
In other words Apple will not be able to sell iPhones in India at the same price as Nokia just like how BMW cannot sell cars in India at the same price as Tata. So it’s a no brainier which will have the larger share in markets like this.
Security was also discussed by the panel along with the how apps are approved by some automated process for iPhone, a human actually using it for Windows Phone 7 and the pot smoking, tree hugging, free loving method Google uses for Android.
It was pointed out that if users had a bad experience using an app they would blame both the app and the phone so it was important apps did what they were meant to without doing anything malicious.
Oh and there were some question when Windows Phone 7 would get a decent browser…
I really liked the panel session and hope so see more of them at future DDD events. Well done to all those involved.
Read more of my opinions about DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper9 here