On 1, the emergence of the apps/widgets model served over saas will
overcome this. Thanks to Apple's big push into this space (cf their inescapable
“there's an app for that” campaign), consumer awareness has increased
massively, and established players have had to work fast to keep up
(cf. RIMs announcement re the BlackBerry AppWorld at last years sxsw).
With another open platform in the form of Android hitting the
mainstream, this will put further pressure on Apple's closed AppStore
platform, and add some much needed competition.

On 2, the key remains to deliver your app as a browser based session
if you can, that way you negate some of the issues you raise here. But
even so we've seen significant consolidation in the device market with
Symbian and Windows ME and now Android. Outside those three, you will
have the BlackBerry OS and the Apple OS, but those 5 will take you
above 95pc market share I'd wager. The key point here is that its not
just first adopters who change their phone every 12 months, pretty
much everyone does. But these mass market users probably hold on to
their desktop or laptop for 36 months or so, which means change and
adoption cycles are much faster in mobile. So if I was a developer
today, I'd probably only bother coding for apple, blackberry and
android (I wonder if google were tempted to name it after a fruit
instead

3 and 4 strike me as entirely related to one thing, bandwith. There's
little to no point having a fantastic device if you can't get the
media on an off it easily – my poor analogy would be there's no point
having a high spec laptop if the only input/output method is via
floppy disc. I'd be fascinated to see the upgrade stats from iPhone
2.5G to 3G users, but my guess is that most have done it as soon as it
was available and economic.

I think the key turning point will be the growing adoption of
connecting your mobile device to a WiFi base station when at work or
home (or even potentially on the go, with taxis, trains, planes and
hotels all offering WiFi now). In my opinion it will be this
proliferation of “wirefree” Internet that will really grease the
wheels. By wirefree, I mean not only going wireless, but more
importantly, that this is being offered for free, with only minor log in
requirements, which means it is actually usable to the masses.

As users become accustomed to the fact that they can connect their
devices at broadband speeds, leapfrogging 3, 3.5 and 4G connections
that are offered by the mobile network operators, then the full
potential of having a smart phone in your pocket will be realised.

With Skype (send and receive calls), email (send and receive text
messages and attachments) and Google voice (transcribing any voicemail
I receive to text) running over WiFi everywhere I go on my iPod touch, enabled
with Push technology (aka notifications) – remind me again why I would
even need a sim card, let alone a contract with a mobile network
operator?

Sent from my iPod touch over hotel wirefree in Mumbai.

The next billion mobile subscribers will not be in the developed / Western world, so VCs also need to be prepared to dust off their passports.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by indexben: New post on http://www.ben.vc with a catchy title – “The mobile black hole…” – http://bit.ly/7uwa1I…