Mobilize, presented by GigaOM, wrestled with the the continuing changes being wrought by mobile devices on development decisions. In the continuing war between web apps or native apps, the battleground at Mobilize was fought to a standstill. IT decision makers will have to decide which way to go based on company needs, not clear industry trends at this point.
In a panel titled, “Apps vs. Web: The Fight for the Future” Krishna Vedati, Senior Vice President of Mobile at ATandT declared that for the time foreseeable future, both native apps that take advantage of the hardware features and compute power in the handheld device and web apps that depend on the browser will live side by side depending on which mode of operation makes the most economic sense.
Jay Sullivan, Vice President of Products at Mozilla discussed advances in HTML5–which is nearing ratification at the W3C. As Sullivan pointed out, features and capabilities are being added to browsers as market pressures and rapidly evolving mobile device capabilities dictate. At the same time HTML5 is a guiding force in building out the basic features of browser offerings.
Mobilize was held in San Francisco today, just ahead of the CTIA conference that will be held in The City next week. So there weren’t many new product announcements although Nokia executive vice president Dr. Tero Ojanpera presented GigaOM founder Om Malik with one of the very first Nokia N8 handsets as a belated–and from all appearances from Malik–unwanted birthday present.
Several of my fellow eWEEK Lab analysts and I will be covering CTIA, so watch this space and eWEEK.com as we dig into the “enterprization” of consumer devices, most especially, the mobile.