A forecast of things to come

I've been thinking about Android, and the iPhone SDK lately, and I have formulated what I think will happen with the mobile industry over the course of the next five to ten years.

• Handsets and providers that provide an excellent all-around mobile experience are going to sell well.This seems like a bit of a given, but I would like to start here. Apple and AT&T provide a complete mobile experience by working together, from registration in iTunes without having to talk to an AT&T customer service rep to the method on the handset's keyboard that lets you type alternate letters. The iPhone provides a complete experience, and what other handset manufacturers and carriers need to get is that multi-touch is only a vessel for making the iPhone experience special. The iPhone could have been done just as well, albeit differently, without multi-touch. The innovative people at Apple would find a good way to make some other input technology suit their needs. There are a lot of handsets embracing new things hardware wise, but not a lot of new things software-wise. The need for deep integration between hardware and software at the mobile level is something that these handset manufacturers need to get in order to be successful as the mobile market evolves.
  One of the things that makes the iPhone experience such a good experience is that it has a fast enough processor to run graphics really, really well. The iPhone is estimated to have a processor clocking in at somewhere around 500 Megahertz, which allows it to show movies, run a compositor, and perform its fancy animations.
• Handset makers will be forced to adopt phones with better processors. Currently smartphones run at somewhere between 100 MHz and 150 MHZ. As the market for mobile phones grows, vendors will be forced to adopt faster processors. The processor used in the MacBook Air may become a mobile phone processor, clocked down to about 1.0 GHz to save power. Handsets will begin integrating video cards by default to run OpenGL accelerated graphics. Handsets will have more power-efficient 3G chips and bigger storage media.
• XMPP will become the new messaging and alert service of choice. The android phone already includes XMPP as a way to get messages. With XMPP, services such as news and weather alerts will become better, an RSS reader-like application will be able to run on the phone, allowing customers to set up specific feeds as to alerts, and unlike current SMS alerts, the alerts can have coherent formatting. XMPP also provides for chat and IM services (jabber), and can send more than just text and small images, making SMS and MMS more obsolete. And unlike SMS and MMS, the jabber services will cost only a monthly data plan.
• More phones will come bundled with data plansAll of the new technology described above requires money to spend on phones. Currently in the United States market, mobile phones are subsidized by the carrier, which is then made up for with a contract for a certain amount of time. As data plans start to become more ubiquitous, carriers will be able to charge more per month for them, enabling greater subsidies. Expensive phones with two year data plan contracts may become as cheap as non-data phones.

In the end, it all boils down to a more complete experience. Integration between hardware and software, good hardware specs backed by subsidies, and XMPP or a better version of SMS that makes use of data will make up the next couple of mobile generations. A laptop processor fits into a phone, and things such as Android and the iPhone drive the market to brave new worlds.