Let’s close our eyes, and visualize a world where we can actually imagine what “Emerging Technology” is in the mobile space. This is a world where developers focus on the ways that a mobile phone is changing the patterns of socialization, play and communication. This is a world where we enhance, not burden.

The mobile space is excited when we read things like this from Pew Internet Research:

“The proliferation of cell phones and the spread of text messaging are changing patterns of commuication for many Americans — espeically younger ones,” said Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

I spent a great couple of days last week down at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Despite being impressed by many of the presentations and the great people (Coverage here.), I walked away with a clearer understanding of the challenges that are facing the mobile industry, and what’s keeping us from focusing on the excitement and opportunity of mobility.

Here’s my list of challenges:

Network
All of us trying to develop in the mobile space right now are very aware of the fact that US carriers, and carriers in general, are keeping network access under tight control, either through tight technical controls like port blocking, or through high data rates. There’s a lot of good reasons for this: mobile spam and untested application crashing phones come to mind immediately. The downside is obvious, a great idea might bubble up, but who among us afford the cost of network access across all the carriers to actually implement the idea? Who can even swallow the cost of network access for testing across all the various handsets? Not even WAP browser implementation is consistent across devices.

Were you thinking about connecting your phone to your PC to use as an SMS gateway? The SMS aggregator Clickatell recently released this regarding US carrier policies for SMS.

US carriers are saying:

All messages being sent to the USA will now need to have a registered shortcode as the Sender ID.

What does this mean if you just want to “release” an application for mobile phones that has an SMS component?

Distribution
With all of the challenges of getting connected to the mobile “network”, it’s no surprise that another bottleneck is distribution. Once you have a great product, and you’ve spent all your money on testing the application, how do you get in touch with your users? Can’t they just download your application? Maybe not. Carriers and their publishers have the keys to the getting your application on a list where your users can see it. I have great hope that Ringtone portals will start to put pressure on Carriers in other ways. WAP might provide an opportunity to get around the carrier control of the deck, but how long does your URL have to be before people start being fustrated about typing it on their phone? Nokia phones have support for Python, but Carriers are still in a position to isolate those applications to your phone, and prevent you from sharing.

Demographic is Everyone
This is a design challenge, pure and simple. This issue highlights the challenges of designing applications for people who are used to just opening a phone and making a phone call. How do you design for a device that is as intimate as a mobile device, a device used to play and communicate? Everyone talks about casual games, but the industry is still excited about mobile 3D games?! We are only starting to understand what mobile design means: Chris Heathcote and Matt D. Jones from Nokia both spoke of “social legibility” as one of their goals.

It’s hard to imagine that network and distribution challenges will be around forever, but these hurdles add up to provide significant barriers now. How can we over come these distribution and network hurdles for effective application development up through a product launch and support?