‘The Future of Mobile’ is a topic very dear to our hearts, as is Europe where 2/3 of the worlds mobile broadband internet customers live among 700 million people. Where T-Mobile and Vodafone are headquartered and where you’ll find one of the biggest mobile internet hardware companies in the world. Nokia.

When I attended the mobile developers conference in Amsterdam earlier this year I learned a lot about leading edge applications and, significantly, learned about where mobile internet developers look for inspiration and opportunities. The smartphone market. It’s not just the big numbers that attract the developers, it’s the advanced hardware that allows them to do things that are simply not possible on a Windows-based UMPC. Location based services. Augmented reality. Internet photography and video. 24/7 connectivity. None of these services are easy on Windows-based systems so it’s no wonder that operating systems like Android, the iPhone OS and Symbian are attractive and why Mer and Moblin are important if Intel want their x86-based devices to squeeze into the mobile segment.

It’s a fascinating subject that I want to learn more about and (hopefully) contribute to and that’s why I’ll be trying to follow everything that comes out of the Mobile 2.0 event in Barcelona over the next few days. As I write this, Opera are on stage talking about Widgets, the mini-apps that some believe will be more important than the browser on small-screen devices. There will be more widget talk in the developer conference today from Nokia, W3C and Vodafone and tomorrow the focus will be on openness, context, play and an interesting section called ‘beyond free.’

You can learn more about Mobile 2.0 here and follow it on Twitter here.

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