‘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.

I’m still tracking as much as I can in the Mobile Linux world to try and bring myself up to a point where I can report with a respectable level of knowledge. Everyone I talk to though, seems to have differing opinions. Its an incredibly fragmented sector and I completely understand those that are simply ignoring all the fuss going on at the core level and focusing on the high-level, OS-agnostic application development environments.

Over the next three days we all have a good opportunity to learn more through the Mobile Linux Conference that is taking place within the Linux World Expo. That’s assuming that people are going to report from it but with all the hype going on about Android, Apple and others, I’m sure there’s going to be some serious focus on it. You can track Exhibitor announcements through this page where you’ll already see some news. I’ll be tracking it continuously over the next three days so if anything significant crops up, i’ll make sure I relay onto the front page here.

LinuxDevices.com have pulled out the important info about the keynote speakers and sessions which include one from Ram Peddibholta, the Director of Open Source Technology Center, Intel who will specifically talk about Moblin and Atom. I wonder how that will be received among the attendees, most of whom will be be coming from the smartphone world. Intel is a new player here and it’s going to be a tough sell for them.

Source:LinuxDevices.