I was reading about the mobile development.

From an economic point of view there are more than 170 milions of devices sold last year, the majority of them can be considered ‘advanced’ or ’smart’ – ie: they have a ‘proper’ OS and the ability to run applications.

The most famous is – of course – the Apple’s Iphone, but all the Android family and Simbian are the most diffuse (Symbian has more than 40% of the market).

The hardware side of the equation is a minor factor: for example quite all the devices have an ARM processor as main unit. Many of them have a touch-screen interface (the leif-motiv exploded with Iphone for a ‘direct user interaction’). And quite all have a GPS unit, memory reader, camera and so on: there are very few differences now…

If the hardware is the same, the difference-key becames the software (and as an extension – the way you can look, buy and download the applications – the AppStore is a milestone).

The situation is very similar to the PC market: same hardware, same OS (ok, this is forced, but we have very few competitor here: Symbian, Android, Maemo, Iphone and windows mobile 6.x – windows phone 7 is just born…).

In this situation for developers there are many possibilities:

- use/buy different SDK, one for any platform, using the ‘elected language’ for each of them (Java, Objective-C…)

- find a RDK (Unity3d for example)

Every solutions have different costs (the cost of the licences or of the hardware, the learning-time cost, the distribution cost).

The learning-curve can be considered an entry-barrier: the current RDK require a medium-high level of knowledge (C/C++language at least). From this point of view the ‘mobile field’ seems to be an elitarian market.

From a personal point of view – I’m not a professional programmer, I HATE C/C++ (I dont’ like at all curly parenthesys…) – I have very few time to dedicate to learning (or re-relearning) ‘high level languages’ – the lack of a ‘ready’ solution is a big mistake!

And a bigger mistake is not to ‘fill’ the gap…