It's all about the browser....again

The mobile browser wars

The press will make this all about the mobile browser and the battle for that space but very soon I think you will see announcements that make it clear the war will be about the pairing of mobiles and desktops and that the browser will be the new channel to allow that to happen.

Today the sync channel, if it exists at all, is usually proprietary and as such pretty much ties your choice of phone and choice of desktop os. Granted, we are only really talking about linux, windows and mac, and there are solutions today that allow that to be done in a platform independent way.

However none of them offer the real user experience that Microsoft and Apple have achieved by owning both ends of the connection.

So up step the browser. It is perfectly positioned and suited to being the platform independent channel for syncing your data between devices and potentially backing up to a server (more on that later). With very little work he browser could today handle your bookmarks, contacts, calendar, tasks, music and photo synchronization.

Why is itunes and safari on windows? Because they have to be for Apple's business model to work. Without syncing the iPhone and ipod are literally shiny bricks.

Many new iphone users do not realize how much they will be tied to a desktop. If they have not owned an ipod then they may assume they can use this like their old standalone phones. Once activated, you could in theory use it this way but would be missing out on a lot of functionality, including software updates.

Today many users think of their mobile device and computers as two very different things. They tend to think of their devices based on what the device can do rather than in terms of how they actually use them. For example, when you read mail on your hone it gets marked read when you look at it in your laptop. This is a feature of the mail protocol (pop or imap) and the client and server both implement them. Mail is just content. There is a lot of content you interact with every day that is not synchronized this way. At a simple level if you bookmark and page on your device you want that bookmark on your laptop and other devices. Take it a step further and why can you not have your search history, your browse history, how about if links you had already visited where marked as such even if it was on another device. You get the idea.

If the browsers are successful in getting you to do this over a cable or bluetooth then it is a simple step for them to introduce a server and free you from that physical connection. Apple could do this with .mac. Once they have that channel, they can monetize it. Eyeballs are money, as are additional services.

Or maybe they will just announce a plain old mobile browser.........