Mobile executives at a Silicon Valley roundtable discussion threw down the gauntlet to Symbian, Android and other software platforms to match the impact of the iPhone.
Talking only about two weeks after the introduction of Apple's iPhone 3G and the App Store, where third-party software for it is offered, heads of some software companies reported huge numbers of downloads and proclaimed a new day on the mobile Internet. The jury is still out on whether the open-source phone platforms coming from Google and the Symbian Foundation will be able to match Apple's success, according to the panelists at the TechCrunch Mobile Web Wars event in Menlo Park, California, on Friday afternoon.
Nearly 1 million Facebook users have downloaded the social-networking company's application to their iPhones, according to Jed Stremel, director of mobile at Facebook. And Loopt, a location-based social-networking startup, reached 100,000 iPhone downloads only about a week after the App Store opened. The average iPhone user also is 47 times as active on Loopt as those on other types of phones, said Loopt cofounder and CEO Sam Altman.
Most of the software CEOs expressed interest in developing for Android but are wary that it will go the way of Java, with too many different versions to adapt to.
"I need Android like I need a hole in the head," said Pandora's Conrad, picturing it as "another OS platform that sits on top of buggy firmware, with devices with hundreds of manufacturers, with different characteristics."
Loopt's Altman said one valuable feature of Android is the ability to have tasks run in the background. He praised the openness of Android, which will allow Loopt to create a contact list with live location information, something that would not be possible on the closed iPhone environment. Whether Android's open-source model will work out well is uncertain, but it should become more clear pretty quickly, Altman said.
"I would guess a month post-launch of Android, you will have a feel of how much people are going to follow the spirit of one stack that works with everything," Altman said.
As for Symbian, Nokia's Rivas emphasized that the transition to the open-source platform won't happen overnight. But he acknowledged that there is another major step Nokia has to take to generate interest at the software epicenter of Silicon Valley.
"Once I have a collection of phones here in the U.S. market that you guys are willing to hit, suddenly the whole value proposition changes for you," Rivas said.
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