Mobile technology has improved so rapidly over the last decade that it is hard to keep up. One minute the water-fountain talking point is that the new Nokia phone has the Snake game, then picture messages and that awful experience of WAP…Pretty primitive when you look back.

Now our phones are hijacking wifi hotspots to stream music, we download applications day and night to enhance our experience and it seems using it as a phone has fallen far down the list. ‘Smartphones’, as they came to be known, do indeed live up to their name; but for all the things they can do, there still remains a list (ever decreasing, admittedly) of what they can’t do.

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona new software was unveiled that tries to solve some of the bigger issues that will make smartphones smarter than ever before.

Flash Player
One of these was phones not playing flash, although I’m not sure why this is regarded as something the phones can’t do as, well, they can. Sure, some don’t, but even the cheap Nokia 5800 came loaded with Flash 9. The Skyfire browser is just like using the browser on your desktop. So don’t be fooled here, they can play Flash videos, the manufacturers often just don’t let them – none more so than Apple, who still refuse to put it in the iPhone. However, what the news this brings is actually that Flash will become a standard feature, especially with Android and Palm Pre handsets deciding to pre-load it from this summer, with the largest percentage of big-boy manufacturers following suit soon after.

Browsers
As a natural follow-on from the Flash news, browsers are also evolving. Hallelujah! It is, seriously, about time this happened; the default web browsers have been terrible for too long and many serious web users have been installing third-party browsers such as Skyfire and Opera. The Nokia N900 saw the very welcome Firefox browser as its default which, like its desktop version, allows customisation through add-ons including social network support. Opera, one of the kings of the browser world, has released a version specifically for the iPhone which apparently will load pages up to 6 times faster than Safari. Before anyone gets too excited though, Apple has yet to approve it.

Operating Systems
The more that manufacturers improve their devices, the more we expect them to continue. With touchscreen, Nokia users got tired of Symbian, and Ericsson and Samsung largely got left behind. Microsoft tried getting in on the mobile phone market with WinMo; Google set the world aflame with Android and Nokia stunned everybody with Maemo 5.

2010 sees Microsoft trying to raise its bar and snatch some marketshare from the other companies with Windows Phone 7. The name change reflects that this is Windows for phones and so does not need to be a carbon copy of Windows for computers. This could work for or against it, some people liked the easy transaction onto WinMo with it operating very similar to their computer. There are some rather drastic changes with this OS actually, not least that Windows Media Player is being replaced with Zune, which will sync not only with computers but iTunes too. With any luck, WMP will be removed from Microsoft entirely.

Microsoft has also realised that most social networking is very important for mobile phone users – we do, after all, want to stay connected – and so there will be live tiles on the home screen to display the real time updates of friends. One final point on Microsoft is that it is continuing its integration services which can make technology-life simple for many. The system will integrate with Xbox 360, allowing your profile, avatar, scores and notifications to be updated as they happen.

This is all great news, and it’s happened so quickly. Who would have thought any of this possible just five years ago when our screens were still an inch in size? It is good to see the manufacturers overcoming limitations, but there is one thing we still need addressed and that is a satisfactory battery life!

by Rich White