The first thing you, the prospective client or business decision maker, must consider when embarking on a project to develop some sort of business technology initiative for mobile is what exactly we, the developers, designers, and consultants that spend our days working in mobile mean by the term. Mobile computing is nothing new, so the first confusion is why this is different at all.

You may have lugged your laptop through security and had to power it on next to your shoes for the last many years. Isn't it a mobile device? Yet your laptop runs a full blown operating system such as Mac OS X or Windows 3.11, 95, 98, 2000, Bob, XP, Vista, or 7 or, if you are a supreme tech dork or a bargain netbook shopper, perhaps Linux. For most purposes then, your mobile computer runs the same software as your office computer, and may even serve a dual function for you or many of your employees. Though mobile computers can be used out and about, they run operating systems that were never designed exclusively for mobile.

When you use a device made to run a purpose built mobile operating system - Apple's iPhone OS, Google Android, Microsoft Windows Mobile or Palm OS - everything changes for the software built to run these systems. New interfaces must be developed. A mouse or a trackball or a trackpad is replaced by a finger or a stylus or speaking into a microphone or even waving the device around. The inputs change. The outputs come from tiny speakers or a relatively small screen or vibrations from the device itself. The processing is amazingly powerful, given the size, but still pales in comparison to modern desktop and laptop computers. The processing power of your mobile device can be easily understood as the fastest commercially available computer available ten years ago.

New capabilities emerge such as knowing where you are while you are using the software and using this data for some perceived gain (and because Big Brother secretly mails us all checks each month to do so). Old ways of doing things - inserting CDs or DVDs, clicking on the File menu - start to disappear.

So while your laptop may still do things your new smart phone or other web connected touch screen thing can't do yet, the touch screen portable thing will increasingly be able to do things your laptop wasn't designed to do. You wouldn't use your laptop to wander through a mall and scan barcodes for the best price in town. Your smart phone allows your users to do that, and if you are in retail your slim margins just got slimmer. A person generally wouldn't search for real estate listings with a laptop by driving around town until they found a nice area, but GPS-enabled apps on smart phones now allow such things.

Despite its portability, your laptop, and the legacy operating system it is running, was made for a desk (and thus includes files and folders and a trash can and other terminology that evokes a cubicle).

So this is a brave new world. But there is one major piece of software that will travel from desk to laptop to smart phone rather well. The web browser, in all its various forms - Internet Exploder, Safari, Firefox, Opera. As such, the software that is designed for a browser will translate to mobile, as well.  This will give plenty of lazy IT managers a way to ignore mobile for years, simply saying "we already run browser-based whatever."

To do so would be forgiven. I was an IT manager once too. But to truly take advantage of this wave, a bit more thought is required. We'll next look at both the benefits of browser based software and when its limitations will push your project towards native applications. After a series of posts covering the technical aspects, we’ll also look at the branding and marketing aspects of mobile applications and games.