Just come back up to the office from the July event, ably run by Ben Hounsell of TenBu. Nine of us braved the squally weather to savour the delights of the Milano lunch at 103. As usual there was a wide range of topics discussed, so here are the highlights that I remember. Apologies if I missed your favourite topic.

The first point of discussion was about building iPhone apps for projects, and whether people asking for them actually understood what was involved and whether it was right for them. The specific project was an academic survey information gathering tool that currently runs on a selection of Java ME devices. The co-ordinators admitted that none of there potential demographic currently own iPhones, yet they felt compelled to have an iPhone app because it was cool. It was interesting to see once again how people outside the industry have been brainwashed into reading the upside without understand what was involved - not just the cost, but in this case that their application would be available to anybody with an iPhone, not just their survey subjects.

This led to a discussion about which handset operating system will win out, if any. We’re all familiar with code fragmentation issues, but the specific problems for users and support services were touched on. As usual, the idea of a common platform works well for developers, but less well for the device manufacturers. Comparisons to the near universality of Windows and hence the predictability of the APIs there for developers focussed on how we’re still effectivelty quite early in the industry. I made the point that Microsoft provide reference hardware designs to the PC makers, so they really are specialists in economical manufacturing and, if you’re lucky, industrial design. Handset makers come from the consumer electronics space so they expect to control the whole process from concept to test. Only if they become hollowed out to manufacturing shells will they be prepared to have a truely common platform.

Next we had a short discussion of femtocells. Clearly a level of interest, but few ideas about how to exploit them in the short term. I was interested to learn that the femtocells still require DSL  and can’t run off a 3G connection. So maybe femtocells will be a saviour for fixed-line providers!

We ended by discussing the idea of a personalised, transferable user interface for devices. The idea being that once configured to your tastes it would migrate to new devices for you. This also included discussions of modular hardware like Modu. While we all agreed that Modu was very cool, there seems to be no precedents in consumer electronics for something similar. There are the RED high-end configurable digital cameras and Arcam’s upgradeable hifi systems, but nothing truely mass market. I raised the issue of sustainable engineering and making devices that lasted for six years, but that didn’t seem to catch the imagination.

Nobody there was admitting to be a social media addict, but the idea of basing the phone’s user experience around something like Facebook seemed to raise interest. Automatic optimisation of devices to make frequently-used functions easier to find was also popular. Unfortunately we were all too battle worn or cynical to believe that any of us could succeed in having such a system adopted should we have built one.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom, however, as mobile seems to be weathering the self-induced financial storm better than some sectors.