Android Developers Win Smackdown Vs. iPhone, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile, Microsoft Asserts It Has Promising Smartphone Future, & More Mobile Madness Highlights

This post was written by Erin Kutz and originally appeared at Xconomy on March 12; republished by permission.

So the iPhone may be the prettiest, the Blackberry may boast the biggest smartphone market share, and the Windows Mobile platform is, um, around, but it’s Android that’s best for developing apps. Or at least it was the Android developers who best defended their platform at the smartphone smackdown during our Mobile Madness event on Tuesday.

The event was a big success, featuring a look at the future of the mobile industry both locally and globally, a panel of executives dishing on what we can look forward to in the next year, and keynote speakers touching on voice recognition, data storage, and Windows’ share in the smartphone world. More than 200 people crammed into Microsoft’s New England Research & Development Center for the forum. (Check out our slide show here.)

I think the purpose of the smackdown was best summed up in the words of referee John Landry, founder and managing director of Lead Dog Ventures: “The objective here is really to dump on the other platforms.”

To achieve that, we invited developers and others passionate about app creation to step up and represent the iPhone, Google’s Android, BlackBerry, and Windows. The audience decided by a raising of hands that the Android guys did the best job representing their platform. The congratulations goes to Henry Cipolla, chief technology officer of mobile app analysis startup Localytics, and Carter Jernigan, founder of two forty four a.m., makers of the app Locale, which enables phones to automatically change their settings based on locations.

The duo lauded Android’s ability to work with multiple carriers, the openness of the platform’s market, and its ability to run background apps, allowing an app to remain active even when it’s not the primary app being run. Jernigan spoke about how his product could only work with the Android platform because of that unique capability. “If you’re trying to create a business and have a lot of different avenues for success, the Android makes the most sense,” Cipolla said.

This gave the iPhone guys an opportunity to jump in. “Don’t you want to be where the people are?” said Raizlabs‘ Craig Spitzkoff, pointing out the fact that Apple has the highest share of customers downloading and paying for mobile apps.

Cimarron Buser, VP of products and marketing for Apperian, pointed out that when it comes to apps, in the beginning there was the iPhone. “You can already see that every other vendor is looking at the iPhone in terms of technology and business model,” he said.

Other smackdown contenders, and even audience members, pointed out the sense of entitlement this has given the iPhone. They criticized Apple’s tendency to suddenly shelve a mobile app (which it did last month with apps it deemed too sexy) and in turn tank a developer’s business.

Zachariah Hofer-Shall, representing development on the Windows Mobile side, lashed out at what he called the “communist regulations of the App Store.” He and others also brought up the iPhones’s inability to support Flash—a perennial criticism of the device.

He took his far share of flak, though. So did our keynoter, Windows Phone evangelist Anthony Kinney, when he gave us a look into the company’s plans for its 7 Series phone, due out in “holiday 2010″ (vague, we know).

And it turns out that Windows’ problem isn’t just one of design or construction, but of marketing (a point brought up earlier in the event by Kinney). “A lot of people out there have Windows Mobile devices and don’t even know it,” said Hofer-Shall, who works for Forrester Research but spoke on the Windows platform from his personal, not professional standpoint, as he has a tech blog outside of work.

William Sulinski, co-founder and CEO of mCaddie, makers of the golf analytics AccelGolf app, represented the BlackBerry platform with the logic and composure that often categorizes this smartphone, or at least its users. He also has iPhone and Android versions of his app, but said he likes the older demographic he can target with BlackBerry (made by Research in Motion), and the huge user base of the phone.

But he had no pretenses about the challenge in developing for RIM’s device. “What it does is separate the men from the boys,” Sulinski said, with a nod to the fact that the varying screen sizes among BlackBerry devices require different coding.

In the end, it seems, no platform is perfect. But each one seems to have developers who love it.

Other highlights from Mobile Madness — The New Future of Computing included:

—Nuance Communications’ vice president of product management, Matt Revis, walked us through the company’s plans for gesture recognition technology for mobile phones. The speech recognition software company already has a big hit with its iPhone app for translating voice to text.

—Andrew Capener, director of service provider marketing for mobility at Cisco Systems, explained how Cisco, which recently acquired local wireless broadband leader Starent Networks, has a stake in the mobile world, due to the exponential growth in data trafficked through mobile networks.

—The 150,000+ mobile apps that Apple boasts of isn’t a lot, or at least not compared with the number of websites that exist on the Internet, Greg Raiz, founder and CEO of app development company Raizlabs, said during our executive panel. Meaning, there’s still plenty more apps to come. He also said he thinks this year will be the year his mom gets a smartphone.

—We concluded the afternoon by inviting about 10 mobile companies (most of which can be seen in our online mobile showcase) to give 90-second lightning presentations of their mission and products. They even stuck to that time constraint. And so did we! (The event ended on time to the minute.)

The take-home message of the day? Things are only beginning for the mobile industry. We’re excited to see which mobile platform, if any, ends up winning the real-life smackdown in development, and all the new moves the industry innovators make in the process.