DvDand Solutions, LLC

That’s right browser wars are coming. Only this time, they are coming to a mobile phone near you. So far we have Microsoft Mobile IE,  Apple’s Safari, Opera, Google’s Chrome and the Blackberry’s proprietary browser. Add to that mix the recently announced and currently undergoing alpha testing, Fennec, the mobile browser from Mozilla, the maker of Firefox open source browser.

Given all these browsers, there is bound to be a shakeup. However, on the flip side of it is the fact that there are so many mobile platforms, Windows Mobile, Apple iPhone OS, Google’s Android, Symbian and Blackberry OS. So, one could argue that each of these are walled gardens and therefore the browsers work in these walled gardens. However, two of the above-named browsers, Opera and Fennec are not tied to any specific platform, though they may not work on all platforms yet. Not to mention, all the big players, except maybe RIM, have the resources to quickly make their browsers platform independent. So, while I don’t expect the browser wars to start right away, I fully expect them in maybe late 2009, early 2010.

In a recent patent application, Microsoft describes how multiple mobile phones (presumably running Windows Mobile, of course) can be brought together to form a single system which would pool the otherwise limited resources of individual phones. According to this patent, one could dynamically bring together several phone screens that would act as a single big screen. This type collaboration is not limited to just phone screens, but also to the CPU, memory, and other resources to form interesting collaborations. This type of collaboration will have several usage including video which is described in the patent as:

The collaborative architecture applies an adaptive video decoder so that each mobile device can participate in playing back a larger and higher-resolution video across combined display screens than any single mobile device could playback alone.

In addition to video display aggregation, Microsoft also envisages following scenarios:

• drag and drop file transfer
• microphone aggregation
• speaker aggregation
• camera aggregation
• antenna aggregation

Clearly, Microsoft is eyeing the future of mobile devices coming together to form ad-hoc network for collaboration at various levels. I certainly hope that this patent becomes a reality in some future version of Windows Mobile.